The Coddling of the American Mind. A Puke(TM) Audiobook

The Coddling of the American Mind.
How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech.
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and then taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.

PART One.
Three Bad Ideas.
CHAPTER 1.
The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker.
When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.
MENG TZU, fourth century BC.
In August 2009, Max Haidt, age three, had his first day of preschool in Charlottesville, Virginia. But before he was allowed to take the first step on his eighteen-year journey to a college degree, his parents, Jon and Jayne, had to attend a mandatory orientation session where the rules and procedures were explained by Max’s teacher. The most important rule, judging by the time spent discussing it, was: no nuts. Because of the risk to children with peanut allergies, there was an absolute prohibition on bringing anything containing nuts into the building. Of course, peanuts are legumes, not nuts, but some kids have allergies to tree nuts, too, so along with peanuts and peanut butter, all nuts and nut products were banned. And to be extra safe, the school also banned anything produced in a factory that processes nuts, so many kinds of dried fruits and other snacks were prohibited, too. As the list of prohibited substances grew, and as the clock ticked on, Jon asked the assembled group of parents what he thought was a helpful question: “Does anyone here have a child with any kind of nut allergy? If we know about the kids’ actual allergies, I’m sure we’ll all do everything we can to avoid risk. But if there’s no kid in the class with such an allergy, then maybe we can lighten up a bit and instead of banning all those things, just ban peanuts?” The teacher was visibly annoyed by Jon’s question, and she moved rapidly to stop any parent from responding. Don’t put anyone on the spot, she said. Don’t make any parent feel uncomfortable. Regardless of whether anyone in the class is affected, these are the school’s rules. You can’t blame the school for being so cautious. Peanut allergies were rare among American children up until the mid-nineteen nineties, when one study found that only four out of a thousand children under the age of eight had such an allergy, meaning probably nobody in Max’s entire preschool of about one hundred kids.
But by 2008, according to the same survey, using the same measures, the rate had more than tripled, to fourteen out of a thousand, meaning probably one or two kids in Max’s school. Nobody knew why American children were suddenly becoming more allergic to peanuts, but the logical and compassionate response was obvious: Kids are vulnerable. Protect them from peanuts, peanut products, and anything that has been in contact with nuts of any kind. Why not? What’s the harm, other than some inconvenience to parents preparing lunches? But it turns out that the harm was severe. It was later discovered that peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the nineteen nineties. In February 2015, an authoritative study was published. The LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study was based on the hypothesis that “regular eating of peanut containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.” The researchers recruited the parents of 640 infants (four to eleven months old) who were at high risk of developing a peanut allergy because they had severe eczema or had tested positive for another allergy. The researchers told half the parents to follow the standard advice for high-risk kids, which was to avoid all exposure to peanuts and peanut products. The other half were given a supply of a snack made from peanut butter and puffed corn and were told to give some to their child at least three times a week. The researchers followed all the families carefully, and when the children turned five years old, they were tested for an allergic reaction to peanuts. The results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17 percent had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3 percent had developed an allergy. As one of the researchers said in an interview, “For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.” It makes perfect sense. The immune system is a miracle of evolutionary engineering. It can’t possibly anticipate all the pathogens and parasites a child will encounter, especially in a mobile and omnivorous species such as ours, so it is “designed” (by natural selection) to learn rapidly from early experience. The immune system is a complex adaptive system, which can be defined as a dynamic system that is able to adapt in and evolve with a changing environment. It requires exposure to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasitic worms in order to develop its ability to mount an immune response to real threats (such as the bacterium that causes strep throat) while ignoring nonthreats (such as peanut proteins). Vaccination uses the same logic. Childhood vaccines make us healthier not by reducing threats in the world (“Ban germs in schools!”) but by exposing children to those threats in small doses, thereby giving children’s immune systems the opportunity to learn how to fend off similar threats in the future. This is the underlying rationale for what is called the hygiene hypothesis, the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner, another example of a problem of progress. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik explains the hypothesis succinctly and does us the favor of linking it to our mission in this book: Thanks to hygiene, antibiotics and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening, causing allergies. In the same way, by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master. This brings us to the oracle’s first Great Untruth, the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Of course, Nietzsche’s original aphorism, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, is not entirely correct if taken literally, some things that don’t kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished. But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate. For example, muscles and joints need stressors to develop properly. Too much rest causes muscles to atrophy, joints to lose range of motion, heart and lung function to decline, and blood clots to form. Without the challenges imposed by gravity, astronauts develop muscle weakness and joint degeneration.
Antifragility.
No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-born statistician, stock trader, and polymath who is now a professor of risk engineering at New York University. In his 2007 best seller, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that most of us think about risk in the wrong way. In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences. Life has a way of creating completely unexpected events, events Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white. Taleb was one of the few who predicted the global financial crisis of 2008, based on the financial system’s vulnerability to “black swan” events. In his later book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused word “resilience” and recognize that some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile: Just as spending a month in bed, leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions, which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most. Taleb opens the book with a poetic image that should speak to all parents. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.” The foolishness of overprotection is apparent as soon as you understand the concept of antifragility. Given that risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life, parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences. There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” But these days, we seem to be doing precisely the opposite: we’re trying to clear away anything that might upset children, not realizing that in doing so, we’re repeating the peanut-allergy mistake. If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide, which we’ll explore in chapter 7. The Rise of Safetyism In the twentieth century, the word “safety” generally meant physical safety. A great triumph of the late part of that century was that the United States became physically safer for children. As a result of class action lawsuits, efforts by investigative journalists and consumer advocates, such as Ralph Nader and his expose of the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, and common sense, dangerous products and practices became less prevalent. Between 1978 and 1985, all fifty states passed laws making the use of car seats mandatory for children. Homes and day care centers were childproofed, choking hazards and sharp objects were removed. As a result, death rates for children have plummeted. This is, of course, a very good thing, although in some other ways, the focus on physical safety may have gone too far. The Alison Gopnik essay quoted above was titled “Should We Let Toddlers Play With Saws and Knives?” Her answer was: maybe. But gradually, in the twenty-first century, on some college campuses, the meaning of “safety” underwent a process of “concept creep” and expanded to include “emotional safety.” As an example, in 2014, Oberlin College posted guidelines for faculty, urging them to use trigger warnings to “show students that you care about their safety.” The rest of the memo makes it clear that what the college was really telling its faculty was: show students that you care about their feelings. You can see the conflation of safety and feelings in another part of the memo, which urged faculty to use each student’s preferred gender pronoun (for example, “zhe” or “they” for students who don’t want to be referred to as “he” or “she”), not because this was respectful or appropriately sensitive but because a professor who uses an incorrect pronoun “prevents or impairs their safety in a classroom.” If students have been told that they can request gender neutral pronouns and then a professor fails to use one, students may be disappointed or upset. But are these students unsafe? Are students in any danger in the classroom if a professor uses the wrong pronoun? Professors should indeed be mindful of their students’ feelings, but how might it change Oberlin students, and the nature of class discussions, when the community is told repeatedly that they should judge the speech of others in terms of safety and danger? To understand how an Oberlin administrator could have used the word “safety,” we turn to an article published in 2016 by the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam, titled “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Haslam examined a variety of key concepts in clinical and social psychology, including abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice, to determine how their usage had changed since the nineteen eighties. He found that their scope had expanded in two directions: the concepts had crept “downward,” to apply to less severe situations, and “outward,” to encompass new but conceptually related phenomena. Take the word “trauma.” In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 17 psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury. In the 1980 revision, however, the manual, DSM three recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder, the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.” The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions. In fact, even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention. By the early two thousands, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful, with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” The subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word “trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health professionals but by their clients and patients, including an increasing number of college students. As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts Haslam examined was the shift to a subjective standard. It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse, if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic (or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder (as we’ll see in chapter 7), then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them.
Safe Spaces.
Few Americans had ever heard of a “safe space” in an academic sense until March of 2015, when The New York Times published an essay by Judith Shulevitz about a safe space created by students at Brown University. The students were preparing for an upcoming debate between two feminist authors, Wendy McElroy and Jessica Valenti, on “rape culture,” the concept that “prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.” Proponents of the idea, like Valenti, argue that misogyny is endemic to American culture, and in such a world, sexual assault is considered a lesser crime. We can all see, especially in the MeToo era, that sexual abuse is far too common. But does that make for a rape culture? It seems an idea worthy of debate. McElroy disputes the claim that America is a rape culture, and to illustrate her argument, she contrasts the United States with countries in which rape is endemic and tolerated. For example, in parts of Afghanistan, “women are married against their will, they are murdered for men’s honor, they are raped. And when they are raped they are arrested for it, and they are shunned by their family afterward,” she says. “Now that’s a rape culture.” McElroy has firsthand experience of sexual violence: she told the audience at Brown that she was brutally raped as a teenager, and as an adult she was so badly beaten by a boyfriend that it left her blind in one eye. She believes it is untrue and unhelpful to tell American women that they live in a rape culture. But what if some Brown students believe that America is a rape culture? Should McElroy be allowed to challenge their belief, or would that challenge put them in danger? A Brown student explained to Shulevitz: “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences.” It could be “damaging,” she said. The logic seems to be that some Brown students believe that America is a rape culture, and for some of them, this belief is based in part on their own lived experience of sexual assault. If, during the debate, McElroy were to tell them that America is not a rape culture, she could be taken to be saying that their personal experiences are “invalid” as grounds for the assertion that America is a rape culture. That could be painful to hear, but should college students interpret emotional pain as a sign that they are in danger? Illustrating concept creep and the expansion of “safety” to include emotional comfort, the student quoted above, along with other Brown students, attempted to get McElroy disinvited from the debate in order to protect her peers from such “damage.” That effort failed, but in response, the president of Brown, Christina Paxson, announced that she disagreed with McElroy, and that during the debate, the college would hold a competing talk about rape culture, without debate, so students could hear about how America is a rape culture without being confronted by different views. The competing talk didn’t entirely solve the problem, however. Any student who chose to attend the main debate could still be “triggered” by the presence of McElroy on campus and (on the assumption that students are fragile rather than antifragile) retraumatized. So the student quoted above worked with other Brown students to create a “safe space” where anyone who felt triggered could recuperate and get help. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members purportedly trained to deal with trauma. But the threat wasn’t just the reactivation of painful personal memories, it was also the threat to students’ beliefs. One student who sought out the safe space put it this way: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.” The general reaction to Shulevitz’s article was incredulity. Many Americans (and surely many Brown students) could not understand why college students needed to keep themselves “safe” from ideas. Couldn’t they do that by simply not going to the talk? But if you understand the fragile-student model, the belief that many college students are fragile in Taleb’s sense of the word, then it makes sense that all members of a community should work together to protect those students from reminders of past trauma. All members of the Brown community should come together to demand that the president (or somebody) prevent the threatening speaker from setting foot on campus. If you see yourself or your fellow students as candles, you’ll want to make your campus a wind-free zone. If the president won’t protect the students, then the students must come together to care for one another, which seems to have been the positive motivation for creating the safe space. But young adults are not flickering candle flames. They are antifragile, and that is true even of victims of violence and those who suffer from PTSD. Research on “posttraumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience. That doesn’t mean we should stop protecting young people from potential trauma, but it does mean that the culture of safetyism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the dynamics of trauma and recovery. It is vital that people who have survived violence become habituated to ordinary cues and reminders woven into the fabric of daily life. Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it. According to Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in Harvard’s Department of Psychology: Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes. Cognitive behavioral therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting (at first in small ways, such as imagining them or looking at pictures), activating their fear, and helping them habituate (grow accustomed) to the stimuli. In fact, the reactivation of anxiety is so important to recovery that some therapists advise their patients to avoid using antianxiety medication while undertaking exposure therapy. For a student who truly suffers from PTSD, appropriate treatment is necessary. But well-meaning friends and professors who work together to hide potential reminders of painful experiences, or who repeatedly warn the student about the possible reminders he or she might encounter, could be impeding the person’s recovery. A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy. This is what we mean when we talk about safetyism. Safety is good, of course, and keeping others safe from harm is virtuous, but virtues can become vices when carried to extremes. “Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make tradeoffs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. “Safety” trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger. When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. The end result may be similar to what happened when we tried to keep kids safe from exposure to peanuts: a widespread backfiring effect in which the “cure” turns out to be a primary cause of the disease.
iGen and Safetyism.
The preoccupation with safetyism is clearest in the generation that began to enter college around 2013. For many years, sociologists and marketers assumed that the “Millennial generation” encompassed everyone born between (roughly) 1982 and 1998 or 2000. But Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University and an authority on intergenerational differences, has found a surprisingly sharp discontinuity that begins around birthyear 1995. She calls those born in and after 1995 “iGen,” short for “internet Generation.” Others use the term “Generation Z.” Twenge shows that iGen suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age, and higher rates of suicide. Something is going on, something has changed the childhood experience of kids born in the late nineteen nineties. Twenge focuses on the rapid growth of social media in the years after the iPhone was introduced, in 2007. By 2011 or so, most teens could check in on their social media status every few minutes, and many did. We’ll explore Twenge’s data and arguments in chapter 7. For now, we simply note two things. First, members of iGen are “obsessed with safety,” as Twenge puts it, and define safety as including “emotional safety.” Their focus on “emotional safety” leads many of them to believe that, as Twenge describes, “one should be safe not just from car accidents and sexual assault but from people who disagree with you.” The second point we want to note about iGen is that the campus trends that led us to write our original Atlantic article, particularly the requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings, started to spread only when iGen began arriving on campus, around 2013. The demands for safety and censorship accelerated rapidly over the next four years as the last of the Millennials graduated, to be replaced by iGen. This is not a book about Millennials, indeed, Millennials are getting a bad rap these days, as many people erroneously attribute recent campus trends to them. This is a book about the very different attitudes toward speech and safety that spread across universities as the Millennials were leaving. We are not blaming iGen. Rather, we are proposing that today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility.
In Summary.
Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile. Their brains require a wide range of inputs from their environments in order to configure themselves for those environments. Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions. Concepts sometimes creep.
Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the nineteen eighties that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages, even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.
Safetyism is the cult of safety, an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.

CHAPTER Two.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings.
What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
EPICTETUS.
Imagine that you are a sophomore in college. It’s midwinter, and you’ve been feeling blue and anxious. You attach no stigma to seeing a psychotherapist, so you take advantage of the campus counseling services to see if talking through your issues will help. You sit down with your new therapist and tell him how you’ve been feeling lately. He responds, “Oh, wow. People feel very anxious when they’re in great danger. Do you feel very anxious sometimes?” This realization that experiencing anxiety means you are in great danger is making you very anxious right now. You say yes. The therapist answers, “Oh, no! Then you must be in very great danger.” You sit in silence for a moment, confused. In your past experience, therapists have helped you question your fears, not amplify them. The therapist adds, “Have you experienced anything really nasty or difficult in your life? Because I should also warn you that experiencing trauma makes you kind of broken, and you may be that way for the rest of your life.” He briefly looks up from his notepad. “Now, since we know you are in grave danger, let’s discuss how you can hide.” As your anxiety mounts, you realize that you have made a terrible mistake coming to see this therapist.
“Always trust your feelings,” said Misoponos, and that dictum may sound wise and familiar. You’ve heard versions of it from a variety of sappy novels and pop psychology gurus. But the second Great Untruth, the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning, is a direct contradiction of much ancient wisdom. We opened this chapter with a quotation from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, but we could just as easily have quoted Buddha, “Our life is the creation of our mind”, or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”) or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”). Or we could have told you the story of Boethius, awaiting execution in the year 524. Boethius reached the pinnacle of success in the late Roman world, he had been a senator and scholar who held many high offices, but he crossed the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric. In The Consolation of Philosophy, written in his jail cell, he describes his (imaginary) encounter with “Lady Philosophy,” who visits him one night and conducts what is essentially a session of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). She chides him gently for his moping, fearfulness, and bitterness at his reversal of fortune, and then she helps him to reframe his thinking and shut off his negative emotions. She helps him see that fortune is fickle and he should be grateful that he enjoyed it for so long. She guides him to reflect on the fact that his wife, children, and father are all still alive and well, and each one is dearer to him than his own life. Each exercise helps him see his situation in a new light, each one weakens the grip of his emotions and prepares him to accept Lady Philosophy’s ultimate lesson: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so, and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.” Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. Happiness, maturity, and even enlightenment require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning and learning instead to question our feelings. The feelings themselves are real, and sometimes they alert us to truths that our conscious mind has not noticed, but sometimes they lead us astray. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jon drew on Buddha and other sages to offer the metaphor that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider sitting on top of a large elephant. The rider represents conscious or “controlled” processes, the language-based thinking that fills our conscious minds and that we can control to some degree. The elephant represents everything else that goes on in our minds, the vast majority of which is outside of our conscious awareness. These processes can be called intuitive, unconscious, or “automatic,” referring to the fact that nearly all of what goes on in our minds is outside of our direct control, although the results of automatic processes sometimes make their way into consciousness. The rider-and-elephant metaphor captures the fact that the rider often believes he is in control, yet the elephant is vastly stronger, and tends to win any conflict that arises between the two. Jon reviewed psychological research to show that the rider generally functions more like the elephant’s servant than its master, in that the rider is extremely skilled at producing post-hoc justifications for whatever the elephant does or believes. Emotional reasoning is the cognitive distortion that occurs whenever the rider interprets what is happening in ways that are consistent with the elephant’s reactive emotional state, without investigating what is true. The rider then acts like a lawyer or press secretary whose job is to rationalize and justify the elephant’s pre-ordained conclusions, rather than to inquire into, or even be curious about, what is really true. Typically, the rider does his job without objection, but the rider has some ability to talk back to the elephant, particularly if he can learn to speak the elephant’s language, which is a language of intuition rather than logic. If the rider can reframe a situation so that the elephant sees it in a new way, then the elephant will feel new feelings, too, which will then motivate the elephant to move in a new direction. Boethius illustrated this “talking back” process by creating “Lady Philosophy” and having her ask the sorts of questions one learns to ask oneself in CBT. As he answers her questions, Boethius sees his life in new ways. He feels flashes of love for his family, and gratitude that they are safe. He changes the ways in which he interprets things, which causes his emotions to change, which then causes his thinking to change even further. If you engage in this “talking back” process on a regular basis, it becomes easier and easier to do. Over time, the rider becomes a more skillful trainer, and the elephant becomes better trained. The two work together in harmony. That is the power and promise of CBT.
What Is CBT?
Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed in the nineteen sixties by Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry. Clinicians assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict. To treat depression, you had to fix the underlying problem, and that could take many years of therapy. But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant, they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering. Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle between negative beliefs and negative emotions. If you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it gives them at least some moments of relief from negative emotions, and if you release them from negative emotions, they become more open to questioning their negative beliefs. It takes some skill to do this, depressed people are very good at finding evidence for the beliefs in the triad. And it takes time, a disempowering schema can’t be disassembled in a single moment of great insight (which is why insights gained from moments of enlightenment often fade quickly). But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood. The evidence that CBT works is overwhelming. A common finding is that CBT works about as well as Prozac and similar drugs for relieving the symptoms of anxiety disorders and mild to moderate depression, and it does so with longer-lasting benefits and without any negative side effects. But CBT is effective for more than anxiety and depression, including anorexia, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder, anger, marital discord, and stress related disorders. CBT is easy to do, has been widely used, has been demonstrated to be effective, and is the best-studied form of psychotherapy. It is therefore the therapy with the strongest evidence that it is both safe and effective. The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT. It is these distorted thought patterns that Greg began to notice on campus, which led him to invite Jon out to lunch, which led us to write our Atlantic article and, eventually, this book. Different CBT experts and practitioners use different lists of cognitive distortions. The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT, how it works, and how to practice it, please see Appendix 1.
EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed, therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-andwhite thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others, often in the service of dichotomous thinking. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do, so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
As you read through that list of distortions, it’s easy to see how somebody who habitually thinks in such ways would develop schemas that revolve around maladaptive core beliefs, which interfere with realistic and adaptive interpretations of social situations. Everyone engages in these distortions from time to time, so CBT is useful for everyone. Wouldn’t our relationships be better if we all did a little less blaming and dichotomous thinking, and recognized that we usually share responsibility for conflicts? Wouldn’t our political debates be more productive if we all did less overgeneralizing and labeling, both of which make it harder to compromise? We are not suggesting that everybody needs to find a therapist and start treatment with CBT. Greg’s original realization about cognitive distortions was that just learning how to recognize them and rein them in is a good intellectual habit for all of us to cultivate. Learning about cognitive distortions is especially important on a college campus. Imagine being in a seminar class in which several of the students habitually engage in emotional reasoning, overgeneralization, dichotomous thinking, and simplistic labeling. The task of the professor in this situation is to gently correct such distortions, all of which interfere with learning, both for the students engaging in the distortions and for the other students in the class. For example, if a student is offended by a passage in a novel and makes a sweeping generalization about the bad motives of authors who share the demographic characteristics of the offending author, other students might disagree but be reluctant to say so publicly. In such a case, the professor could ask a series of questions encouraging the student to ground assertions in textual evidence and consider alternative interpretations. Over time, a good college education should improve the critical thinking skills of all students. There is no universally accepted definition of “critical thinking,” but most treatments of the concept include a commitment to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence in a proper way, which is the basis of scholarship and is also the essence of CBT. Critical thinking is also needed to recognize and defeat “fake news.” It is not acceptable for a scholar to say, “You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I’m sticking with it.” When scholars cannot rebut or reconcile disconfirming evidence, they must drop their claims or else lose the respect of their colleagues. As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances. But what would happen if some professors encouraged students to use the distortions in our list above?
Microaggressions: The Triumph of Impact Over Intent.
A prime example of how some professors (and some administrators) encourage mental habits similar to the cognitive distortions is their promotion of the concept of “micro aggressions,” popularized in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Sue and several colleagues defined micro aggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” The term was first applied to people of color but is now applied much more broadly. Many people from historically marginalized groups continue to face frequent acts of bias and prejudice. Sometimes people make thinly veiled bigoted remarks, and in cases where the speaker is expressing hostility or contempt, it seems appropriate to call it aggression. If the aggressive act is minor or subtle, then the term “micro aggression” seems well suited for the situation. But aggression is not unintentional or accidental. If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one. Unfortunately, when Sue included “unintentional” slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions. He encouraged them to engage in emotional reasoning, to start with their feelings and then justify those feelings by drawing the conclusion that someone has committed an act of aggression against them. Those feelings do sometimes point to a correct inference, and it is important to find out whether an acquaintance feels hostility or contempt toward you. But it is not a good idea to start by assuming the worst about people and reading their actions as uncharitably as possible. This is the distortion known as mind reading, if done habitually and negatively, it is likely to lead to despair, anxiety, and a network of damaged relationships. Sue’s original essay included a number of examples of micro aggressions, some of which imply that a person holds negative stereotypes toward various groups, for example, a white woman clutching her purse when a black person passes by, a taxi driver passing by a person of color to pick up a white passenger, a white person praising a black person for being “articulate.” A person who has experienced these things repeatedly might be justified in suspecting that bigotry or negative stereotypes motivated the behaviors. However, many of the examples offered by Sue do not necessarily suggest that the speaker feels hostility or holds negative stereotypes toward any group. His list of micro aggressions includes a white person asking an Asian American to teach her words in the Asian American’s “native language,” a white person saying that “America is a melting pot,” and a white person saying, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” These all hinge on the fact that listeners could choose to interpret the statement or question in a way that makes them feel insulted or marginalized. Sue explains that an Asian American could take the language question as an assertion that “you are a foreigner”, a Latino student could take the “melting pot” comment as an injunction to “assimilate, acculturate to the dominant culture”, a black student could interpret the “most qualified person” comment as an implicit statement that “people of color are given extra unfair advantages because of their race.” Yes, one certainly could interpret these everyday questions and comments in this way, as tiny acts of aggression, rebuke, or exclusion, and sometimes that is exactly what they are. But there are other ways to interpret these statements, too. More to the point, should we teach students to interpret these kinds of things as acts of aggression? If a student feels a flash of offense as the recipient of such statements, is he better off embracing that feeling and labeling himself a victim of a micro aggression, or is he better off asking himself if a more charitable interpretation might be warranted by the facts? A charitable interpretation does not mean that the recipient of the comment must do nothing, rather, it opens up a range of constructive responses. A charitable approach might be to say, “I’m guessing you didn’t mean any harm when you said that, but you should know that some people might interpret that to mean.” This approach would make it easier for students to respond when they feel hurt, it would transform a victimization story into a story about one’s own agency, and it would make it far more likely that the interpersonal exchange would have a positive outcome. We all can be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they are bigots when they harbor no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback. It may also make them less interested in engaging with people across lines of difference. By Sue’s logic, however, CBT itself can be a micro aggression, because it requires questioning the premises and assumptions that give rise to feelings. Sue gives the example of a therapist asking a client, “Do you really think your problem stems from racism?” Depending on the therapist’s intention, such a question could indeed be improperly dismissive. But if the intention of the therapist is to help the client talk back to his emotions, search for evidence to justify interpretations, and find the realistic appraisal of events that will lead to the most effective functioning in a world full of ambiguities, then the question may very well be appropriate and constructive. Teaching people to see more aggression in ambiguous interactions, take more offense, feel more negative emotions, and avoid questioning their initial interpretations strikes us as unwise, to say the least. It is also contrary to the usual goals of good psychotherapy. Shadi Hamid, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, describes his approach to dealing with potential micro aggressions in an article in The Atlantic: “As an Arab and a Muslim, I get the questions ‘Where are you from?’, by which people usually mean ‘Where are you really from?’, and ‘Were you born here?’ quite often. It doesn’t usually occur to me to get offended.” As Hamid notes, “In our identitarian age, the bar for offense has been lowered considerably, which makes democratic debate more difficult, citizens are more likely to withhold their true opinions if they fear being labeled as bigoted or insensitive.” Hamid’s point has important implications for the challenge of building a community on a college campus, where we want students to freely engage with one another rather than keeping their thoughts hidden. Imagine that you are in charge of new-student orientation at an American university that is very diverse, there are students from a wide variety of racial groups, ethnic groups, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. There are international students from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, some of whom don’t speak English well, many don’t understand the nuances of English words and American customs, and as a result, they often choose the wrong word to express themselves. There are also students on the autism spectrum who have difficulty picking up on subtle social cues. With all this diversity, there will be hundreds of misunderstandings on your campus each day. The potential for offense-taking is almost unlimited. How should you prepare these students to engage with one another in the most productive and beneficial way? Would you give them a day of micro aggression training and encourage them to report micro aggressions whenever they see them? To go along with that training, would you set up a Bias Response Team, a group of administrators charged with investigating reports of bias, including micro aggressions? Or would you rather give all students advice on how to be polite and avoid giving accidental or thoughtless offense in a diverse community, along with a day of training in giving one another the benefit of the doubt and interpreting everyone’s actions in ways that elicit the least amount of emotional reactivity? More generally, the microaggression concept reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from “intent” to “impact.” In moral judgment as it has long been studied by psychologists, intent is essential for assessing guilt. We generally hold people morally responsible for acts that they intended to commit. If Bob tries to poison Maria and he fails, he has committed a very serious crime, even though he has made no impact on Maria. (Bob is still guilty of attempted murder.) Conversely, if Maria accidentally kills Bob by (consensually) kissing him after eating a peanut butter sandwich, she has committed no offense if she had no idea he was deathly allergic to peanuts. Most people understand concepts related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in this way, they focus on intent. If, on the basis of group membership, you dislike people, wish them ill, or intend to do them harm, you are a bigot, even if you say or do something that inadvertently or unintentionally helps members of that group. Conversely, if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbor no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor. However, some activists say that bigotry is only about impact (as they define impact), intent is not even necessary. If a member of an identity group feels offended or oppressed by the action of another person, then according to the impact-versus-intent paradigm, that other person is guilty of an act of bigotry. As explained in an essay at EverydayFeminism.com, “In the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us?” It is undeniable that some members of various identity groups encounter repeated indignities because of their group membership. Even if none of the offenders harbored a trace of ill will, their clueless or ignorant questions could become burdensome and hard to tolerate. Comedian and diversity educator Karith Foster, a black woman who is married to a white man, had a particularly difficult experience when her husband was taken to the emergency room after a nearly fatal motorcycle accident. As hospital personnel asked him about his medical history, he slipped in and out of consciousness. Foster began to answer for him, but nobody seemed to be listening to her. “For the first time in my life I felt invisible,” she said. She told us that a doctor glanced at her indifferently and finally asked, in a detached tone of voice, what her relationship was to the patient. Then, as they treated her husband, more members of the all-white staff asked her that same question with a similar intonation, until finally Foster was on the brink of tears. “It wasn’t the question,” she told us. “I understand that by law and hospital protocol it needed to be asked. What was so disconcerting was the tone I perceived.” She remembers clearly thinking, “Am I seriously having to deal with this racist bullshit RIGHT NOW? As my husband’s life is on the line?!” She described what happened next: I wanted so badly to lose it and scream at the hospital staff: “We’re living in the twenty-first century! It’s called a mixed-race marriage!” But I knew my emotions were getting the best of me in this incredibly stressful moment and were leading me to label the doctors and nurses as racists. I was assuming that I knew what they were thinking. But that’s not the way I normally think when I’m not under so much stress. It took everything I had, but I took a deep breath and practiced the C.A.R.E. model that I teach: I reminded myself that everyone was doing their best to save my husband’s life, that the stress of the situation might be influencing my interpretations, and that I needed to keep the lines of communication open. Doing that must have shifted how I was coming across, because although I don’t remember acting any differently, it seemed like all of a sudden the doctors began showing me X-rays and explaining the procedures they were doing. One of the attendants even went out and bought me a cup of coffee and refused to let me pay for it. That’s when I had the epiphany that what I had experienced wasn’t racism. No one was being malicious because I was black and my spouse was white. But for them to fully comprehend our relationship, they had to change their default ideas of what a married couple looks like. Foster told us that in dealing with hospital personnel’s insensitivity, “without taking a step back, I could have made an awful situation a lot worse.” After the emergency, her husband is doing fine now, Foster made sure to speak with the hospital administration about the insensitivity and lack of awareness she and her husband experienced, and the administrative personnel were receptive and apologetic. It is crucial to teach incoming students to be thoughtful in their interactions with one another. A portion of what is derided as “political correctness” is just an effort to promote polite and respectful interactions by discouraging the use of terms that are reasonably taken to be demeaning. But if you teach students that intention doesn’t matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts), and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are “aggressors” who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world, and even their university, as a hostile place where things never seem to get better. If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it. Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate. And, to add injury to insult, this sort of environment is likely to foster an external locus of control. The concept of “locus of control” goes back to behaviorist days, when psychologists noted that animals (including people) could be trained to expect that they could get what they wanted through their own behavior, that is, some control over outcomes was “internal” to themselves. Conversely, animals could be trained to expect that nothing they did mattered, that is, all control of outcomes was “external” to themselves. A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work. An internal locus of control has even been found to make many kinds of adversity less painful.
Disinvitations and the Ideological Vetting of Speakers.
Another way that emotional reasoning manifests itself on college campuses is through the “disinvitation” of guest speakers. The logic typically used is that if a speaker makes some students uncomfortable, upset, or angry, then that is enough to justify banning that speaker from campus entirely because of the “danger” that the speaker poses to those students. In a typical case, students pressure the organization that issued the invitation, or petition the college president or relevant deans, demanding that someone rescind the invitation. The threat is made (sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly) that if the speaker comes to campus, there will be loud, disruptive protests in an organized effort to stop the talk from taking place. Strategies include blocking entrances to the building, shouting expletives or “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at anyone who tries to attend, banging loudly on doors and windows from outside the room, and filling up the auditorium with protesters, who eventually shout or chant for as long as it takes to prevent the speaker from speaking. As the idea that the mere presence of a speaker on campus can be “dangerous” has spread more widely, efforts to disinvite speakers have become more common. Greg’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been tracking disinvitation attempts going back to 2000, the FIRE disinvitation database currently contains 379 such events.
About 46 percent of the attempts were successful: the speaker was disinvited, or the event was otherwise canceled. Of the events that proceeded, about a third were disrupted by protesters to some degree. For most of the events, the disinvitation effort can be clearly categorized as coming from one side of the political spectrum or the other. As you can see in Figure 2.1, from 2000 through 2009, disinvitation efforts were just as likely to come from the right as from the left. But after 2009, a gap opens up, and then widens beginning in 2013, right around the time that Greg began noticing things changing on campus. Part of this change is because, on some campuses, conservative groups began inviting more provocateurs, especially Milo Yiannopoulos, a master of the art of provoking what he calls “mild rage.” Yiannopoulos describes himself as a “troll” and even named his 2017 speaking tour “Milo’s Troll Academy Tour.” While trolls have, of course, been around for a long time, the dynamic of troll versus protesters became more common in 2016, and we have used asterisks in Figure 2.1 to show where the line for the left would have been had we not included the seventeen Yiannopoulos disinvitations. Many of the speakers who faced disinvitation efforts from the left in 2013 and 2014 were serious thinkers and politicians, including conservative political journalist George Will, and managing director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde. Some of them were even clearly left leaning, such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, comedian Bill Maher, and former U S Attorney General Eric Holder.
Disinvitation Attempts by Year and Source of Criticism.
FIGURE 2.1. Disinvitation attempts each year since 2000.
Solid line shows efforts initiated by people and groups on the political left, dashed line shows efforts from the right. Asterisks show where the solid line would have been had Milo Yiannopoulos been removed from the dataset.
Something began changing on many campuses around 2013, and the idea that college students should not be exposed to “offensive” ideas is now a majority position on campus. In 2017, 58 percent of college students said it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.” This statement was endorsed by 63 percent of very liberal students, but it’s a view that is not confined to the left, almost half of very conservative students (45 percent) endorsed that statement, too. The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend. It was in this spirit that Zachary Wood, a left-leaning African American student at Williams College, in Massachusetts, led the “U