#jonathan haidt

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[doubledaybooks]

What books should you read in 2025 to feed your mind? Adam Grant reccommends, LIFE IN THREE DIMENSIONS by Shige Oishi, PhD of Psychology.

“It turns out that there’s more to life than happiness and meaning. In his pioneering research, Shigehiro Oishi discovered a neglected third dimension of the good life: having new and interesting experiences. In this lively, insightful book, he reveals what it takes to get rich psychologically.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Hidden Potential, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

[luxe-pauvre]

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age. We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

Jonathan Haidt, Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

[dhaaruni]

Why Do They Vote That Way? by Jonathan Haidt

[justforbooks]

The Anxious Generation author on how to fight back against big tech

‘No smartphones before 14; no social media until 16’: One year on, Jonathan Haidt talks about the way his book changed the global conversation around children and digital devices – and explains how he handles his own teenagers

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. You’ll have to forgive the cliche, because it’s literally true. The author of The Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about the effect of digital tech on young minds, is based at New York University’s business school: “I’m around all these corporate types and we’re always talking about companies and their mission statements,” he says. So, he decided to make one for himself. “It was very simple: ‘My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people better understand each other, and to help important social institutions work well.’”

This is characteristic of Haidt: there’s the risk that writing your own brand manifesto might seem a bit, well, pompous. What comes across instead is the nerd’s desire to be as effective as possible, combined with the positive psychologist’s love of self-improvement (one of his signature undergraduate courses is called Flourishing, which sets students homework such as “catch and analyse 10 automatic thoughts”).

The Anxious Generation, out in paperback, follows books on happiness, political polarisation and campus culture wars. It’s an evidence-based but thoroughly mission-driven call to action: smartphones, he argues, are largely responsible for a collapse in young people’s mental health since 2010. The gloomy picture takes in increased anxiety, depression, even self-harm and suicide (with hard indicators such as an uptick in emergency room admissions for self-inflicted injuries meaning that it can’t be down to increased “awareness” or diagnosis creep). There are ways out of the mess, Haidt says, but time is limited, particularly if we want to avert the even greater threat posed by AI.

The book has sold 1.7m copies in 44 languages, capturing the attention of a different anxious generation – parents thankful they were born too early for the phone-based childhoods Haidt describes in dispiriting detail, but desperate for guidance now they have children of their own. His statement of the problem, and straightforward advice on what to do about it, has convinced policymakers, too. In Australia, where a ban on social media for under-16s will take effect later this year, his work has changed the law. The wife of the politician who helped design the legislation was reading The Anxious Generation in bed, Haidt told one interviewer, “and she turns to him and says: ‘You’ve got to read this book, and then you’ve got to effing do something about it.’”

So what is his prescription to reverse, or at least treat, what he calls the Great Rewiring of children’s lives? He sets out “four norms” that parents, and society at large, should adopt: no smartphones before the age of 14; no social media until 16; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Although The Anxious Generation has largely been seen as a book about digital devices, it’s as emphatic about that last point. Boomers, gen Xers and even millennials enjoyed plenty of free play outside when crime rates were much higher than they are now. Modern parents, exposed to a diet of constant bad news, are more paranoid. This stunts development, reducing the opportunity to learn skills such as cooperation and conflict resolution, to overcome fears and, well, to have fun.

Essentially, he argues, we’re guilty of overprotection in one place (the real world) and underprotection in another (online). “I think that was one of the important points of Adolescence,” he says, referencing the Netflix show that dramatised the influence of the “manosphere” on teenage boys. “We all freaked out in the 90s about the outside world. We all thought our kids are in danger if they’re not in our sight, and so we’ve stopped letting them out, and we thought: well, as long as they’re on computers, that’s good. They’ll learn to program. They’ll start a company. One of the poignant moments in [the show] was when the parents said: ‘We thought he was safe. He was just up in his room.’”

The four norms look simple enough on paper. But what about the fiendish reality of enforcing them, particularly if your children are already extremely online? “What I found in the year since the book came out is that parents with young children love it,” Haidt says. “They’re excited, like: yes, we’re going to do this. Whereas parents of teenagers have more mixed reactions, for exactly the reason that all of us are already so deeply into this.”

Haidt has two children of his own with artist and photographer Jayne Riew: a girl of 15 and a boy of 18. “The advice that I give to parents of teenagers is, if you recently gave your child a smartphone or social media, you can take it back. Give them a flip phone, a brick phone, a dumb phone. The key is you want your kids to be able to communicate with their friends, but you don’t want to give them over to for-profit companies [whose] goal is to hook your child.”

“Now, if your kids are 15 or 16 and their entire social lives are on Instagram and Snapchat, it would be very painful to cut them off,” he says, “because they’ll experience that as social death. So the key strategy … is to help them take back their attention by creating large parts of the day where they’re not on it.” Ban devices in the bedroom, push for phone-free schools, do everything you can to expand the window of time spent away from addictive tech.

Back in 2019, when he was laying down ground rules for his own children, the evidence pointed to social media as the greater evil, particularly for girls. So he banned that, rather than phones per se. “My daughter says she’s the only person in her high school who doesn’t have Snapchat.” Isn’t he worried about her being left out? “Her friends have compensated for it. They say when there’s something important going on that she needs to know about, they’ll text her so she’s not entirely out of the loop, and it’s been great, because she is really involved in the real world. She runs track, she does sewing and makes clothing.” Even so, he would do things slightly differently now: “The rule I wish I had followed was no screens in the bedroom, ever. My kids seem to need their computers and their phones more than they would have if I’d had a better policy.”

Haidt clearly loves his job, and sets great store by what he regards as the truth-telling function of academic research. But with the book’s success, is there a risk he morphs into a kind of activist? Yes, he concedes, though he doesn’t seem unhappy about it. “Once I came to realise the full extent of what is happening to literally hundreds of millions of children – I mean, human consciousness is being changed at an industrial scale – and the fact that AI is not yet entangled in our world, but in two years it will be very hard to do anything – I [felt] a kind of a campaigner’s zeal to get this done, to get the norms changed this year.”

When I mention a colleague who hears from her kids that “everyone does their homework using ChatGPT” he nods, and says “this is a potentially unsolvable problem for education. Like all teachers, we’re struggling to figure out what to do. It makes it easy for everyone to do their homework, but students need to learn how to do hard things.”

Does his newfound zeal mean it’s harder for him to admit he might be wrong? To give counterarguments their due? “Oh, yeah, I suffer from confirmation bias like everyone else. I have a whole book on confirmation bias, practically [2012’s The Righteous Mind]. And so that’s why one thing that we’ve done from the very beginning is seek out contradictory views, talk to our critics, have them publish on the Substack.” Haidt, with researcher Zach Rausch, maintains a running commentary on the evidence base for the Great Rewiring at afterbabel.com. There, he posts “responses to sceptics” who question the link between screens and declining mental health. Some claim there are better explanations, such as Covid (though indicators of wellbeing started declining in 2010) or the climate crisis (though preteens, rather than more politically aware adolescents, seem to be particularly affected – the opposite of what you’d expect if climate worries were responsible).

In March 2024, psychologist Candice Odgers wrote a review of The Anxious Generation in Nature. She said: “Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations,” adding that “most data are correlative”. In other words: the problem may have coincided with the introduction of smartphones, but we can’t say that there’s a causal link. Odgers instead leans towards the idea that people with pre-existing problems use social media more, or in more destructive ways.

Haidt comes out fighting, though, citing “dozens” of papers, including, for example, a meta-analysis of 26 studies that found the risk of depression increased by 13% for each extra hour spent on social media. “She accused me of not knowing the difference between correlation and causation. That has structured the debate ever since. And the strange thing about that review, I just looked back at it the other day, what I realised is there’s not a single word that indicates that she read past chapter one.” This seems hard to believe, but, Haidt says, “I had a long section in chapter six specifically titled ‘correlation versus causation’”. When I asked her to respond to this later, Odgers said: “The issue is not a failure to understand the distinction between correlation versus causation, it is the failure to apply this understanding when making causal, and frankly damaging, claims about young people that will be heard by millions of people.”

“I love debating and arguing, and that’s what drew me to academic life … but the accusation that I don’t understand the difference in correlation and causation, I guess that did get to me”, Haidt says.

One important part of the puzzle, he says, is that companies have acknowledged that children are vulnerable in internal reports never intended for public consumption. He cites one by TikTok, for example, admitting that the app was “popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively”.

If the evidence is so strong, what does he think drives his critics? “I think some of them seem to be motivated by an admirable desire to defend the kids, to say, ‘Look, if this is what the kids are doing, we adults shouldn’t criticise’.” He claims that “some of the researchers are deep video gamers, and they went through this whole thing about ‘Do violent video games cause violence?’. So they seem especially primed to see everything as just a replay of previous moral panics.”

I also wonder whether he’s got people’s backs up through his interventions in academic life, railing against what he sees as progressive overreach. His 2018 book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, was based on an Atlantic piece of the same name, though it’s more careful and caveated than the title makes it seem (editor Don Peck zhuzhed it up from Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions). The idea is that colleges have become highly risk-averse places, where students expect to be shielded from difficult ideas, and faculty and administrators live in fear of career-wrecking complaints based on offended sensibilities.

There are many reasons for this turn, Haidt argues, some of which overlap with those set out in The Anxious Generation: overprotective parenting raising a generation of fragile, nervous kids, for one. He cites the expectation of good “customer service” driven by high tuition fees, and an administrative culture of “CYA” (cover your ass). But he also blames a lack of “viewpoint diversity” among faculty, leading to a moribund, timid intellectual environment and a failure to push back against overly empowered students.

This argument hits a little differently in 2025, with the Trump administration carrying out an unprecedented assault on universities, and using “woke” culture on campus as its primary justification. A letter sent by officials menacing Harvard specifically demands “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring”. Is it a case of be careful what you wish for? Or, more directly, did Haidt’s championing of this issue provide ammunition for the current war against academic independence?

“I don’t think the fact that I’ve been calling for reform since 2011 should be used against me when the fact that there wasn’t reform became a trigger for Donald Trump,” he says. Haidt believes the progressive monoculture that produced calls to, among other things, defund the police and abolish standardised tests alienated “normies” to the extent that Trump rode into office “on a wave of revulsion about what’s happening on campus and more broadly in society”. Surely inflation, the cost of living, played a larger role in voters’ rejection of the Democratic candidate? Haidt concedes that “it contributed”, but otherwise sticks to his guns in a way that, to me, suggests he’s a little too immersed in this particular debate to see the bigger picture. Which is not to say he isn’t outraged by the way things have unfolded. Still speaking softly and precisely, he unleashes the Haidtian version of a tirade.

“Trump is a deeply unstable, narcissistic man who has a zero sum view of the world and a strong sense of vengeance. And now [he’s] using the power of the federal government and the department of justice to harass and harm his enemies … this is the most shocking transformation of America I’ve ever heard of. So while I have been a critic of schools like Harvard that, you know, was ranked as the worst university for free speech in the country … now everything is reversed.” He adds that “[Trump] is especially using antisemitism as a cudgel. I don’t think that’s his real motivation. And while I have always stood for the value of viewpoint diversity, so I think President Trump is not wrong to call for it, I’ve also always stood against government micromanaging what universities do.”

In The Coddling … Haidt declared himself “a centrist who sides with the Democratic party on the great majority of issues” and said that he had never voted Republican for Congress or the presidency. More recently, he stated: “I was always on the left. Now, I’m nothing. I’m not on any team.” Either way, he has undoubtedly annoyed progressives who take a more instinctively tribal approach. A contrarian by nature, he also sees that instinct as an essential part of any intellectual’s toolkit. His postdoc supervisor, cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, modelled “an incredible playfulness with ideas and a joy in intellectual perversity, which means his dictum was: if someone asserts it, deny it and see how that goes. And if someone denies it, assert it and see how that goes.”

Does that make him a bit irritating? “Oh, yes, it does,” he says, without a trace of offence. That’s the point: “The founding story of the academic world is Socrates being a gadfly.” Does it ever bleed into his personal life? “My wife and I have long had a conflict of truth versus beauty, and in my view, she is willing to sacrifice truth for beauty. I have to have a footnote for everything. There has to be a source for everything. And that sometimes makes me annoying to her.”

“Carried to excess it [has] the risk of know-it-allism, and I’ve been accused of that by my wife – and several ex-girlfriends. So yeah, I think my strengths are also my weaknesses. The same is true for everyone.”

The Anxious Generation started life as a different book about the corrupting effects of social media on democracy. After he’d written one chapter, Haidt realised that the scale and urgency of the problem faced by children and teens meant it would have to be about them instead. He still has plans to go back to the first idea, but given everything that’s happened, he’s taking two or three years “off” to support the movement he’s started (“I don’t have to drive it, I just have to help it along”). He says he’s optimistic – “very optimistic that we’re going to, if not fully solve it, make enormous progress – we already are.”

This is energising, but I note that, when discussing “green shoots” of hope back in 2018, he welcomed the new, socially responsible approach taken by Facebook and Twitter, including the latter’s commitment to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation”. “Yeah, that died. That green shoot did not go very far,” he sighs. And in a follow-up exchange, he strikes an even darker note. I ask about the broader picture, is he concerned about … the end of civilisation as we know it?

Somewhat alarmingly for a man who first made his name in the Pollyanna-ish field of positive psychology, he really is. “I am extremely worried about social collapse,” he emails. “Technology always changes societies, and we are just beginning the biggest technological change in history. It will only speed up as AI becomes entangled in everything. So we are headed into very dangerous times, especially for liberal democracies that require some degree of shared facts, shared stories and trusted institutions.

“This is part of the reason I feel such urgency to protect kids now, this year, 2025. The next two generations may face challenges beyond anything we can imagine. They need to be strong, competent and in control of their attention.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[folatefangirl]

I really need to stop reading nonfiction books that are marked as New York Times bestsellers (with the exception of a few select recommendations). Anyway, if y'all are wondering why 2024 had a new surge in folks pushing KOSA, I bet we can point to this book as one of the key factors. Note that I agree with him that being on the interwebs constantly and seeing a negative feed and needing to feel validation constantly for what you create and post (even in fandom spaces) is not great for the mental health. It's definitely detrimental and we have data to back it up! That being said, it's disappointing an author this well-read and with this level of access to data and even a ready-made pool to study from his own NYU students has his head stuck so far up his ass.

I do realize the irony of borrowing this from the library as an ebook and reading it on my kindle app with frequent commentary updates pushed on Discord. He'd probably consider me a peak example of what is wrong with my generation! That being said, I still think he's a bit of an out-of-touch prick.

[rideretremando]

Haidt è convinto che l’ambiente in cui i ragazzi crescono sia “ostile allo sviluppo umano” e che questa condizione stia provocando “un’epidemia” di sofferenza psichica. Causa della caduta sarebbe l’attraversamento della pubertà con in tasca uno strumento sempre acceso che ti spegne rispetto alla realtà circostante per calamitarti verso Paesi delle meraviglie e dell’eccitazione. Dove la produzione di dopamina è incessante – attivata da like, retweet, commenti - fino a provocare una dipendenza che impedisce ogni rientro in un universo senza filtri. Come succede invece alla Alice di Lewis Carroll quando ritrova le sue dimensioni e si sveglia nel giardino d’origine. Questo “collasso esistenziale” sarebbe cominciato con il passaggio dai cellulari agli smartphone e la diffusione di questi negli anni Dieci.

Siamo andati allo sbaraglio, li abbiamo gettati in mare senza salvagente e lezioni di stile libero

[sussex-newswire]

"In honor of World Mental Health Day, Prince Harry led a significant discussion with Jonathan Haidt, author of the New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. Focusing on the impact of social media, they explored how screens and devices affect the mental health of Generation Z and discussed actionable steps to address the rising mental health crisis among teens.

"This vital conversation coincides with the release of The Archewell Foundation’s second edition of The Archewell Foundation Insight Report. This report captures insights from ongoing sessions organized by the Foundation, which facilitate intimate discussions aimed at deepening our understanding of how young people and parents navigate life in the digital age.

"The report highlights a global youth perspective on technology’s evolving role, featuring contributions from young people across Colombia, Georgia, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These voices shed light on the unique challenges of growing up online and share their hopes for the future.

"Through The Archewell Foundation, The Duke and Duchess are dedicated to engaging with young people and parents to gain insights on social media and the future of the digital landscape, working together to create a better online world.

"View the report here."

[intothepast9]

very excited to learn that taylor lorenz has beef with jonathan haidt because I love taylor lorenz and I also have beef with jonathan haidt

[airbrickwall]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jonathan Haidt (@jonathanhaidt)

[dwellordream]

- Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation

[luxe-pauvre]

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain. In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence. […] But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent? This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong. But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.

Jonathan Haidt, Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

[monetizeme]

Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether it should step in to block or delay the implementation of a law that would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. If not blocked, the law will force TikTok to cease operations in the U.S. on January 19, unless its Chinese corporate owner (Bytedance) sells to a buyer not controlled by a foreign adversary. The case hinges entirely on constitutional arguments pertaining to national security and free speech. The Justices will hear no evidence about addiction, depression, sexual exploitation, or any of the many harms to children that have been alleged, in separate lawsuits filed by 14 state Attorneys General, to be widespread on TikTok.

The upcoming ban will also be adjudicated in the court of public opinion as Americans try to decide whether the loss of access to TikTok would be a reason to protest or celebrate. In this post we argue that Americans should welcome the disappearance of TikTok because the company is causing harm to children, adolescents, and young adults at an industrial scale.

Our evidence comes mostly from research done by those 14 Attorneys General. Some of their briefs have been posted online for the world to see. The briefs include hundreds of quotations from internal reports, memos, Slack conversations, and public statements in which executives and employees of TikTok acknowledge and discuss the harms that their company is causing to children. We organize the evidence into five clusters of harms:

Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use

Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide

Porn, violence, and drugs

Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation

TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action

We show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and that they were often acting under the orders of company leadership to maximize engagement regardless of the harm to children. As one internal report put it:

“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”1

Although these harms are known, the company often chooses not to act. For example, one TikTok employee explained,

“[w]hen we make changes, we make sure core metrics aren’t affected.” This is because “[l]eaders don’t buy into problems” with unhealthy and compulsive usage, and work to address it is “not a priority for any other team.”2

Although the evidence below is all publicly available, no one has compiled and combined direct quotations from company insiders and internal reports across multiple alleged harms. We think this compilation gives vital information to parents, who might want some insight into the character and business practices of a company that owns much of their children’s attention and influences their social development.3 Parents might want to know that TikTok knows that its parental controls are ineffective and rarely used:

In another internal document, TikTok admitted that “user research” shows that “[f]amilies do not use Family Pairing” and that “Family Pairing doesn’t address parents’ top concerns,” including “inappropriate content, offensive interactions, and lack of privacy.4

And even if parental controls worked and parents chose to shield their kids from bad stuff, they can’t because TikTok’s content moderation is poor. An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”5

For those who think that social media is relatively harmless, we urge you to read the quotations and internal studies described below, in which employees of TikTok discuss the vast and varied harms that they are causing to literally millions of American children each year.6

[petitjeanofficial]

“Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.” ― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why Students Are Miserable: The Coddling of the American Mind

John Stossel: Over the past 10 years, many colleges went mad. They charge students big bucks and then make them feel guilty. This is what happened to Lucy Kross Williams at Stanford.

Lucy Kross Williams: I was anxious. I felt guilty constantly. I couldn't stop thinking about the whole white privilege thing.

Stossel: Kimi Katiti attended The Art Institutes of California.

Kimi Katiti: I feel like I lost my life for like six years.

Stossel: This new documentary, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” argues that today, more young people are anxious and depressed because adults at their schools brainwashed them.

Kimi: I was full of self-confidence when I was 18, but while I was in college, that disintegrated.

Stossel: Kimi was taught she was a victim.

Kimi: I was introduced to ideas such as microaggressions.

VO: Have you heard or even said any of these common microaggressions? Wow, you're so articulate! Can I touch your hair?

Kimi: I began to see myself through the lens of black and a woman. If I see someone, like, coming up with their dog, for example, and the dog’s barking at me. I could interpret that as a racist, microaggression on the part of both the dog and the dog walker. I was like, the world's a lot darker than I thought it was. In order to kind of compete and get the best grades, I sort of showed how much of a victim I was in order to impress my professors.

Stossel: She thought that was wrong, but she didn’t push back.

Kimi: I thought, I'm paying a lot. So, they're definitely teaching me like, the golden rules for life.

Chant: Ben Shapiro, go to hell!

screaming hysterically

Stossel: Those rules included censoring speech by conservatives, like Ben Shapiro. Kimi joined the mob trying to get Shapiro’s posts blocked on Twitter. She kept sending complaints to Twitter’s censors.

Kimi: I would sit down all the way through the night. I'll try again. Try again.

Stossel: At Stanford, Lucy was taught that Shapiro's ideas put black, brown, trans, queer, Muslim students at risk.

Lucy: My first thought was like, this is extreme. This is ridiculous. And then I sort of, there was the, well you're privileged, you're white.

Stossel: She was taught that a good person:

Lucy: Didn't read too many books by white authors or listen to the wrong kind of music. I was really torn on rap because I didn't know if that was appropriation or appreciation.

Stossel: To be accepted, she changed the way she spoke.

Lucy: When I started to use the vocabulary of like, marginalized, intersectional, hegemonic, blah, blah, blah. People just kind of smiled a little bit more. And I started feeling like I was, I was part of an in-group.

Stossel: But a few years later she concluded:

Lucy: These set of thought processes was really unhealthy and was making me miserable.

Greg Lukianoff: Administrators teach students that they're fragile and in constant danger and can be permanently harmed by words. This is not a kind or compassionate thing to teach people.

Stossel: Greg Lukianoff co-wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Years ago, he suffered from suicidal depression. Therapy helped him, but now:

Lukianoff: I'm looking on campus and I'm like, wow, it’s kind of like administrators are telling students to catastrophize, to do all these things that I was taught not to do.

Stossel: This is amplified by required courses that divide students into "oppressed" or "oppressor."

Lukianoff: Colleges provide websites and phone numbers so students can report people who offend them.

Stossel: And lots of people offend them.

Chant: "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!"

Jonathan Haidt: In 2012, there was none of this.

Stossel: Coddling coauthor Jonathan Haidt:

Haidt: And by 2014, 2015, there was a lot of it.

screaming hysterically

Activist: What about our protection, right now!

Stossel: At this college they:

Haidt: Basically, took the president of the university hostage. They wouldn't even let him go to the bathroom. It wasn't about learning, it wasn't about exposure to ideas. It was about this battle between good and evil.

Stossel: This new censorship was supposed to help minorities, but they too were often punished. Saeed Malami spoke at a protest.

Saeed Malami: I go up there, you know, feeling all cool with myself. I was like, you know, blackness is not a skin color. It's an attitude to life. If you're white, you can be black. If you're black, you can be purple or whatever it is. I'm like everyone can be black. And what happened after that? A lot of people I thought I was tight with just stopped talking to me.

Stossel: So instead of saying, "I’m no victim," he shut up.

Saeed: What I thought to be true, I would keep in my head and then say something else.

Stossel: Doing that makes other students dumber.

Haidt: Other people challenging us, make us smart. Cancel culture is like a way of shooting yourself in the brain.

Stossel: For Kimi, a turning point was when she went to a skatepark in a conservative neighborhood.

Kimi: Are they going to hate that a black woman’s in their territory? Will they literally pick up a skateboard and attack me?

Stossel: The park was in Orange County, California.

Kimi: I was afraid of Orange County to begin with, just because it was notoriously conservative. So, just going into Orange County was kind of scary for me.

Stossel: But at the park, Kimi found the county was not evil as she’d feared.

Kimi: This was a really great place. That was when I knew there was a way that I was looking at the world, that wasn’t right. I was the one inflicting pain on myself. And it was robbing me of happiness.

Lukianoff: It's really important to have great sympathy for younger people today because they're just doing what older people are telling them. Like this idea that they're always in constant danger, that words will permanently harm them and that they're much more fragile than they actually are.

Lucy: When I was a social justice advocate, I was tired, miserable, pessimistic.

Kimi: Now that I'm out of that and I'm thinking for myself, I'm much happier.

Lucy: I wasn't really sure what the alternative was until a friend sent me a link.

Stossel: To this YouTube channel where black scholars said things she’d never heard.

John McWhorter: The whole business of black men being at a unique risk of being killed by white cops is vastly distorted.

Lucy: I was astonished to find that, like, there were black thinkers writing about race and sharing ideas that I never heard on campus. This whole new world of ideas has opened up to me and it was so exciting to feel like I was thinking for myself again.

Stossel: “Coddling” is a good introduction to how some of today’s schools harm students. This video was just a taste, there’s more in the full documentary and you can find that at thecoddlingmovie.com

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[kanmurireads]

Went into this book knowing that a lot of people were contesting the findings the author presents. I don't have kids so a big part of the book was of little use to me. The author makes good points, but I think he limits himself to Gen Z too much. I think many of the problems he cites apply to millennials as well. A book to consider if you're a parent; otherwise, mostly meh.