The Coddling of the American Mind

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

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Category: Psychology | Reading Duration: 21 min | Rating: 4.4/5 (324 ratings)

About the Book

The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) seeks to go behind the scandalized reporting and to establish what’s really happening on US college campuses. Drawing on psychological theory and wide-ranging research, The Coddling of the American Mind demonstrates that university life has taken a worrying turn.

Who Should Read This?

Baffled readers trying to understand campus politics
Parents of college-aged kids
Citizens concerned about accelerating political polarization

What’s in it for me? Discover how political turmoil is up-ending college life in the United States.

You’ve probably come across the newspaper reports and shocking headlines. Professors are being screamed at and shouted down at American universities. Guest speakers are being disinvited and having their events disrupted. Student activists are increasingly resorting to violence in order to make a point.

What exactly is happening on US campuses? this summary set out to answer that question. Examining the root causes of on-campus turbulence, they argue that young people in the United States are suffering from chronic overprotection. And as you’ll find out, the long-term effects of all this coddling are even more troubling than those eyebrow-raising headlines.

In this summary, you’ll learn - what peanuts can teach us about campus politics;

why the USSR was good for American politics; and
why some college students were banned from discussing their personal problems.

When you were a kid, were you allowed to bring peanuts to school? If you live in the United States, your answer to that question probably depends on your age.

Chapter 1: Young people need to face challenges in order to become strong.

Starting in the mid-nineties, America found itself facing a minor public health crisis, as the rate of peanut allergies in the population began to soar. Faced with the prospect of putting children’s health at risk, many schools decided to ban the foodstuff from lunchboxes altogether. Seems like a good idea, right? Well, not exactly.

A 2015 study discovered that shielding children from peanuts may have actually been contributing to the surge in allergies. The key message here is: Young people need to face challenges in order to become strong. In that 2015 study, researchers followed a group of children from infancy to the age of five. They found that without early and repeated exposure to peanuts, many of the kids’ immune systems never learned how to deal with them in a healthy way – leading to serious allergies down the line. In the same way, when we try to shelter young people from all of life’s challenges, we run the risk of weakening them in the long term – a phenomenon attested to by life on American college campuses. Since 2014, student life has been dramatically altered by the rise of safetyism.

This term refers to a growing culture that prizes safety at all costs, and sees challenges and difficulties as intolerable burdens that need to be eliminated. But here’s the thing: safetyism rests on a novel and expanded meaning of the word “safety. ” Over time, it’s come to include protection against challenging ideas and feelings of discomfort, not just physical threats. And that means safetyism can be used to silence dissenting students and speakers. After all, if students need to be “protected” from anything that makes them uncomfortable, why should they be exposed to arguments that make them feel “unsafe? ” Well, remember the peanuts.

Sometimes overprotection can be more harmful than allowing young people to encounter challenges and risks. In fact, it’s only by facing adversity that we can begin to develop real strength. Imagine a young person who has been sheltered from difficult emotions for most of his life. Is he likely to find it easier to get by when he becomes an adult? Probably not. Life has some challenges, upsets, and pain in store for all of us – and it’s better to learn how to deal with these things early on, rather than to run into trouble later in life when the stakes get high.

Chapter 2: Assuming the worst about others aggravates campus tensions.

Imagine that you’re a student sitting in a classroom, and someone accidentally steps on your toes. What do you feel? Probably nothing more than a burst of pain and a fleeting sense of irritation. Now imagine that whoever stepped on your foot did it intentionally.

How would you feel in that situation? Probably a lot angrier and more indignant, right? Well, in life we often have no clue about other people’s intentions – so if we want to avoid feeling undue anger and frustration, we should try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, many students on college campuses are taking the opposite tack, which has led to disastrous results. The key message here is: Assuming the worst about others aggravates campus tensions. In assuming the worst about other people’s intentions, students are succumbing to cognitive distortions that make the world seem far more hostile than it really is.

In falling prey to these cognitive distortions, students are essentially allowing the emotional and irrational sides of their minds to cloud their vision and misrepresent situations that upset them. For a case in point, take the concept of microaggressions. The term refers to the daily slights and indignities experienced by minority groups. In some ways, it’s a useful idea. Not all discrimination is overt, and helping to stamp out even so-called “minor” instances can make the world a fairer place. But there’s a problem.

According to Derald Wing Sue, the Columbia University Professor who popularized the term, microaggressions don’t need to be intentional. In this line of thinking, it’s not our actual motivations that matter; instead, it’s the worst possible intentions that someone else could read into our words or actions. That means that if a white person says, “America is a melting pot,” that counts as a microaggression – because someone else could take it to suggest that minorities need to conform to the dominant culture. Is this really a helpful way of thinking about our interactions with others? Does assuming the worst about people’s intentions lead to understanding, goodwill, and trust? Of course not.

In fact, such thinking is bad for everyone in the long run. The student who learns to interpret ambiguous comments in an uncharitable and hostile manner is going to experience a lot of unwarranted pain in her life. And if she accuses well-meaning people of bigotry, it’s only going to inflame pre-existing tensions. So rather than assuming that our initial, negative impressions about others are correct, we should take the time to interrogate our thoughts. It often benefits everyone if we can find a more reasonable and charitable interpretation of each other’s words and actions. The human mind is primed to think in terms of tribes.

Chapter 3: Campus politics encourages harmful tribal thinking.

Thanks to our evolutionary history, we all have a tendency to favor fellow tribe members and to target outsiders who differ from us. Luckily, humans have the ability to move past their tribal instincts and dial down intergroup conflict. But these days, many students are encouraged to do the exact opposite. The key message here is: Campus politics encourages harmful tribal thinking.

Have you ever heard political commentators criticizing what they call “identity politics? ” The term refers to political movements that ground themselves in group characteristics like race, gender, and sexuality. It’s not a particularly novel phenomenon, and it’s usually harmless. But not all forms of identity politics are equal. Some varieties are more troubling than others. An especially problematic one is called common-enemy identity politics.

This encourages students to think of themselves as tribe members locked in bitter conflict with a common oppressor. Unlike forms of identity politics that emphasize our shared humanity, this type is far more concerned with locating and denigrating enemies. Take the college newspaper article a Latino student at Texas State University wrote in 2017, under the headline “Your DNA Is an Abomination. ” In the piece, the student asserted that he had only ever met a dozen “decent” white people and argued that “white death will mean liberation for all. ” In using these words, the student seems to have been calling for the end of white dominance over society, rather than the literal death of white people. That being said, the article felt offensive to many conservative readers, who flooded the newspaper with hate mail and even death threats.

But as extreme as the article’s argument might have seemed to those offended readers, it’s actually in keeping with some forms of activism that are currently taught on college campuses. Take the popular concept of intersectionality, which examines the ways that various forms of discrimination overlap and interact. Now, depending on how its interpreted, this idea can provide an interesting and fruitful way of looking at discrimination. It highlights the fact that the experiences of, say, black women in the US are unlike those of either black men or white women. In other words, it alerts us to the intersections of experience between marginalized groups. But, according to the authors, some interpretations of intersectionality can be harmful.

By depicting privileged groups as oppressors and others as virtuous victims, this sort of teaching can help to inflame simmering tribal loyalties. Our ability to live side-by-side with people who are different than us depends on our recognition that such black-and-white thinking is rarely accurate. In the next blink, we’ll discuss what can happen when we lose sight of this fact. The night of February 1, 2017, marked a watershed moment in campus politics.

Chapter 4: Tensions on college campuses have been escalating dramatically.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a well-known and provocative right-wing commentator, was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley – but student activists were determined to disrupt the event. Now, protests against controversial speakers were nothing new on US college campuses. But the chaos that ensued that night was unprecedented. Rioters hurled Molotov cocktails, shot professional-grade fireworks at police, and attacked Yiannopoulos’s supporters with sticks, barricades, and pipes.

In all, the riot left a repair bill of half a million dollars – and the spectacle left many Americans wondering how college politics had gone so terribly wrong. The key message here is: Tensions on college campuses have been escalating dramatically. People knew that campus politics could be bitter, but violence on this scale was something new. What had caused things to get so vicious so quickly? Well, a re-interpretation of “violence” was an important factor. Just as students re-defined “safety” to include emotional comfort, in recent years they’d also re-interpreted “violence” to include harsh or unsympathetic speech.

This thinking allowed UC Berkeley students to portray Yiannopoulos’s provocations as violent attacks. In that light, their own rioting and genuinely violent actions could be justified as a kind of self-defense. And it’s not just visiting speakers who’ve learned that the atmosphere on college campuses has taken a sharp turn. Even distinguished professors can run into problems if they say the wrong thing. Take the case of Amy Wax and Larry Alexander. In 2017, these two law professors wrote an opinion piece arguing that the loss of so-called “bourgeois values” like hard work and commitment to marriage had contributed to a number of social problems.

In the article, they claimed that not all cultures are equal when it comes to “preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. ” The article provoked a firestorm. Dozens of the professors’ colleagues signed open letters denouncing their claims and accusing the pair of “hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy. ” In years gone by, the professors’ colleagues might have sought to disprove their ideas. But in 2017, it was sufficient to condemn them. If you find that politics is making you angrier than ever before, you wouldn’t be alone.

Chapter 5: US politics is getting more and more adversarial.

Every day it seems easier to give in to the cycle of outrage and mutual accusation. In a way, this makes campus politics a little easier to understand. After all, the protests and riots we came across previously didn’t occur in a vacuum; they arose in a political climate that seems to be inching toward a boiling point day by day. The key message here is: US politics is getting more and more adversarial.

This isn’t just a gut feeling. Independent research shows that Republicans and Democrats really do have increasingly little in common. Every year, the Pew Research Center conducts surveys to find out how the political attitudes of various groups differ. In 2004, Republicans and Democrats had beliefs that were separated by 17 percentage points. By 2017, however, they differed by 36. That’s an increase of 110 percent in under fifteen years!

At the same time, the public has adopted a new attitude toward politics. In the past, Americans were usually motivated by their enthusiasm for their own party – but, according to recent research, they’re now more motivated by hostility toward the other party than by commitment to their own. On the whole, that means that politics has become less about people pursuing their own ideals and more about fanning the flames of mutual resentment. There are a couple of reasons for this dramatic increase in political animosity. One is that, with the fall of the USSR, the US lost a common enemy. Without any major external threats to unite against, American citizens began to focus on their own disagreements and turned on each other with renewed vigor.

At the same time, the dawn of the digital age was transforming the way Americans consume media and discover news. In the past, everyone watched the same three national television channels, which tended to bring divergent voices together. By the 2010s, an increasing number of Americans were using social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For all the benefits of these platforms, they ultimately allow us to isolate ourselves from those we disagree with – making it a lot harder for us to discover common ground.

Chapter 6: Ever-expanding bureaucracies are stifling university life.

Imagine you’re a student who’s been feeling lonely at college, so you go to see the on-campus psychologist to talk things through. At first, it seems to help – but then, a few days later, a letter arrives for you. In it, an associate dean tells you to avoid discussing your feelings with anyone else. She warns you that you’ll face disciplinary action if you share your thoughts with other students, and refers to the dangers of mentioning “suicidal or self-destructive” feelings to others.

You’re shocked. You never mentioned feeling self-destructive or suicidal, and you thought your meeting with the psychologist was confidential. Sounds pretty dystopian, right? Maybe – but for students at Northern Michigan University, it was a reality. The key message here is: Ever-expanding bureaucracies are stifling university life. Many university bureaucrats buy into the notion of safetyism and prioritize so-called “well-being” to an absurd degree.

In the case of the university in Michigan, administrators decided that students discussing troubles with friends placed an unsafe burden on their shoulders. As the dean argued, “Relying on your friends can be very disruptive to them. ” This attitude might seem laughable, but its effects are actually serious. Bureaucrats are so eager to shield students and protect their own institutions against legal liability that they overregulate student life – and end up stifling it in the process. Political speech is a common target for overregulation. Many codes defining what can and can’t be said on US campuses are puzzlingly vague.

For example, Jacksonville State University once ordered that “no student shall offend anyone on University property” – an unenforceable code if ever there was one! Now, wanting to avoid offending people might seem like a laudable goal. But even if the intention behind this sort of overbearing regulations is well-meaning, they can often prove detrimental to student welfare. By teaching young people that disputes should be resolved by bureaucrats and governing bodies, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn the art of conflict resolution. In the long term, this will only make young people more vulnerable, and leave them ill-equipped to deal with life’s challenges. In some ways, this summary portray a sorry picture of American university life.

Chapter 7: We can teach young people to adopt better, healthier habits of mind.

Once the bastions of daring and independent thought, universities no longer seem to guarantee the freedom of conscience that was their hallmark not so long ago. Thankfully, things aren’t yet set in stone. Many of the problems we’ve examined could actually be solved fairly simply, if people become motivated enough to take action. By avoiding some of the pitfalls that parents and educators commonly fall into, we can raise a generation of young people capable of coping with adversity – and even benefiting from it sometimes.

The key message here is: We can teach young people to adopt better, healthier habits of mind. So how do we do that? Well, first of all, we need to teach young people that not all risks are to be avoided. In other words, we need to argue against the cult of safetyism. Risks and challenges aren’t always disasters waiting to happen. In fact, they’re often opportunities to grow.

When raising children, then, we should always bear in mind the old saying, “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. ” Put simply, young people fare better when we teach them to deal with life’s difficulties, rather than trying to shield them against all of the world’s discomforts. Another piece of wisdom that we can pass on is that we should learn to be critical thinkers about our own thoughts and emotions. We shouldn’t just automatically assume our initial impressions about other people’s intentions are true or that our feelings of outrage are justified. For example, not everything that offends us is necessarily intended to be hurtful. The ability to draw back from our emotions and rationally engage with our thoughts is good for our relationships with others and for our own mental health!

When we learn to interrogate our feelings, we spare us and those around us a lot of nasty, personalized, and unproductive conflict. Finally, we can teach our young people to be on their guard against tribal thinking that neatly divides the world into “us” and “them. ” Life is rarely so clear-cut – and we’d all do well to remember it.

Final summary

The key message in this summary: Although it can be hard to accept, sheltering young people from challenges will only harm them over time. Protecting students to an unreasonable degree while they’re in college ultimately comes at the cost of their long-term well-being. A better strategy is to equip them to deal with the challenge of life, while teaching them to give others the benefit of the doubt. Actionable advice: Teach children how to argue productively.

Too many parents think of arguments as totally negative and undesirable aspects of family life. But the ability to argue fairly and constructively is actually a valuable life skill. Teach your children how to speak respectfully to those they disagree with, and how to keep their cool in an impassioned debate. The skills they’ll learn at home will stand them in good stead when they’re older!

About the Author

Greg Lukianoff is the CEO and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free-speech advocacy group focusing on college campuses. He is the author of Freedom From Speech and Unlearning Liberty.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has also written The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.