coddling of the american mind the atlantic

I recently became particularly alarmed by reports about new moralistic trends on college campuses. In 2012, I published my most recent book, The Righteous Mind, in the hope that if Americans understood the biases that affect their everyday moral thinking, they might be able to understand one another better. Each side has its own values, of course, but increasingly its own facts, too-about history, economics, climate science. During that time, the American left and right have become like different countries, perpetually at odds. I have studied moral psychology for 28 years. I took this question to my friend, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. And I began to wonder whether distorted thinking patterns were not only interfering with truth-seeking, but also perhaps leading to a worsening of student mental health. I began to wonder whether campus culture, more generally, was coaxing students toward distorted thinking. Campus leaders seemed to be telling students that they should overgeneralize, personalize, and magnify problems. The resident assistants who implemented the program had been given training materials that sought to define racism, and included statements such as “the term applies to all white people living in the United States” and “people of color cannot be racists.” While such claims may be good topics for debate, they seem on their face to be examples of several classic cognitive distortions-overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, and an inability to disconfirm. Such an activity is not only reductive and unscholarly, it is a classic demonstration of the all-or-nothing thinking I had struggled with. At the University of Delaware, as part of a diversity-focused orientation program, students reported being made to “take a stance” on one side of a room or another, displaying their personal views on polarizing topics such as affirmative action and gay marriage-even if they didn’t yet know where they stood. One case that was much on my mind had taken place in the fall of 2007.

The organization I lead, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, supports free-speech rights on campus. As I was learning to identify distortions in my own thinking, I began to recognize them in the thinking of others.

Coddling of the american mind the atlantic