100 tweets from “The Coddling of the American Mind" (by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff)

1. This is a book about three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years: The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
   
2. If students didn’t build skills and accept friendly invitations to spar in the practice ring, and if they avoided these opportunities because well-meaning people convinced them that they’d be harmed by such training, well, it would be a tragedy for all concerned.
3. Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.
4. Students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions.
5. Well-intentioned overprotection—from peanut bans in elementary schools through speech codes on college campuses—may end up doing more harm than good.
6. Comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs, too.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously.
12. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide.
13. Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. Over time, a good college education should improve the critical thinking skills of all students.
19. 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.
20. 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.”
21. 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.
22. Another way that emotional reasoning manifests itself on college campuses is through the “disinvitation” of guest speakers.
23. 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.
24. Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
25. Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.
26. The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger.
27. There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.
28. Human mind is prepared for tribalism (…) Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently.
29. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves.
30. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.”
31. This is the way to win hearts, minds, and votes: you must appeal to the elephant (intuitive and emotional processes) as well as the rider (reasoning).
32. King and Murray understood this. Instead of shaming or demonizing their opponents, they humanized them and then relentlessly appealed to their humanity.
33. In recent years we’ve seen the rapid rise of a very different form that is based on an effort to unite and mobilize multiple groups to fight against a common enemy.
34. Identifying a common enemy is an effective way to enlarge and motivate your tribe.
35. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.
36. Some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyperactivating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor.
37. Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming. This can engender a sense of “walking on eggshells,” and it teaches students habits of self-censorship.
38. Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible with the educational and research missions of universities, which require free inquiry, dissent, evidence-based argument, and intellectual honesty.
39. Nelson Mandela: “When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.”
40. As Marcus Aurelius advised,“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” (…) All of us must learn to ignore some of the things we see and just carry on with our day.
41. Words that give rise to stress or fear for members of some groups are now often regarded as a form of violence.
42. Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”
43. Cohesive and morally homogeneous groups are prone to witch hunts, particularly when they experience a threat, whether from outside or from within.
44. Witch hunts generally have four properties: they seem to come out of nowhere; they involve charges of crimes against the collective; the offenses that lead to those charges are often trivial or fabricated; and people who know that the accused is innocent keep quiet, or in extreme cases, they join the mob.

    

    Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

45. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”
46. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. “They” must be stopped, at all costs.
47. In physics, as Newton’s law tells us, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction.
48. Many professors say they now teach and speak more cautiously, because one slip or one simple misunderstanding could lead to vilification and even threats from any number of sources.
49. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.
50. iGen [short for “internet generation,” because they are the first generation to grow up with the internet in their pockets] is the first generation that spent its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media.
51. Teens today are spending much more time alone, interacting with screens (…) Devices take us away from people.
52. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.
53. The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression (…) Rates have been rising since 2011, especially for girls.
54. Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV.
55. There are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
56. Some young women now want plastic surgery to make themselves look like they do in their enhanced selfies.
57. Safetyism is likely to make things even worse for students who already struggle with mood disorders.
58. We should all take reasonable precautions to protect our children’s physical safety—for example, by owning a fire extinguisher—but we should not submit to the pull of safetyism (overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risk), which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.
59. Adolescents who spend several hours a day interacting with screens, particularly if they start in their early teen years or younger, have worse mental health outcomes than do adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interaction.
60. Both depression and anxiety cause changes in cognition, including a tendency to see the world as more dangerous and hostile than it really is.
61. So many teens have lost the ability to tolerate distress and uncertainty, and a big reason for that is the way we parent them (Kevin Asworth, clinical director, NW Anxiety Institute in Portland, Oregon).
62. Modern parenting is preventing kids from growing strong and independent (…) Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.
63. Safetyism takes children who are antifragile by nature and turns them into young adults who are more fragile and anxious (…) Overprotection makes them weaker and less resilient later on.
64. Helicopter parenting combined with laws and social norms that make it hard to give kids unsupervised time may be having a negative impact on the mental health and resilience of young people today.
65. Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.”(…) Children, like other mammals, need free play in order to finish the intricate wiring process of neural development.
66. Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society.
67. Free play, according to Peter Gray, is “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”
68. Free play helps children develop the skills of cooperation and dispute resolution that are closely related to the “art of association” upon which democracies depend.
69. Administrators are more likely than professors to think that the way to solve a new campus problem is to create a new office to address the problem (Meanwhile, professors have generally been happy to be released from administrative duties, even as they complain about corporatization.)
70. Overreaction and overregulation are usually the work of people within bureaucratic structures who have developed a mindset commonly known as CYA (Cover Your Ass).
71. The bureaucratic innovation of “bias response” tools may be well intended, but they can have the unintended negative effect of creating an “us versus them” campus climate that results in hypervigilance and reduced trust.
72. Some professors end up concluding that it isn’t worth the risk of having to appear before a bureaucratic panel, so it’s better to just eliminate any material from the syllabus or lecture that could lead to a complaint.
73. As more and more professors shy away from potentially provocative materials and discussion topics, their students miss out on opportunities to develop intellectual antifragility. As a result, they may come to find even more material offensive and require even more protection.
74. Good intentions can sometimes lead to policies that are bad for students.
75. The number of campus administrators has grown more rapidly than the number of professors, and professors have gradually come to play a smaller role in the administration of universities. The result has been a trend toward “corporatization.”
76. Market pressures (…) have encouraged universities to compete on the basis of the amenities they offer, leading them to think of students as customers whom they must please.
77. The proliferation of regulations over time conveys a sense of imminent danger even when there is little or no real threat.
78. Some of the regulations promulgated by administrators restrict freedom of speech, often with highly subjective definitions of key concepts.
79. These rules contribute to an attitude on campus that chills speech, in part by suggesting that freedom of speech can or should be restricted because of some students’ emotional discomfort.
80. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and bad for universities.
81. Any effort to change one part of children’s lives can produce unexpected effects in some other part.
82. Prepare the Child for the Road, Not the Road for the Child.
83. Kids need to develop a normal immune response, rather than an allergic response, to the everyday irritations and provocations of life, including life on the internet.
84. You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults.
85. Kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict.
86. Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month.
87. Trial and error is a slower but usually better teacher than direct instruction.
88. Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting some bumps and bruises.
89. Children need opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk.
90. Help your kids find a community of kids in the neighborhood who come from families that share your commitment to avoid overprotection.
91. Encourage your children to engage in a lot of “productive disagreement.”
92. As psychologist Adam Grant notes, the most creative people grew up in homes full of arguments, yet few parents today teach their children how to argue productively.
93. Learning how to give and take criticism without being hurt is an essential life skill.
94. Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.
95. Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind).
96. Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.
97. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
98. Children and teens who engage in mindfulness practices are better able to calm themselves and be more “present.”
99. Use the “principle of charity.” This is the principle in philosophy and rhetoric of making an effort to interpret other people’s statements in their best or most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.
100. Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility”: the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.
101. Having people around us who are willing to disagree with us is a gift.
102. Discourage the use of the word “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety.
103. A great way for students to learn the skills of civil disagreement is by participating in structured, formal debates.
104. Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos”—its purpose, end, or goal.
105. If the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university.
106. University presidents must make it clear that nobody has the right to prevent a fellow member of the community from attending or hearing a lecture.
107. We suggest that universities add “viewpoint diversity” to their diversity statements and strategies (…) It does commit the university to avoiding political uniformity and orthodoxy.
108. A university devoted to the pursuit of truth must prepare its students for conflict, controversy, and argument.
109. Encourage politeness and empathy without framing issues as micro-aggressions.
110. Most students are not fragile, they are not “snowflakes,” and they are not afraid of ideas.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”

Penguin Press, 2018

352 pp.