Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. You will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast SI. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to have Jonathan Height on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor Height is a social psychologist at New York University's
Speaker 1: Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations
Speaker 1: of morality and how morality varies across cultures, including the
Speaker 1: cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. Height is the
Speaker 1: author of The Happiness Hypothesis and of the New York
Speaker 1: Times bestseller The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided
Speaker 1: by politics and religion. His third book, with Greg Lukianoff,
Speaker 1: is called The Collbling of the American Mind, How good
Speaker 1: intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
Speaker 1: Thanks for trying with me today, Jonathan. My pleasures got
Speaker 1: Good to see you again. Good to see you too.
Speaker 1: So when we talked around twenty fourteen at one of
Speaker 1: these imagination retreats they're organized with Marty Selligman, you brought
Speaker 1: up some of the zeitgeist was just starting, right And
Speaker 1: in your book I noticed you right, you said surprising
Speaker 1: events began happening on college campuses around twenty thirteen and
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, So it was right around then they were
Speaker 1: having this conversation. That's right. So you know, you and
Speaker 1: I have been in the academy for a while, and
Speaker 1: after a while, you think you understand students. And then suddenly,
Speaker 1: in the twenty thirteen to twenty fourteen academic year, there
Speaker 1: started being some reports about students asking for trigger warnings
Speaker 1: and safe spaces, and the first articles about that appear
Speaker 1: in the New Republic of the New York Times. And
Speaker 1: I started seeing some signs of that in my own teaching,
Speaker 1: and Greg started seeing it. So so it's amazing how
Speaker 1: it seems to come out of nowhere, and at first
Speaker 1: it's only on a few elite campuses, so most people
Speaker 1: didn't see anything of this until Halloween of twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: Many people will have heard about the events at Yale,
Speaker 1: you know, protests around Nicholas Christakis and Erica Christockus. So
Speaker 1: the Academy has been changing very quickly. We don't know
Speaker 1: how extensive this is. We don't know whether things are
Speaker 1: happening at most schools or just the elite schools, but
Speaker 1: it is a kind of a new constellation of moral
Speaker 1: ideas and practices that kind of swept in from like
Speaker 1: not being there at all in twenty twelve to being
Speaker 1: pretty widespread in twenty seventeen. Right, So you call these
Speaker 1: the tumultuous years twenty fifteen to twenty seventeen. Can you
Speaker 1: describe some of these specific incidents that you're referring to
Speaker 1: as tumultuous. Sure, So, you know, the Academy is a
Speaker 1: very special place where from maybe four hundred thirty BC
Speaker 1: until around twenty fourteen, it was good to be provocative.
Speaker 1: You were supposed to be provocative, that a word of praise.
Speaker 1: But beginning around then, people were provocative in the wrong way.
Speaker 1: Found that some students, not most, this is not about
Speaker 1: most students, but there would be some students who would say,
Speaker 1: you know, that is unacceptable, that cannot be set on
Speaker 1: our campus. So the first shoutdown that we know of
Speaker 1: was at Brown University in twenty thirty fall to twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: That's the first I did it one week. Can identify
Speaker 1: where Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was brought in to speak
Speaker 1: in a series that brings in diverse viewpoints, and because
Speaker 1: he was, he didn't I don't think he originated, but
Speaker 1: he was. You know, they used to stop in risk
Speaker 1: police in New York. So, okay, so students wanted to protest,
Speaker 1: that's great, that's fine. But they protested in a way.
Speaker 1: Their goal was to shut down the talk and prevent
Speaker 1: others from hearing. And so that was the first one
Speaker 1: and nothing happened to the students. There was no punishment,
Speaker 1: and that's generally been the rule when students have acted
Speaker 1: as though it's their right to shut down a talk.
Speaker 1: So that's a sort of a very surprise of it.
Speaker 1: It's very contrary to academic norms. Protest is fine, but
Speaker 1: stopping people from hearing, stopping people from speaking. You know,
Speaker 1: we're all liberal in the sense that not left right,
Speaker 1: but in the sense that our culture is based on
Speaker 1: one of free speech, argumentation, free increy, be provocative. If
Speaker 1: you have the arguments to back it up, go for it.
Speaker 1: And so this is a new culture coming in that
Speaker 1: is very antithetical. Now, I don't want to demonize them.
Speaker 1: This is always in pursuit of moral goods, and this
Speaker 1: is the theme of all of my work in the
Speaker 1: Righteous Mind. Bad people aren't divided at all. They have
Speaker 1: no guilt. The bad people are all united, and we
Speaker 1: must all you know how to get them. So you know,
Speaker 1: this is a battle of moral goods. This is not
Speaker 1: a battle of good versus evil. It's a battle of
Speaker 1: different conceptions of the good. But it really washed in
Speaker 1: around twenty fourteen, and then by twenty fifteen Halloween twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen is when it went national. Okay, and so you
Speaker 1: said that you wrote this book with greg Or. You say,
Speaker 1: this book is about education and wisdom and its opposite.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a really interesting framing. And as
Speaker 1: I read the book and I saw clearly how that
Speaker 1: is the how do you define wisdom? So the reason
Speaker 1: why we use the wisdom framing is because my first book,
Speaker 1: it was the Happiness hypothesis, Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom,
Speaker 1: and so I didn't get it. I should have read
Speaker 1: the whole wisdom literature. You know, before I wrote a
Speaker 1: coddling book with Greg, But I was just proceeding straight
Speaker 1: from my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis. So there are
Speaker 1: certain you know, the ancients have all kinds of ideas.
Speaker 1: They had all kinds of ideas about chemistry that are worthless,
Speaker 1: and they had all kinds of ideas about biology that
Speaker 1: are garbage. They had all kinds of ideas about consciousness
Speaker 1: that are amazing, and all kinds of ideas about relationships
Speaker 1: and hypocrisy and morality or immoralism that are time tested
Speaker 1: and that are the wisest things that anyone has ever said,
Speaker 1: because there's been a filter. You know, things only get
Speaker 1: passed down to us from Marcus Aurelius and Buddha because
Speaker 1: those were ones that really fit with the human mind.
Speaker 1: So that's what I mean by wisdom. There are certain
Speaker 1: psychological ideas that are deeply true psychologically and are deeply conducive,
Speaker 1: power fully conducive to living a life of happiness, flourishing, engagement,
Speaker 1: and virtue. So let me see. Here's okay. So I'm
Speaker 1: pulling out the Happiness Hypothesis so I'll read, well, even
Speaker 1: I met my dead. Yeah. So here are three of
Speaker 1: the chapters, and these become the three Great untruth. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like if campus administrators and students had
Speaker 1: read the happiness hypothesis and then said, hey, let's do
Speaker 1: everything the opposite. Okay, that's where we would be on campus.
Speaker 1: And that's where we are on campus. So all right,
Speaker 1: Chapter two, Changing your Mind, Page twenty three. Here's an
Speaker 1: opening quote. The whole universe is change, and life itself
Speaker 1: is but what you deem it that is. And here's Buddha.
Speaker 1: So it's a great truth. Buddhas is the same thing.
Speaker 1: What we are today comes from our thoughts of tomorrow,
Speaker 1: and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our
Speaker 1: life is the creation of our minds. And this leads
Speaker 1: right into a discussion of cognitive therapy. So if you feel,
Speaker 1: if you know, if some speaker is going to come
Speaker 1: to campus and question whether we should have open borders,
Speaker 1: let's say, and you find that threatening, you find that offensive,
Speaker 1: and you find that an attack on you and your friends,
Speaker 1: well you could consult the stoics and you could say, hmm,
Speaker 1: how am I appraising this? Is this really a threat
Speaker 1: to me? Is this you know? Maybe he has a
Speaker 1: reason for zor let me be curious. There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of ways you could approach this event. But if students
Speaker 1: are encouraged to search for microaggressions to believe that their
Speaker 1: experience must not be invalidated. So this is a new
Speaker 1: phrase from the last two years. Not just that a
Speaker 1: speaker or a person or an idea is invalidating my opinion,
Speaker 1: but if that speaker were to come to campus, he
Speaker 1: would invalidate my existence. Now that's a really extreme appraisal.
Speaker 1: If we care about our students' mental health, should we
Speaker 1: be teaching them the stoics and saying, here, why don't
Speaker 1: you try some different appraisals that will be less self
Speaker 1: destructive and less irrational. Or should we say, if you
Speaker 1: feel even a little glimmer of offense, you've been a
Speaker 1: victim of aggression and something needs to be done. So
Speaker 1: that's what we mean by wisdom and its opposite. Many
Speaker 1: campus practices directly contradict the wisdom of the ancients and
Speaker 1: instantiate practices that will link students into ways of thinking
Speaker 1: that we know are going to make them more anxious
Speaker 1: and depressed, and that is in line with the modern
Speaker 1: psychological literature. Thank goodness for you, because he said you
Speaker 1: probably should have been hit. But actually it's very consistent.
Speaker 1: Especially you know, like how do you define wisdom, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, the cognitive there's different components of wisdom, but
Speaker 1: it's very consistent where you're describing, for with the cognitive
Speaker 1: wisdom component, which in essence of that is the ability
Speaker 1: to hold very diverse viewpoints within your working memory at
Speaker 1: one time without prejudgment and also kind of accepting the
Speaker 1: inherent paradoxes of existence. So I believe there is an
Speaker 1: existential element of that where you kind of recognize good
Speaker 1: and evil. Its dichotomy. Transcendence to me is a big
Speaker 1: part of the cognitive wisdom. This is wonderful. What's the
Speaker 1: opposite of your killing me? This is like your health
Speaker 1: is like, oh I wish this is perfect because we'll
Speaker 1: probably get to this later. But you know, my big
Speaker 1: thing that I'm trying to do on campus, I start
Speaker 1: co founded this organization, Heterodox Academy, because we think a
Speaker 1: lot of us professors think that you actually need viewpoint
Speaker 1: diversity to get our jobs done. You need to see
Speaker 1: things from different perspectives, and we need to teach our
Speaker 1: students to take different perspectives. So let me get this down.
Speaker 1: Holding multiple perspectives. Is this the bald view? Which which
Speaker 1: theorists are you talking about? Whohould I be reading on wisdoms? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: Baltus has done a really good analysis. I can send
Speaker 1: you a good review paper and I will also put
Speaker 1: it in the show notes. One that I personally prefer,
Speaker 1: which is quite good and it does rely a little
Speaker 1: bit on Baltas, but other research as well, But there
Speaker 1: you go. So we have a special obligation on campus
Speaker 1: to expose our students to divergent views, to differing views,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're going to hate those views, but they
Speaker 1: should not shout them down or shut them down and
Speaker 1: use intimidation. They should actually go to the talk. So
Speaker 1: this is since I feel like there's such great concordance here,
Speaker 1: I actually want to read to you my favorite definition
Speaker 1: of wisdom in its entirety. So I really like this
Speaker 1: definition of whise people by clinical psychologist Deodre Kramer. She
Speaker 1: rates wise people have learned to view the positive and
Speaker 1: negative and synthesize them to create a more human, more
Speaker 1: integrated sense of self in all its fragility and vulnerability.
Speaker 1: This allows for openness, non defensive, and less judgmentalism as well.
Speaker 1: As a catalyzing influence of negative emotions. Wise people are
Speaker 1: not pollyannish. They are willing to explore the shadow side
Speaker 1: of life and are capable of expressing the wide array
Speaker 1: of human emotions in such a way as to derive meaning.
Speaker 1: They seem first to embrace and then transcend self concerns
Speaker 1: to integrate their capacity for introspection with a deep and
Speaker 1: abiding concern for human relationships and generative concern for others.
Speaker 1: The wise person also has the capacity to interact with
Speaker 1: others in a way that does not put them on
Speaker 1: the defensive. That's gorgeous. Yeah, please do send that to me.
Speaker 1: I will at Heterox Academy. We're getting very interested in
Speaker 1: intellectual humility, and there are many aspects of our current
Speaker 1: politics and culture war that push against humility and towards certainty.
Speaker 1: So this is a very helpful definition of wisdom. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Sure so. I really like this paper you wrote with
Speaker 1: Sarah al Jo called moral amplification and the Emotions that
Speaker 1: attach us to Saints and Demons. So the wise person
Speaker 1: wouldn't have this stark difference between you know, I'm the angel,
Speaker 1: everyone else's a demon, right, Yeah, exactly, And that's great untruth.
Speaker 1: Number three in our book is life is a battle
Speaker 1: between good people and evil people. We are so prone
Speaker 1: to that belief. You don't have to teach it. It's
Speaker 1: very easy to ramp it up. And what we should
Speaker 1: be doing on campus is not ramping it up. We
Speaker 1: should be toning it down. This idea of moral amplification
Speaker 1: is really I mean, I found it really profound. You know,
Speaker 1: this argument that small differences between groups can get amplified
Speaker 1: into the perception of major and unbridgable differences. I don't
Speaker 1: think that point is made often enough, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we've kind of you know, we have various things
Speaker 1: tweedled versus tweedled dumb. You know, we kind of know
Speaker 1: that that can happen. But you know, to the people
Speaker 1: doing it, it doesn't seem small at all. It seems
Speaker 1: like it's a matter of life or death. And then
Speaker 1: there's this sense of like or this fundamental need to
Speaker 1: create heroes, right or to create saints, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that. You know, the liberals and conservatives, they each
Speaker 1: have their own hero, you know, their own sort of
Speaker 1: symbolic notion of their hero. And by propping up you're
Speaker 1: going exaggerating these differences right when both sides are propping
Speaker 1: up their most exaggerated version, not even further. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. So I've been involved in cultural psychology, which
Speaker 1: is sort of refounded by Richard Schwader in the eighties,
Speaker 1: and then also course positive psychology with you, which is
Speaker 1: cores started by or start by Marty Seligman and Mike
Speaker 1: Chicks and me High. But something I love about cultural
Speaker 1: psychology is you look at the mind, or you look
Speaker 1: at how people think about mind, You look at their
Speaker 1: psychological ideas in different cultures, and then you often can
Speaker 1: now begin to see them in our own. So for me,
Speaker 1: doing my postdoc in India and studying the concept of
Speaker 1: purity and pollution led me to thinking about sanctity and
Speaker 1: sacrilege and blasphemy and apostasy on all these religious words.
Speaker 1: And we might think, yeah, you know that was those
Speaker 1: were all really important back in the fifteenth century and
Speaker 1: the Inquisition, but you know, now that we're in a
Speaker 1: sector society, it doesn't happen anymore. But that's not true
Speaker 1: at all. The psychology is ancient. Then we had a
Speaker 1: couple thousand years where we had big gods, but you know,
Speaker 1: big gods are only a few thousand years old, and
Speaker 1: now that you know, they might be less common in
Speaker 1: the future. Humans have been religious for fifty one hundred,
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand years, we don't know, and so I
Speaker 1: think we're seeing a lot of these concepts. What's happening
Speaker 1: often on campus is blasphemy laws. So for example, it's
Speaker 1: very clear, you know, so for example, Charles Murray's book
Speaker 1: The Bell Curve, it certainly committed blasphemy in that he
Speaker 1: claimed that there were genetic differences and that was part
Speaker 1: there could be. He said, that's possible, that's right. He
Speaker 1: said that he's actually different. Yeah, you know, you're right, right,
Speaker 1: So he's often misquoted. Now, what he said was very
Speaker 1: provocative and controversial, and that is you know that we
Speaker 1: used to think was appropriate in the academy. But what's
Speaker 1: happened is because he committed blasphemy, he is banned, at
Speaker 1: least in some people's minds. If he were to come
Speaker 1: on campus and speak about the coming apart of the
Speaker 1: working class in the upper class. That's what he was
Speaker 1: going to do at Middlebury College. He was coming to
Speaker 1: speak about what was possibly the most important issue of
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen election, which is why is the white
Speaker 1: working class so disaffected and so angry. But that was blasphemy,
Speaker 1: not that he was going to say anything blasphemous, but
Speaker 1: because he was permanently marked as a blasphemer. And so
Speaker 1: I think you can understand the reaction to Charles Murray
Speaker 1: if you resurrect or understand these ancient notions of purity, pollution, sanctity, taboo, blasphemy, apostasy.
Speaker 1: Could you particularly say, like what the left, which of
Speaker 1: those that you just mentioned do the left tender gravitudors
Speaker 1: and which ones do the right ten of gravitude? Sure?
Speaker 1: So moral Foundation's theory. This is my main work in
Speaker 1: moral psychology, done with with Jesse Graham, Pete Dittosena Koleva,
Speaker 1: Matt Motel, and Robbie Eyer. We surveyed moral concepts and
Speaker 1: moral codes and moral texts from around the world, Stone
Speaker 1: creat Joseph as well at Chicago and found that even
Speaker 1: though things vary, like when you look, you know, when
Speaker 1: I first read the Book of Leviticus and read all
Speaker 1: those purity and pollution taboo, it was the logic of
Speaker 1: you know, you know, if a woman gives birth to
Speaker 1: a boy, she must not touch sacred objects for four weeks,
Speaker 1: but if it's a girl, it's eight weeks. Like this
Speaker 1: is a weird kind of logic of disgust and contamination.
Speaker 1: And then I read all these ethnographies from other cultures
Speaker 1: and they had a very similar kind of logic to
Speaker 1: These were cultures that had never met, never associated. So
Speaker 1: the mind clearly has in it kind of an infrastructure,
Speaker 1: kind of a ready to build a set of understandings.
Speaker 1: And so moral foundations theory is about the six main
Speaker 1: taste buds of the moral sense or foundations upon which
Speaker 1: moralities build. So those are number one, care and compassion,
Speaker 1: which everybody has, but progressive morality builds a lot on
Speaker 1: if you go to occupy what to occupy Wall Street?
Speaker 1: A lot? It was about love and care and compassion.
Speaker 1: Two fairness, fairness, reciprocity, tit for tat, reciprocal, altruism, cheating.
Speaker 1: Clearly we're predisposed to think in that way. Everybody has that,
Speaker 1: But progressives care a little more about equality and conservatives
Speaker 1: care more about proportionality. Three liberty versus oppression. Everybody hates oppression.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants to be free. Left and right. There different,
Speaker 1: mostly just in terms of who they think is the oppressor.
Speaker 1: So those three are you know, everybody on the left
Speaker 1: and the right builds on a lot. Then there are
Speaker 1: three that everyone has individually, but people on the right
Speaker 1: or moralities on the right, tend to build a lot
Speaker 1: more on. So number four is group loyalty. Now, of
Speaker 1: course the left can do it against the right, but
Speaker 1: in general people on the right go in more for
Speaker 1: the idea you know, my country right or wrong. You know, teams, sports, raw, raw,
Speaker 1: school spirit, and the left is a little more wary
Speaker 1: of racism, exclusion, walls, borders. The fifth is authority versus subversion,
Speaker 1: And here is social conservatives, not libertarians at all, but
Speaker 1: social conservatives really go in for the idea that we
Speaker 1: have to have order, structure, tradition is helpful. And this
Speaker 1: is the sort of Edmund Burke conservatism. Thomas Soel called
Speaker 1: it the constrained vision of human nature. We need constraints.
Speaker 1: And the last foundation is sanctity versus degradation. And that's
Speaker 1: all the stuff about, like why do so many moral
Speaker 1: codes have to do with the body and food and
Speaker 1: death and lesions and physical stuff. And this is the
Speaker 1: work I did with Paul Rosen at Penn was so
Speaker 1: lucky to go to Pen for grad school. And then
Speaker 1: I started looking at morality and Paul Rosen happened to
Speaker 1: be that the world's expert in discuss so there too.
Speaker 1: I mean, the left does it sometimes, like there's a
Speaker 1: kind of a yoga morality where they talk a lot
Speaker 1: about chakras and purity and anti GMO stuff. So the
Speaker 1: left do it. But in general, you know, I think
Speaker 1: about it as like there's a dimension from Leon Cass
Speaker 1: who said shallow are the souls who've forgotten how to
Speaker 1: shut or he's a conservative bioethesist, and Peter Singer who
Speaker 1: sets sanctity to zero. None of that stuff matters. All
Speaker 1: that matters is whether conscious sentient beings have suffered. So
Speaker 1: that is sort of the landscape the six foundations that
Speaker 1: we have to work with when cultures build moralities. Good
Speaker 1: thanks for explaining that. So, in building on your work,
Speaker 1: I came across Jeremy Freimer's work when I was trying
Speaker 1: to do a sort of literature review of extensions of
Speaker 1: your theory in the Political demean and I found something
Speaker 1: I thought was really interesting. He found that when it
Speaker 1: comes to ratings of moral exemplars both the globals and conservatives.
Speaker 1: There is agreement there on three in particular, three characteristics
Speaker 1: that are included in their wayhing or their judgment or perception.
Speaker 1: What biz are? Yeah, sure, care, fairness, and purity. And
Speaker 1: then the distinctions is that for liberals promoting authority, negatively
Speaker 1: predictive moral judgments and purity and authority were the major
Speaker 1: grounds for political disagreement. Okay, but the researchers argue that
Speaker 1: the similarities outweigh the differences. So I think that is
Speaker 1: interesting as well to discuss that there are at least
Speaker 1: there's a common humanity to some degree. And if your
Speaker 1: group is going to elevate a hero, you're going to
Speaker 1: activate all kinds of ideas of sacredness. So it's not
Speaker 1: that people on the left can't do sacredness, it's that
Speaker 1: they use it less. It's a less preferred one. But sure,
Speaker 1: you know, a hero here on the left to hero
Speaker 1: on the right, most of it is going to be
Speaker 1: similar psychology. But you know, what I've noticed, having studied
Speaker 1: morality since I was at PEN in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: is that the examples on the left tend to be
Speaker 1: people who fight racist and that's like the most common thing,
Speaker 1: like moralities about fighting racism. It will stand up against
Speaker 1: racist bullies and you know that does that is heroism.
Speaker 1: But it just seems to draw from a kind of
Speaker 1: a narrow band. So what is a give me an
Speaker 1: example of a form of activism that is broader than
Speaker 1: fighting for racism. I just mean, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: hold up examples, I would guess. So in academic psychology,
Speaker 1: that's almost all been from the let everybody's on the left.
Speaker 1: But character development, there's a lot of people who go
Speaker 1: to study or work on character education, and that tends
Speaker 1: to flourish in private schools, Catholic schools. So Christians, when
Speaker 1: they educate from morality, they tend to have a much
Speaker 1: broader palette of virtues, and they tend to have, you know,
Speaker 1: seventeen different virtues. That's it's just the virtues that we're
Speaker 1: consciously trying to instill in our kids are somewhat different.
Speaker 1: So Freimer also found that people on both sides of
Speaker 1: the political divide anticipated that hearing from the other side
Speaker 1: would induce cognitive dissonance and would require a great effort,
Speaker 1: caused frustration an undermine a sense of shared reality with
Speaker 1: a person expressing disparate views, in other words, would damage
Speaker 1: their relationship. So there does seem to be a tension
Speaker 1: here between wanting to get along and wanting to arrive
Speaker 1: at sort of like a truth, a sort of shared
Speaker 1: universal or some sort of transcending truth. Usually those are
Speaker 1: not intention because who is it that they want to
Speaker 1: get along with. They don't want to get along with
Speaker 1: people on the other side. The right mind is based
Speaker 1: on three ideas. The third of the ideas it is
Speaker 1: morality binds and blinds. I'm a total Dirk Him. I
Speaker 1: fell in love with a mail Dirk Him in bad
Speaker 1: school when I read his book Suicide and in Moral Education,
Speaker 1: and it just taught me to see groups have needs,
Speaker 1: and groups need to do something to stick together, to
Speaker 1: bind themselves together. Otherwise they're prone to dissipate. And so
Speaker 1: having a common enemy and bashing them and talking about
Speaker 1: how evil they are is a really good thing to do.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, this is why social media is
Speaker 1: making such a mess of our society, because suddenly social
Speaker 1: media puts us into conversation in ways that allow us
Speaker 1: to do this thirty times a day. We can join
Speaker 1: together to bash how evil the other side is, and
Speaker 1: every day each of us sees between five and one
Speaker 1: hundred examples of how unbelievably horrible the other side is,
Speaker 1: and that allows us to bond together over what, you know,
Speaker 1: what Nazis or subversive communists or whatever the word is
Speaker 1: they are. So it seems like, you know, there are
Speaker 1: multiple motives why each side wants to avoid exposure to
Speaker 1: another person's opinion opinion that radically, multiple reasons. One might
Speaker 1: be a degradation of social status within your group, and
Speaker 1: it seems like that's what we're seeing playing out a
Speaker 1: lot on Twitter. Yes, if you think about, you think
Speaker 1: about for those of you, those listeners who are on
Speaker 1: Twitter or Facebook, you know, when you think about when
Speaker 1: do you press like? Why do you press like on
Speaker 1: a post? And it isn't just a pure readout of
Speaker 1: what you liked and dislike, And a lot of it
Speaker 1: is very strategic. I find that, you know, some like
Speaker 1: on Twitter, people will there are some people who will
Speaker 1: look into my likes, or they'll look into who I follow.
Speaker 1: At the point, he follows a right winger, he follows
Speaker 1: an all right person. But yeah, I study morality. I
Speaker 1: follow all kinds of people from all over the place.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's like you've got these little you know,
Speaker 1: Shetland sheep dogs out there nipping at your heels if
Speaker 1: you don't conform. I love something that you endorsed that
Speaker 1: someone else said. I can't remember who the other person
Speaker 1: was and said it, but that we should probably delete
Speaker 1: old backlogs every year or so or something like that,
Speaker 1: because what's the point, right, Yeah, yeah, Twitter, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a program called tweet Delete I think, which I'm gonna.
Speaker 1: I'm going to It's on my list. You know, you
Speaker 1: can say it for any amount of time, so I
Speaker 1: think i'll I mean, I think it's good to have
Speaker 1: your tweets around for a few weeks or months because
Speaker 1: people might still be thinking about, oh I saw a
Speaker 1: tweet from heyight or you know whatever, what is that?
Speaker 1: But what I found is that the only people who
Speaker 1: go back more than a few months are people writing
Speaker 1: a smear piece or a hit piece. And so there's
Speaker 1: a professor MYU has written two of those on me,
Speaker 1: And what she does is she goes back through all
Speaker 1: my old tweets and she'll find something which is perfectly innocuous,
Speaker 1: but she'll then present it in a way to make
Speaker 1: me seem as though I favored torture or something like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, so there are a lot of we live
Speaker 1: in a it's kind of what's it like A we
Speaker 1: can be prosecutors all the time. Now you can prosecute
Speaker 1: our case. And especially because norms change so quickly, So
Speaker 1: somebody might use a word three years ago that is
Speaker 1: no longer a word that you should use. But if
Speaker 1: that word is on your Twitter profile for your life,
Speaker 1: you know there could be a mob against you in
Speaker 1: five or ten years. So you know why bother like,
Speaker 1: who are we benefited by leaving five year old tweets up?
Speaker 1: We're benefiting our opposition just yeah, well the few people
Speaker 1: who are playing the game. Yeah. Absolutely, So I thought
Speaker 1: that was a really excellent point. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: another great untruth. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker? Yep?
Speaker 1: Can you link that to cognitive behavior therapy as well
Speaker 1: when you explain it? Yes, So the key idea there
Speaker 1: is anti fragility. It's a wonderful, wonderful idea. The word
Speaker 1: was coined by nasim Ta Lead precisely because there was
Speaker 1: no word in English language for it. So we open
Speaker 1: the book with this, So we open chapter one with this,
Speaker 1: and it's just such a powerful idea once you get
Speaker 1: it that there are many things in the world that
Speaker 1: are fragile. So a glass is fragile, so you should
Speaker 1: protect it, and don't let your kids play with your
Speaker 1: toddlers play with a glass. A plastic cup is resilient.
Speaker 1: They can play with a plastic cup because if they
Speaker 1: drop it, it it won't break. But there's no cup that
Speaker 1: gets better if they drop it. There's no That just
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. And what TALEV was saying is
Speaker 1: there are a few things in our world that are
Speaker 1: like that. There are a few things in our world
Speaker 1: that have to be dropped. They can't wire up, they
Speaker 1: can't work unless you drop them periodically. And so the
Speaker 1: immune system is the best example. The immune system is
Speaker 1: an open system. You know, it's a miraculous product of evolution,
Speaker 1: but it's only partly finished, and it requires exposure to
Speaker 1: all kinds of bacteria, viruses. It turns out we even
Speaker 1: need to be exposed to worms. Our evolution had a
Speaker 1: lot of intestinal worms in it, and because we don't
Speaker 1: get worms anymore, our immune systems aren't really optimal anymore.
Speaker 1: And that's why we get certain autoimmune diseases. An the
Speaker 1: point is, if you think you're doing your kids a
Speaker 1: favor by washing everything with antibacterial wipes and keeping them
Speaker 1: safe from dirtant germs, you're not. You're exposing that you're
Speaker 1: weakening their immune system. It's anti fragile and you can't
Speaker 1: do or protect it. And Telleb specifically says, this is
Speaker 1: what we do with kids, that kids' minds, kids, social life,
Speaker 1: kid's sense of strength or social confidence is anti fragile.
Speaker 1: You know, if you had the option of protecting your
Speaker 1: kid till she was eighteen, and you said, my kid,
Speaker 1: I don't want her ever to be excluded, that would
Speaker 1: be so painful. I don't want her ever to be teased.
Speaker 1: I don't want her ever to be left out insulted.
Speaker 1: So would you do that? Would you give your kid
Speaker 1: blanket protection to the age of eighteen and then sent
Speaker 1: her off to college? Of course, not, well, certain things
Speaker 1: I would want to protect them from, like physical violence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that's absolutely so. Anti fragile means that we
Speaker 1: grow from small things, and it's the small things that
Speaker 1: we must not deprive the kids of, and the small
Speaker 1: things lead them to be able to take on bigger things.
Speaker 1: So of course, if I could protect my kids from
Speaker 1: being raped or mugged, or work or being in a
Speaker 1: car that nothing good happens for being a car accident,
Speaker 1: I would. So when Nietzsche said what doesn't kill me
Speaker 1: makes me stronger, he was aware that he was anti fragile.
Speaker 1: There's a great quote from not Confucius Dementius that you know,
Speaker 1: when Heaven wants to strengthen a man or harden him
Speaker 1: for a job, he will put him to hunger and
Speaker 1: test and test his bones. And you know, Heaven will
Speaker 1: test him and make things hard for him to prepare
Speaker 1: him for a challenge. So this is ancient wisdom. And
Speaker 1: what's happened just in the last few years is we've
Speaker 1: developed this idea that kids are fragile, and if they
Speaker 1: are exposed to teasing or insults, they will they will
Speaker 1: be damaged by them. In fact, the image that we're
Speaker 1: given from the microaggression theorist is death by a thousand
Speaker 1: paper cuts. So even if each one is small, they
Speaker 1: add up. Of course, if you actually get repeated paper cuts,
Speaker 1: he'd get a callous and you'd stop getting paper cuts.
Speaker 1: That's the way our skin is designed, so it's bad psychology.
Speaker 1: I'd rather get a callous from practicing cello. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: exactly that's right. Yeah, our skin gets callous. Our skin
Speaker 1: is anti fragile, and we've forgotten that. And again, the
Speaker 1: subtitle of the book is how good intentions and bad
Speaker 1: ideas are setting up a generation for failure? Good? Can
Speaker 1: I riff off that good intentions part? Because I keep
Speaker 1: getting stuck with something and I wanted to discuss it
Speaker 1: with you. I want to know, as a professor, if
Speaker 1: I have students who are generally concerned about an injustice
Speaker 1: that they're perceiving on their campus, They're generally concerned about
Speaker 1: something that they may have happened to them that is
Speaker 1: generally horrible, a horrible thing, what do you recommend we
Speaker 1: can do as professors? And then, of course there's implication
Speaker 1: for parents as well, to help them channel in the
Speaker 1: most productive way that still allows them to maybe make
Speaker 1: the world a better place, but also do it in
Speaker 1: a way that also doesn't protect them from learning and growth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there are many options in those cases. Let's start
Speaker 1: with some that are just a really bad idea. So
Speaker 1: suppose somebody says something to you that you think it's
Speaker 1: not clear. I mean, it's not hostile, but you know,
Speaker 1: you think that they were referring to your race or
Speaker 1: your gender or something like that. So the first thing
Speaker 1: is you have to decide how to set your own
Speaker 1: sensitivity and how much do you want to react to things.
Speaker 1: Do you want to pick your battles, you want more battles,
Speaker 1: So you have to decide now. Of course, if somebody
Speaker 1: doesn't truly aggressive, hostile, exclusionary, that's another matter. But I'm
Speaker 1: talking about college campuses are generally incredibly progressive places where
Speaker 1: most people are very welcoming. So I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: black students, for example, don't face clear indignities. Of course
Speaker 1: they do, and your question is what should they do
Speaker 1: about it? So the first is pick your battles and
Speaker 1: be sure you're right, and don't waste your time on
Speaker 1: trivial things and things where you might actually be misinterpreting.
Speaker 1: That's the first thing. So cognitive therapy can really help
Speaker 1: you with that, whereas microaggression training is likely to hurt.
Speaker 1: It's but you really don't want to turn your immune
Speaker 1: system or your nervous system over to other people so
Speaker 1: that they get to decide when you get upset. That's
Speaker 1: the first thing. Let's suppose it is truly an active racist.
Speaker 1: Let's suppose it is something that you don't want to
Speaker 1: You shouldn't just look away or ignore or brush off.
Speaker 1: What should you do? Here's another bad thing. Social media
Speaker 1: encourages you to get points by publicizing it and shaming
Speaker 1: the person and trying to get people to join you. Now,
Speaker 1: that can be effective in certain ways, but think about
Speaker 1: what kind of society you want to live in. Do
Speaker 1: we want a society which we all settle things by
Speaker 1: mutual shaming. That's where we're going. That's called call out culture.
Speaker 1: It's bad for everyone. I talk to students about Everybody
Speaker 1: hates it. I talk at universities. I say, I describe
Speaker 1: call out culture. How many of you have that? You
Speaker 1: think you have that here at your school? All hands
Speaker 1: go up, So you know, even if you can justify it,
Speaker 1: the net effect is terrible for everybody. So there are
Speaker 1: many other things one can do. If it's an individual
Speaker 1: who did something, sometimes it could be much more effective
Speaker 1: to talk to them privately. I recommend that everybody read
Speaker 1: Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Speaker 1: It is full of brilliant social psychology when which people
Speaker 1: resolve conflicts and they often turn enemies into friends. Now
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you need to do that, but I'm
Speaker 1: saying in many cases is if you go to a
Speaker 1: person privately and you do it in a skillful way,
Speaker 1: they will actually be embarrassed or ashamed, they will apologize,
Speaker 1: and you actually make the world a better place. You
Speaker 1: make that person a better person, and you gain possibly
Speaker 1: a friend. Whereas if you attack them publicly, you almost
Speaker 1: never will bring them to your way. They'll feel they'll
Speaker 1: have their defenses, they'll have their excuses, they'll think they've
Speaker 1: been unjustly called a racist, and now they're can be
Speaker 1: more attracted to alt right websites and rants about the
Speaker 1: way that the left is always accusing everybody of rating system.
Speaker 1: So you have to decide how much do you want
Speaker 1: to get upset about this, how do you want to
Speaker 1: handle this? And do you want to just attack someone
Speaker 1: in a way that might feel good but it is
Speaker 1: likely to just make them dig in good. I like
Speaker 1: those suggestions because we're in a position where we can
Speaker 1: really help students. What I like about your book is
Speaker 1: that it really looks at what are the most effective
Speaker 1: strategies from a wide varied perspectives, not only ancient wisdom
Speaker 1: but also modern clinical psychology. Right, so kind of ground
Speaker 1: on yourself in that's right. This our book is not
Speaker 1: about blaming. We're not, you know, attacking sjw's. We don't
Speaker 1: mention sjw's. Our book is trying to apply psychology, and
Speaker 1: I would even say positive, mostly positive psychology, to understand
Speaker 1: how to flourish in college and to recognize that we're
Speaker 1: doing a lot of things for moralistic reasons that are
Speaker 1: preventing students from flourishing in college, which will have massive
Speaker 1: negative ramifications for businesses that hire them and for the
Speaker 1: democracy in which they vote. Oh there, I just ran
Speaker 1: out of there. No but to finish this up. Let
Speaker 1: me just read this quote. This is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite quotes in the book. So Van Jones, who was
Speaker 1: Obama's you know, green Energies or I think it was,
Speaker 1: He was invited to speak at the University of Chicago
Speaker 1: by David Axelrod, who is, you know, a political consultant
Speaker 1: in an Obama campaign, and I mean Axlerod runs a
Speaker 1: political talk show at Chicago, and they had invited in
Speaker 1: I think Skrey Lewandowski, you know, worked I was a
Speaker 1: Trump person, so he worked on Trump's campaign or something.
Speaker 1: At any rate, students protested, they wanted to shut it down.
Speaker 1: I don't think the really tried, but there was some
Speaker 1: talk about shutting it down, and a lot of talk
Speaker 1: about what should be the response of Chicago's students if
Speaker 1: somebody associated with the Trump presidency comes to speak at
Speaker 1: the university, what should they do? And so Axelrod asks
Speaker 1: Van Jones what he thinks they should do, and Jones says,
Speaker 1: and I've got to quote it because it's so brilliant.
Speaker 1: Jones says, there are two ideas about safe spaces. One
Speaker 1: is a very good idea. One's a terrible idea. The
Speaker 1: idea being physically safe on campus, not being subjected to
Speaker 1: sexual harassment, physical abuse, being targeted, you're an N word
Speaker 1: or whatever. I'm fine with that. But there's another view
Speaker 1: that is now ascended, which I think is a horrible view,
Speaker 1: which is I need to be safe ideologically, I need
Speaker 1: to be safe emotionally, and if I don't feel safe,
Speaker 1: it's a problem for everybody else, including the university administration.
Speaker 1: Meaning I'm a victim of microaggression. I'm going to call
Speaker 1: it into the bias response team. I'm going to file charges,
Speaker 1: and some grown up has to do something to punish
Speaker 1: the person who offended me. And Van Jones is saying,
Speaker 1: this is a terrible idea. But here's the kicker. Here's
Speaker 1: where he really gets the anti fragility, he gets the
Speaker 1: psychology right. Here's what he says. And here he's really
Speaker 1: talking to progressive college students. How can progressive students at
Speaker 1: Chicago become better progressives? How can they become more effective politically?
Speaker 1: Here's what he says. Quote, I don't want you to
Speaker 1: be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally.
Speaker 1: I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some
Speaker 1: boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to take all the weights out of the gym.
Speaker 1: That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. Boom, Yes,
Speaker 1: drop the mic right at that point. Right. That's so
Speaker 1: you know that advice, I mean that should be handed
Speaker 1: on a car to every incoming student. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: something else that should be taught to all incoming students
Speaker 1: is of course, in positive psychology or something. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could, you know, try to guess the topic that
Speaker 1: when I covered in my core I get the most
Speaker 1: letters from students at the end of the course saying
Speaker 1: that transformed my life. What do you think it is?
Speaker 1: The adversity class, the post traumatic growth lecture and resiliency lecture.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing that's interesting about that. But I'm shocked
Speaker 1: every semester that this happens, that this is such a
Speaker 1: revelation to students, and it just it might speak to
Speaker 1: the fact that they're getting such different messages outside of
Speaker 1: that course exactly, because what I teach in that lecture
Speaker 1: is that you know, Bonano's research, which was the precursor
Speaker 1: to the postramatic growth research, but showing that, wow, look
Speaker 1: at the human capacity for resiliency is far underrated, right
Speaker 1: I mean, And so when I teach out to students
Speaker 1: and then they start to realize, wow, like I actually
Speaker 1: am capable of not only bouncing back, but becoming stronger
Speaker 1: as you use the word strength strong, it's like a
Speaker 1: revelation to students. That's right. What we're doing to kids
Speaker 1: by protecting them is I think tantamount to child abuse. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it's well intended, it's different. But I've recently begun doing
Speaker 1: this little thought experiment. Let me just try it on you.
Speaker 1: I haven't really said this publicly. Okay, so let's imagine.
Speaker 1: Let's imagine. You know, so in Americans, American education, we've
Speaker 1: had this idea that if we push things to earlier grades,
Speaker 1: kids will learn it better. So if we start, you know,
Speaker 1: because kids didn't used to start reading until first grade.
Speaker 1: You know, in Finland, they don't start really academic stuff
Speaker 1: till until age seven, but we've changed kindergarten even preschool
Speaker 1: to do academic stuff. Do you think that makes kids smarter?
Speaker 1: Do you think that making them start something early means
Speaker 1: that they'll go further in it with their whole life? No?
Speaker 1: I mean all the research I've shown, there's like this
Speaker 1: window where it's better to like face adversity first. Right,
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right. They're sensitive exactly. There's sensitive periods,
Speaker 1: and so if you push a skill to before the
Speaker 1: sensitive period, there's no name, and what you're doing is
Speaker 1: you're pushing out other things. Okay, so that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Now let's go the other way. Suppose we said, hmm,
Speaker 1: let's not let kids read until they're fourteen. It's just,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't want their brains to just, for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, no reading until you're fourteen, and then at
Speaker 1: fourteen we teach them to read. What do you think,
Speaker 1: do you think they'd be as good at reading or
Speaker 1: do you think that maybe they'd be permanently damaged in
Speaker 1: their reading abilities? Well, I'm thinking that through. I don't
Speaker 1: think either option. I think there's like a nuanced anser there.
Speaker 1: I don't think they'd be permanently damaged, but I think
Speaker 1: there would be at a disadvantage. Yeah, on average, on average, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because the windows closed. But this was all preliminary
Speaker 1: to this. Throughout history and certainly in American history. Up
Speaker 1: until the early nineteen nineties, kids went outside to play,
Speaker 1: they played with other kids, then they came home. That's
Speaker 1: the way it always was until the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: It's no longer that way. So what if we and
Speaker 1: typically at age seven plus or minus. In fact, all
Speaker 1: over the world, I used to study street kids all
Speaker 1: over the world. Around age eight, kids are on the street.
Speaker 1: They's street kids. They can live without adult help, they
Speaker 1: can run from the police, they can steal food at
Speaker 1: age eight. You know, by seven or eight, kids can
Speaker 1: certainly walk to school, go out and play groups, get
Speaker 1: in conflicts. That's the way it always was. But in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties we freaked out based on some early
Speaker 1: in the eighties, freaked out based on the media ecosystem
Speaker 1: that put missing kids in our faces. By the nineties,
Speaker 1: we had this idea that if you ever take your
Speaker 1: eyes off your kid, if there is not a responsible
Speaker 1: adult looking at your kid, he or she will be abducted.
Speaker 1: Now that was never true. There's child abductions have been,
Speaker 1: you know, there are few in the country. I mean
Speaker 1: one hundred eight year is what we know is the
Speaker 1: FBI stat that we could but we could find, not
Speaker 1: counting the non custodial parent. Obviously, parents abduct their kids
Speaker 1: if they don't get them in divorce proceedings, but stranger
Speaker 1: abductions are almost unheard of. But yet we freaked out
Speaker 1: and we stop kids from going outside on their own.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can be arrested. It didn't happen in
Speaker 1: the nineties, but the two thousands, you can be arrested.
Speaker 1: If your seven to nine year old go to a
Speaker 1: park nearby, you could lose them because a child from child.
Speaker 1: You're neglecting your children. So what do you think Suppose
Speaker 1: we took the ability to function independently, the ability to
Speaker 1: deal with other kids without a referee, without a teacher,
Speaker 1: the ability to function as an autonomous person. Suppose we
Speaker 1: said to kids, no more of that until you're fourteen.
Speaker 1: You're not allowed out until you're fourteen. Okay, fourteen, Now
Speaker 1: we'll let you go out, but you have to call
Speaker 1: in and we have to track you with your iPhone
Speaker 1: and a Da da da da. So we delay any autonomy,
Speaker 1: any independent on supervised play until they're fourteen. What do
Speaker 1: you think when they come to college, do you think
Speaker 1: will be just as skilled socially or might they be?
Speaker 1: Might they have been slowed down in their maturation? Well,
Speaker 1: then I saw the Black mir episode that played out
Speaker 1: that very scenario. So based on that prediction, I would
Speaker 1: say it is not very beneficial to the development. That's right,
Speaker 1: That's right. And so this I think, you know, again unintentional,
Speaker 1: but I think this, you know, along with lead point,
Speaker 1: like the lead epidemic that was just horrible at that
Speaker 1: damage millions and millions of kids, and I think prevent it,
Speaker 1: we stopped them from playing out from free play. We
Speaker 1: deprive them of free play. That I think is the
Speaker 1: second biggest terrible thing we've done to our kids. I
Speaker 1: loved that you brought that into your book, and it
Speaker 1: reminded me of some great research Gotnik has been doing
Speaker 1: on you know, play as in delaying the literacy for
Speaker 1: a couple of years, you know, by having to better literacy. Right, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's right. There's no reason that kindergarteners should be doing
Speaker 1: spelling and math, they should be playing. I really like that.
Speaker 1: So let's finally cover your third great untruth. Always trust
Speaker 1: your feelings the righteous mind. The first principle in the
Speaker 1: righteous mind is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Speaker 1: So descript and this is just descriptively, not prescripted descriptively thinking.
Speaker 1: We tend to have gut feelings that guide our interpretation,
Speaker 1: and our reasoning follows, like the tail being wagged by
Speaker 1: the dog. So that is what we're prone to. And
Speaker 1: it's an empirical question should we always do that? Is
Speaker 1: it always a good idea to go with our feelings?
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of research on when intuition is
Speaker 1: better than reasoning and when reasoning is better than intuition.
Speaker 1: And if you're trying to decide what color you want
Speaker 1: to paint your room, you could reason about it, or
Speaker 1: you can go your gut feelings. Gout feelings are probably
Speaker 1: going to be a better guide. But if you're trying
Speaker 1: to decide what happens socially, yes, intuition has a lot
Speaker 1: to contribute. But the whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy
Speaker 1: is that people make predictable mistakes, especially people are prone
Speaker 1: to anxiety and depression. So if you are prone to
Speaker 1: anxiety and depression, you habitually take everything in the worst
Speaker 1: possible way. You habitually interpret an innocent question as a
Speaker 1: slight or an exclusion. Yeah, you should stop it. You
Speaker 1: should stop listening to your gut feelings. You need therapy,
Speaker 1: You need help, and so CBT is a way cognitive
Speaker 1: health therapy is a way of helping you to catch
Speaker 1: your most common distortions and then correct them. So let's
Speaker 1: rephrase it. Not should you listen to your feelings. Of
Speaker 1: course you should sometimes, but you shouldn't take them as
Speaker 1: definitive sources. Rather, you should get better at understanding which
Speaker 1: of your habitual thoughts are distortions and which ones are accurate.
Speaker 1: You should not have professors on campus telling you to
Speaker 1: go with your feelings and that if somebody challenged you
Speaker 1: on something, they're invalidating your existence. They have no right
Speaker 1: to question you. This is your reality. So if you
Speaker 1: set people up as though their interpretations are supreme, they're sovereign.
Speaker 1: Anyone in the classes says, well, I look at things differently,
Speaker 1: and you say no, no, I'm telling you my experience.
Speaker 1: You can't question my experience. It's true. They can't question
Speaker 1: what you felt, but they can question what you made
Speaker 1: of it. And so I think in universities we need
Speaker 1: to help each other think better. In other words, we
Speaker 1: are also prone to confirmation bias. We are also prone
Speaker 1: to emotional reasoning and post talk reasoning that we need
Speaker 1: people to challenge us. We need people to question us.
Speaker 1: And sometimes we'll say, no, you're wrong, I'm sure that
Speaker 1: I'm right, and here's my evidence. Other times we might say, oh, wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't think of that. Maybe she didn't mean anything
Speaker 1: bad by and maybe or maybe she was just busy.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's all it was. So we need other people
Speaker 1: to question our feelings. For us, I want to push
Speaker 1: back against you a second and you said it's good
Speaker 1: for people to push back. But when I was in
Speaker 1: grad school, I mean, you've posed my work a lot.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I've told you that, but your
Speaker 1: dual process model of morality with Elfin and the writer
Speaker 1: was extremely helpful metaphor in my own dissertation. I know,
Speaker 1: don't if I toldis was a dual process theory and
Speaker 1: human intelligence that was my theory. So I really drew
Speaker 1: on that a lot. Elet of the right that would
Speaker 1: be really cool. Yeah, it's a two volume dissertation that
Speaker 1: no one's read but my mom. But it's a trade book.
Speaker 1: You got to make a trade book maybe someday. Well,
Speaker 1: and I talk about it a lot in my book
Speaker 1: un Gifted Intelligence Redefined, But I argue that basically, in
Speaker 1: a nutshell, intelligence is actually the cognitive flexibility to switch
Speaker 1: between motive thought depending on the task constraints. And I
Speaker 1: did a bunch of studies to show that that is
Speaker 1: a skill in itself that has been undervalued in the
Speaker 1: intelligence literature. So saying and intelligence is the ability to
Speaker 1: switch cognitive either system one or system to motive thought
Speaker 1: depending on the task constraints and your test demands. The
Speaker 1: point I wanted to make here is that, and I
Speaker 1: think it's the same data as what you said, but
Speaker 1: I would frame it in a different way. I think
Speaker 1: it's possible to hone your intuition and better so you
Speaker 1: can rely be a more reliable guide. Your intuition could
Speaker 1: be a more reliable guide to reality. And that was
Speaker 1: a major point of my dissertation. So I would just
Speaker 1: extend I agree everything you said. It's not only a
Speaker 1: matter of not trusting your intuition, but actually becoming more
Speaker 1: confident and knowing yourself better, know when your intuition is
Speaker 1: working for you and when it's not. Yeah, that's man.
Speaker 1: How do you sharpen a knife, you know, with another
Speaker 1: hard thing? And how do you sharpen your intuitions? If
Speaker 1: everyone around you says, oh, I won't question your intuition,
Speaker 1: so that in aggression, you know, then you're not going
Speaker 1: to get better intuitions. That's right. If you have a
Speaker 1: therapist or a caring friend who can say, you know
Speaker 1: what you know, you're doing that thing again where you're
Speaker 1: assuming the worst about people. Let's look at the evidence.
Speaker 1: That's how you sharpen intuition. That's one way, absolutely, I
Speaker 1: should clarify I wasn't only my mom who read megoritation.
Speaker 1: I did pass the committee. I want to four people,
Speaker 1: so well, end this because I'm going to be a
Speaker 1: very respectable of your time. Let's let's end this conversation
Speaker 1: day talking about the Herodox Academy because I, as you know,
Speaker 1: I joined it recently and I've been telling people, telling
Speaker 1: people that I'm proud, I'm a proud member. I am
Speaker 1: for viewpoint diversity. I wanted to raise just one point
Speaker 1: one additional nuanced data I'm here is I see sometimes
Speaker 1: and not within the Heaterex Academy conference. I didn't see
Speaker 1: that there, but I see it on Twitter sometimes. I
Speaker 1: see it in certain circles, a pitting of viewpoint diversity
Speaker 1: versus racial ethnic diversity. And that bothers me because I
Speaker 1: care equally about both, yes, and they don't have to
Speaker 1: be antagonistic to each other. But I see it pitted
Speaker 1: as antagonistic and certain circles of discourse. Have you noticed
Speaker 1: that too? Oh? Absolutely, absolutely so. Because part of what's
Speaker 1: happened on campus is set of policies that are intended
Speaker 1: to help black students in particular, and that's what a
Speaker 1: lot of the protests were in twenty fifteen, and so
Speaker 1: unfortunately the contest have devolved into black students wanting certain
Speaker 1: policies about microaggression, safe spaces, bias response teams, also ethnic
Speaker 1: identity centers, and those who said no, no free speech,
Speaker 1: free speech. We should be allowed to say whatever we
Speaker 1: want and even if you know and so in each
Speaker 1: side holds up the worst elements of the others. So
Speaker 1: for many on the left, free speech means white frat
Speaker 1: boys wanting to sell one of VL songs, you know,
Speaker 1: with the N word. There's no reason why we need
Speaker 1: to have that on campus. That doesn't do anyone any good.
Speaker 1: So if you take an extreme view of the free
Speaker 1: speech side, an extreme view of the identity politics side, yeah,
Speaker 1: they are totally incompatible and their enemies. That's not what
Speaker 1: we're about. We are of the view that for the
Speaker 1: academy to do what it needs to do, you have
Speaker 1: to have a space, a very special space. This is
Speaker 1: not like the public square. This is a special institution
Speaker 1: that only exists and only does its work if people
Speaker 1: are exposed to diverse people and ideas. So, if you
Speaker 1: really think diversity matters, it's not because people have different
Speaker 1: skin codes, because they have different perspectives and ideas. If
Speaker 1: you really think diversity matters, and you have to value
Speaker 1: viewpoint diversity, and what we're working on several of our
Speaker 1: projects are how can we solve all the diversity problems together?
Speaker 1: Are because there are some ways. There are some ways
Speaker 1: recommended often by diversity consultants that involve very heavy handed
Speaker 1: training about white privilege, and there are ways of doing
Speaker 1: diversity training that backfire. The more you blame people, the
Speaker 1: more you turn them against diversity. So there are ways
Speaker 1: that it's done on and there's there's an article in
Speaker 1: Science on this. There's all kinds of articles that diversity
Speaker 1: training either doesn't work or sometimes it even backfires, and
Speaker 1: so we say we've got to stop that. Companies are
Speaker 1: spending hundreds of millions of dollars on training that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Everybody feels like a victim. Now Google is getting sued
Speaker 1: from both sides. In the future, everybody will be sued
Speaker 1: from all sides. This is a complete mess. We have
Speaker 1: to solve all the problems together, and that means we
Speaker 1: have to look at what we're trying to do in
Speaker 1: the classroom. What are the features or factors that might
Speaker 1: make black students feel less welcome. We've got to address
Speaker 1: those that. We have to address them in ways that
Speaker 1: don't make other people feel that they live in terror
Speaker 1: being called a racist. So that doesn't help anyone either
Speaker 1: the black students, if the white students are free to
Speaker 1: talk to them, So we have to address them all together.
Speaker 1: We cannot address them on Facebook or Twitter. We cannot
Speaker 1: address them in the public square. We cannot address them
Speaker 1: in anywhere where people can grandstand and show off. We
Speaker 1: have to work on the dynamics of small group discussions
Speaker 1: and recognize that what we're doing is hard and important.
Speaker 1: It's going to acquire everybody to try harder, to give
Speaker 1: less offense and to take less offense. We've got to
Speaker 1: create conditions in which people can give each other the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt, listen to each other, and welcome
Speaker 1: those who see things differently. That's what diversity can do
Speaker 1: for us. Gosh, if there's anything that this world needs
Speaker 1: more now, it's not. So. I want to wish you
Speaker 1: good luck on that project, and I wish you and
Speaker 1: Greg all the best on the book tour blitz that
Speaker 1: will be happening soon. Well, thanks so much, scot. I.
Speaker 1: This ultrapsychological discussion with you. Thanks and good look to
Speaker 1: you me too. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in the discussion at Thespsychology podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a
Speaker 1: rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.