Jonathan Haidt

Greg Lukianoff

Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

The Coddling of the American Mind

Gigi V

I’m not American but even I can see that coddling affects the minds of our next generation. I see a lot of dysfunctional and anxious kids so this book really helped me to see how they became that way.

John Manoogian III

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND synthesizes human psychology, cognitive behavioral techniques, educational and parenting trends, current events, and through it all, a way forward. What a beautifully written book.

Pamela Koh

One of the best books of the year - everyone should read this.

Hannah Yang

As a current college student, I think The Coddling of the American Mind should be required reading (despite its unfortunate title, which might turn people away from it or lead to a more combative/ungenerous reading), especially for students to recognize psychological distortions. At the very least, I'd read the Atlantic article that the book grew from. 

CONTEXT:
Here's the problem Haidt and Lukianoff identify (taken from the article):

  there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.

The book is structured in several parts: first, exploring 3 'Great Untruths' that have led to this culture of 'safetyism' and how we got here; second, explaining extreme cases on college campuses that exemplify safetyism; third, identifying 6 reasons that these untruths proliferated; and finally, offering parenting/teaching advice to foster stronger psyches. 

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

A key argument throughout the book is that people are antifragile: we need to be exposed to things that hurt us or make us uncomfortable in order to learn how to handle those things. Our culture has expanded the definition of 'safety' to include emotional safety and increasingly decries any infringement of others' feelings - which leads young people to become increasingly incapable of handling emotional discomfort, which then narrows the scope of experiences that are acceptable.

  "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."

9 common psychological distortions, which cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) seeks to correct:
1. Emotional reasoning: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.
2. Catastrophizing: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely.
3. Overgeneralizing: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident.
4. Dichotomous thinking: Viewing events/people in all-or-nothing terms.
5. Mind reading: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.
6. Labeling: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others.
7. Negative filtering: Focusing almost exclusively on the negatives; seldom noticing positives.
8. Discounting positives: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial.
9. Blaming: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; refusing to take responsibility for changing yourself.

ADDRESSING SOME CONCERNS:
Importantly, I think it's constructive to read this as a self-help book. If you were to take out all of the potentially controversial political ideas in the book, you would still be getting solid advice. Here are my thoughts on a few of the common criticisms I've seen in reviews of this book:

1. Cherry-picking cases; generalizing from a privileged population (middle class, college-educated). While this book does feature extreme cases, I think the authors chose cases that clearly pinpoint the interplay of multiple psychological distortions. These distortions still occur frequently, even if to a lesser degree, in students' day-to-day thinking. If anything, since this book was published and with the continuing exponential rise of social media as a space for political discourse, these problems have become far more prevalent. The book focuses on cases of political polarization, but being able to recognize and reason through these distortions is critical for just... living in a pluralistic society. I've seen plenty of students be privately 'canceled' by people who have never even spoken to them on the basis of rumored individual slights (ex: not returning someone's feelings can subject you to blaming, labeling, negative filtering, dichotomous thinking, etc) - and while it's perfectly fine to dislike someone after a poor interaction or real grievance, this level of avoidance of people you might not like doesn't seem healthy.

2. Naivete: disregarding legitimate safety concerns, CBT is not the answer to everything. Yes, there may be neighborhoods where it is literally unsafe for children to be wandering around alone, making the 'free range kid' character-building concept naive. Haidt and Lukainoff maintain throughout the book that physical safety is important and I think you can reasonably assume that they are only recommending that parents implement their advice to the extent that it is actually physically safe. Similarly, I don't think Haidt and Lukianoff are suggesting that CBT is The Answer to handling trauma or resolving systemic issues/political divides. They are arguing that CBT's practices would make people's regular, day-to-day thinking healthier -- because currently, the way many students think makes them more anxious and suspicious of the world/people around them than their realities merit. There is a difference between being upset by something someone has said and feeling unsafe due to a word choice. 

3. The intent vs impact debate. Haidt and Lukianoff critique concepts such as microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces (on campus). Admittedly, when I first read the section on microaggresions, I was deeply skeptical: I've complained to my friends numerous times about my white professors not being able to remember my name eight weeks into a quarter despite having no issue remembering dozens of white students, and how invalidated that makes me feel. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about this, because I do think microaggressions in aggregate are detrimental to the students who experience them - but I agree that on an individual scale, labeling someone a 'microaggressor' is not fruitful especially if the person's 'offense' was unintentional, and as the authors point out, "there is nothing 'micro' about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry." Similarly, while I think it's important for students to feel safe on campus, they should not feel endangered by ideas they disagree with - the point of college is to grapple with those ideas and in doing so, form a foundation for your own views. Frankly students should feel safe everywhere on campus... which should be a space for intellectual exploration and learning from mistakes in a low-stakes environment. The trend of focusing exclusively on someone's 'impact' (that is, the people receiving/perceiving the action get to judge whether the action was 'harmful' based on their own reaction) has pros and cons, but I agree that personally, internally, I would feel a lot more optimistic about the world and the people in it (and my capacity to influence others) if I recognized that some people say stupid things with no ill intentions rather than clinging to the initial hurt I feel.

There's a lot more to talk about (ex: a lot of people take issue with inviting controversial speakers, and I'm skeptical of the discouragement of thinking about intersectionality) but this review is already far longer than I intended. Point is: I think this book resonated a lot with some of the problems I see in my own (+ others') college experience and in my emotional landscape. Even (and ESPECIALLY!) if you find yourself disagreeing with the ideas in this book, it's an important read.

SOME MORE INTERESTING POINTS:
Besides the general utility of the psychological principles Haidt and Lukianoff discuss, some interesting trends the book talks about:
- Changes in parenting over time! The loss of free play! Seeing how letting kids navigate their own neighborhoods alone transitioned from a prerequisite to being 'ready' for school to a sign of parental neglect was very interesting.
- Disparity in effects of social media on girls vs boys because boys typically express aggression physically (can escape after school) whereas girls use relational tactics/exclusion (inescapable and amplified with social media).
- The idea of the corporatization of college: "even at public universities, 18-year-olds are purchasing what is essentially a luxury product. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to control the experience? [...] Students, accustomed to authoring every facet of their college experience, now want their institutions to mirror their views. [...] For today's students, one might say, speakers are amenities."
- Prior to the era of polarization, partisans were driven to political participation because they were enthusiastic about their own party or candidate -- now, they are more motivated by their hostility towards the opposing side.

Okay that is quite enough from me!! Will continue to think through the ideas that this book has introduced (even and especially the ones that I find less savory) because that is how I prepare - rather than shield - myself for the doubtlessly turbulent future ahead.

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

Reviews