I'm here today in Manhattan talking to you Dr. Jonathan Haidt
Who's a professor at NYU and I have him here for a bunch of reasons
Jonathan is an extremely interesting researcher. I've been following his work on disgust and political belief for
Literally for decades he was one of the first people who
started to do serious research on disgust which is its own emotional system and therefore very much worth attending to
But we also have some other
interests in common Jonathan also
Started this institute called the Heterodox Academy
Which is attempting to bring back a reasonable diversity of views or what he regards as a reasonable diversity of views to
University faculty and and campuses and discussions, so I first met Jonathan
It's gonna be just about 30 years ago
25 years ago in
2014 yeah I'm sorry it was in 1994 was in 1994 yeah yeah right right so yeah
You came to do a job talk at Harvard to for an assistant professorship position
and I had been aware of your work on disgust then and and
Agitated hard for them to hire you because I thought it was of great significance
Which turned out to be exactly the case, so what do you remember about that?
I Remember I was so excited to have an interview at Harvard. It was my only interview. If I didn't get that job
I had no job for the following year, and it was a very strange day in which I didn't feel particularly
Welcomed or wanted, and then I had my session with you in which it was this guy who was it he had it
He actually got a job at Harvard, and he was studying Jung which is like almost taboo
And he was talking about dreams and creativity
And so I just that was the really bright that was the bright memory of the day was our hour-long conversation
Yeah, well I was also really interested at the time man now in in the biological basis of behavior right and so and and in
in the relationship between fundamental motivational systems and thought because
Obviously our thought is grounded in fundamental motivational systems and your work on disgust
Which maybe you can tell the viewers a little bit about was really interesting to me because it was an emotional system that
Hadn't been studied much. I mean you were really one of the pioneers in the in the psychological study of disgust
Well the way to explain it is that Paul Rozin, my advisor at Penn is
The pioneer in the study of disgust, and he'd studied it as a food-related emotion
he'd written a bit about it being a moral emotion and I was a graduate student at Penn and
I was interested in morality, and I was reading the Bible and I was reading
anthropological accounts of different countries and different cultures and at the time morality was all about
Reasoning, about harm, rights and justice so Lawrence Kohlberg was the leading figure in the field and because I was looking at morality across cultures
And when you look across cultures
It's not just about fairness and harm and rights, it's about menstruation and food taboos and skin lesions
And it's very physical, and I was you know why why do so many
Societies why is it like the normal default way of being is to somehow bring the body into morality?
Why is that and so I just happened to be at Penn where the world's expert in
disgust was I went to talk to him and that started one of the best collaborations of my life and
What it led to is is a broadening of the of the moral domain basically, there's a sort of Western
Secular approach that you see in Western philosophers either morality is about harm and utilitarianism
It's minimize harm, or it's about rights and principles
Immanuel Kant and
a
Much better way psychologically, I think about morality is virtue ethics. It's just a lot of stuff
it's just we have just a lot of stuff that we judge on and
This led me eventually to realize that people on the left and people on the right
Care about different stuff everybody cares about harm and fairness
But the stuff about keeping you know boundaries around the group build a wall protect the group hold the group together
hate traitors
You know everybody can do that
But right wing morality builds on these additional additional foundations of these additional emotions and foundations
So that work on disgust that I was just beginning to talk about then when we first met in
1994 led eventually to what we now call moral foundations theory and with my-- with about five or six
colleagues if you go to yourmorals.org
You can take our test you can learn all about it
But it led to the perspective that
Ultimately was I think the right perspective as the cultural war was heating up and as left and right
We're essentially becoming like different countries different cultures
So so it's not obvious on
first
Consideration why disgust would be a moral emotion so you know most of the work
That's done. That's outside of the disgust realm
I would say is predicated on the assumption that the reason that conservatives in particular
But perhaps people who are more authoritarian in general draw boundaries around their territories
Because they're afraid of the other
But that isn't really that isn't really how it plays out as far as I can tell because conservatives for example are less neurotic than
Trait in the big five traits sense than liberals although. It's um
It's a minor difference
But the disgust issue seems to be particularly relevant, so so can you tell us a little bit about why disgust per se?
Well first conservatives are a little less neurotic
But they also at if you do very low level perceptual experiment just like a puff of white noise in the ear
People who react more strongly to that to any sort of very low level threat are more likely to vote Republican in this country
So they're you know there are all these interesting personality differences that lead to different politics, but as for why disgust?
So I'm I'm a Durkheimian. I would say I love the
Sociologist Émile Durkheim, and I'm also a social psychologist
So I'm always thinking not about people as individual utility maximizers
But people as members of social groups people who are totally focused on
Belonging in their social groups and people who have some pro-social motives about keeping the group together
About doing things that are good for the group, so as I try to argue in my book The Righteous Mind. Yes
We're selfish
There's no doubt that we often will do things to advance our own self-interest at the expense of others
But we're also really group-ish which means we'll do all sorts of things to advance our group at the expense of others
Basically, we're tribal. We evolved as a tribal species and we're doing we have all this software. I would say oh, there's all these
predispositions
predispositions for life in in tribes that are battling other tribes
And that's why it comes out so easily if you look at the way boys organize themselves when they get a fraternity
The hazing rituals when you look at the way
It's especially clear in boys the way street gangs organize themselves girls tribalism is a little different
But I would say this is and that's why again. I love the Jungian approach of archetypes there's something
There's just this weird stuff that is pan-human
Even if it comes out slightly differently around the world there really is a human nature
And it comes complete with a whole bunch of like pre-designed ideas, so there was a new article
I think it was published in Nature. I'll try to find a link for it. It's about a year old
That was based on
high-resolution imaging of
Neuronal connections, and it's actually reviewed in Kurzweil's book How to [Create] a Mind
I think that's the name of it
And so it turns out that the cortex is made out of these columnar structures that are pre-organized units of neurons
And they're replicated across the entire cortex. It's basically the same structure and like the
The older let's say Connectionist idea was that neurons that fire together wire together right that's happening of course
That's pretty standard neurology, but the the columns are already pre-wired, so it's actually columns that fire together that wire together
But there's but there's even more with the high-resolution scanning, so it turns out that underneath the columnar structure there are these pre-built
Highways that are connected connective tissue that are pre
pre-prepared so the columns have the option to
connect to the to the underlying highway, and then that highway can connect to other columns, so it's as if
Implicit in the brain organization, and this is at the cortical levels say nothing of subcortical organization. There's already
preexistent
Likelihoods that certain neurons will fire will wire together. Yeah, so and and what else is cool is that this is actually
architecturally quite
Regular, so they found that the these super highways are arranged in lines, and and and and in
At right angles to one another so it's almost like a three-dimensional structure of wired cubes that underlies the neuronal structure
So that's some neurological evidence for the archetypal idea, so let me just explain to explain to the viewers here
Why this isn't just some like
psychological geek conversation
This is actually really relevant to a lot of the things that we'll be talking about and that your audience probably cares about
because one of the most contested ideas in the social sciences is the idea of innateness and
Yeah, the idea is well
If something is innate then it can't it can't vary across societies, and if it varies across societies
then it's not innate and if gender varies if
Masculinity or femininity vary across societies then it's not innate
It's socially constructed
But that's the wrong understanding of innateness
The definition that I use comes from Gary Marcus who was actually a neuroscientist here at NYU
He says innate doesn't mean hardwired is almost nothing interesting
That's hardwired innate means structured in advance of experience
But then experience can still revise it and boy does that work for gender for almost everything
Yeah, that's right almost everything that we're not a blank slate about anything and something I used to tell my students at UVA I taught
At UVA for 16 years is you know everything's a social construction
masculinity femininity
Cancer the Sun death everything
There's a social construction for you won't find a society that doesn't have thoughts about these things
but the fact that societies have social constructions tells us nothing about whether there's not also an
Underlying biological reality and in almost all cases there is well otherwise we wouldn't be able to communicate which is one of EO Wilson's
Comments right when I mean Wilson is the entomologist to study ants at Harvard and also wrote number of books about
Sociobiology that got him in trouble with the radical leftists
And he said even if we could communicate with ants there would be nothing to say to each other because their
Fundamental mode of being in the world is based on
Motivations and interests that are so different from ours that there wouldn't be any structure for communication
And you can kind of tell that with regards to the animals that we make friends with right
We're much more likely to make friends with animals who has a who have a fundamental biological and social nature
That's very close to ours like dogs because we can basically speak their language even though not completely
A mammal language of love and you know I miss you, and I want to play you yeah, that's right
Yeah, exactly and that bonding. Yeah, okay, so back to discuss back to discuss so
So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rozin is to see us as these amazing omnivores
This is part of our survival strategy even more than other other Apes
We are just brilliant omnivores, and we have the Omnivore's Dilemma, which is we've got to be interested in all kinds of new stuff
We're not tied to any place we can roam on to a whole new continent, so we're interested in stuff
But stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes so we have to be careful about that stuff
And so these motives have to be in tension
And this is actually an interesting way to understand the left-right difference you have to have both motives
But if so imagine two siblings one of whom is set more towards trying new stuff seeking out new stuff
And the other is a little more fearful
Then we're like whoa no let's you know let's not try that let's stay with what's tried-and-true
I mean that's progressivism and conservatives, and that's the origins of it
And if you look at kids behavior at the age of two or three it does predict
How they'll vote much later not hugely, but there is a clear prediction there, so
so disgust is part of a regulatory system about our engagement with the world and whether we are just sort of out there and
You know we we seek out variety and diversity
We think diversity is just a great thing or whether we want a little more order structure predictability
conservatives are neater than
progressives if you take photos of their rooms
You know you can actually you know cleanliness and organization you can predict how they vote
Disgust it turns out what's really cool about disgust in modern politics is if you look at all the different things that we're fighting over
Especially in this country our culture wars over. You know going back a few decades
You know sex, drugs, the flag, immigration all of these things
I have a study with my colleagues which was led by Sena
Koleva in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people and we also had their scores in the disgust scale
But one of the foundations of morality is sanctity and purity and it relates to disgust
What we found is that if you know if you know
What people's left-right how they place themselves in a left-right scale you can pretty much predict where they fall out on most culture war
Attitudes except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity so what I mean is
flag-burning, okay
Do you think you know do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag or the country's flag as an
Expression as a political action. What do you think people just give some answer on a one to seven scale and
People on the right think you know more like they say no people on the left with yes
People who score high on loyalty are more likely to say no people who lower on it
Say yes, and that's even taking account of where they're on the left-right dimension, but here's the cool thing
It's only if you add in the purity or sanctity thing that you can really understand
What people are doing because some people see the flag not as just a piece of cloth
They see it as having some innate essence some something sacred about it
Which must be protected and so so this is
They think of it as a unifying center. Exactly, that's right
So if there's something sacred and this is that this is the central piece of my work around
Politics and morality is the psychology of sanctity
If you hold something sacred then your team circles around it and it's only
Those who circle around with you and sometimes literally circle around like Muslims at prayer in Mecca
They literally Circle the Kaaba circling is a very primitive ancient
It feels right to circle something, but even if even if you do it symbolically or you all bow at the same time
That binds you together. Children do that with their mothers when they when they engage in exploratory behavior, right well
They use their mother as a center of the world and children differ in the degree to which they'll move outward from their mothers
So they move out until they they they trip over there their uncertainty threshold
Is it a distance like it's a distance?
And so so the more exploratory kids who are lower in negative emotion will go out farther before they come back to their mother
So the mother's a center
And you know that that would be associated
Symbolically with the idea of the center as a motherland or potentially as a fatherland
That's right that makes sense so this way that we're we are incredibly symbolic creatures
we're not just out to make as much money as we can we're
Symbolic and social creatures and this psychology of sanctity or purity has become really
Not just on the right. It's always been important for
Especially religious conservatives, we're beginning to see it even on the campus left
and this is why I think we see some of the odd things we see on campus that the
Campus must be kept as a sacred and pure space
One of the things that really alarms me about what's happened on campus the last couple of years is that
The older idea we had that it's a place for contesting ideas
It's a it's a zone of enormous choice people can take what courses they want to say what they want it's kind of a wonderful
free-for-all with some with norms of respect it's now becoming much more of a religious zone where the perimeter of the campus is the
Boundaries and within it's there are almost they're blasphemy laws basically
And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury
protests when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury and
As everybody knows he was shouted down so the students are chanting and they're chanting in unison
And it seems like a religious revival meeting and they're swaying and they're saying their sacred you know racist, sexist
Anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away. It's like a ritual incantation
So that all-- to define the space as safe, and it's safe and look I'm the maternal warden
So far all this happening is they're binding together
They're moving at you know synchronous movement and call and response so it it's using a lot of tropes from religion and religious worship
But here's the cool thing
When the administrator I forget who it is comes on to say
okay, we have moved we're moving the talk and
Then you hear a couple people screaming out "off campus, off campus"
And he says to another location on campus, and there's like oh no no
Because you know look no one had to go to this talk so everyone could have just stayed home
And the students did succeed in shutting down the venue, so they could have declared a victory
But it's not a full victory unless he is physically off the campus
We can't have him speaking on campus because that defiles us that pollutes us
We must shut that down, and that's where I started saying wow this is like full-blown
psychology of religion, Durkheim, sanctity, purity, blasphemy
And that I think you know that doesn't describe most students that that describes a sort of the core those who
Really have their identities wrapped up in this movement. Okay, so so with disgust
I wanted to I wanted to ask you a couple things about that so you
Know the Big Five research into political differences basically shows that the liberals are high in trait openness and low on trait
Conscientiousness, and the Conservatives are the reverse
but we've fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with a Big Five aspect scale and
Orderliness is strongly associated with disgust
So so right, right?
Right exactly it does sound a lot like Freud
but it but it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces for example, so
So now in-- and their meetings start on time-- yes, and yeah exactly right right so
So then the the nexus for political beliefs seems to be openness. So that's that exploratory tendency that you talked about
exploration of ideas and creativity and low
Orderliness and so then I thought well why in the world would why would the political nexus go across those dimensions which are some
Relatively uncorrelated then I thought and this is in keeping with your work on disgust is that it's an issue of
Borders which of course seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump's election when he talked about borders
But you might say
And I think this is reasonable that the conservative is someone who wants the borders between
categories to remain intact no matter what level of analysis
so it's borders from the highest resolution level of cognition all the way up to the actual physical borders of
rooms, towns
States, countries all of that so the borders should be thicker and the reason they want that
Now there was a paper published in PLOS ONE. I don't know if you saw it it was a couple of years ago
It was a mind-boggling paper
It should have been like front page news as far as I was concerned and what the researchers did was between countries and then within
provinces or states within countries they correlated the level of
of
Frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs and
Found a walloping correlation was like 0.6
It was one of the highest by that for those of you who don't know social scientists never discover anything
That's associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6
Other than heritability right other than heritability yes
and so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease the higher the probability of of
Totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes, and then they controlled for governance because one of the questions was was this top-down
authoritarianism or bottom-up authoritarianism and the answer was that it was bottom-up okay, and so I thought about that in -
from two perspectives
Simultaneously at the time, okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness
So it's a a fundamental sub trait, and I was reading this book that was called Hitler's Table Talk
And it was a it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942 - yeah
so it's a spontaneous utterance assay and
It's full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented, but what's really interesting is all the language is disgust
It's not fear so so Hitler's basic metaphor was that the Aryan race
And country was a pure body and that it was assaulted by
Parasites right and then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up and shook hands
What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years right because of smallpox and measles and so that
That border issue that separates conservatives from liberals. Let's say as the Conservatives say
The novel is potentially contaminated. It's not so much that it's dangerous. That's different. That's fear
It's contaminating and the Liberals say hold on a minute if you make the borders too thick then information can't pass through. Exactly
So that's the Omnivore's Dilemma right there. Right right and and then since we have a biological
Architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected
We have the same attitude towards abstract information, which would be ideas that we do to
things like food or illness
This right right and so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea. That's right. Now
I'm a big fan of George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
That we yeah
We use our bodily our
Bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics and like what our policies should be about borders and immigration
There's a Canadian psychologist, Mark Schaller, he and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of these the behavioural immune system
Yeah, right that we don't just try to you know
Microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears and so whoever can keep themselves and their children
From being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game and so a lot of that is
Judging carefully about people is he dangerous, is she dangerous and that's both for sexuality, for contact, for all kinds of association
So yeah in a lot of ways our emotions and our bodily interactions structure
how we think and feel about about social interactions
Well even with the black death in Europe
I mean so the black death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world and they brought back rats that were
Infected exactly so so what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time so the European expansion
produced a tremendous
Interchange of ideas from all around the world that's globalization
But it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time
So wouldn't it be good if in every society or every organization we had some people who specialized in
Specialized in saying "hey, what are the opportunities?" and then we had other people who specialized in saying "well
But what are the risks?" and it just so happens that a lot of people have trouble doing all that in themselves
When we have systems that are well constituted with people who have different
Personalities and different motives and goals we actually can get better outcomes. We can have a discussion between them
Yeah
well
That's exactly why that
it's it's for that precise reason that
That I've been so interested in free speech as a as a value because well even on the economic front
it's pretty obvious if you look at things economically that the
entrepreneur types who start businesses are lumped in with the liberal creative types
We've done a lot of work on the prediction of entrepreneurial behavior and ability and it's openness. That's the big predictor
It's not the only one its openness an IQ fundamentally but for managerial and administrative
expertise it's oh
It's IQ and conscientiousness so the Liberals start businesses and and but they can't run them
Because their their their interest's flipped, and they don't have the organizational ability and the Conservatives can run them
But they can't continue to transform and expand them it yin, and yang yin, and yang, yeah
so so
One more thing about what happened in Nazi Germany
That that's very relevant and interesting because it's it's useful to get these motives right you know
first of all if if something disgusts you if something if you're afraid of something then you run away from it or you freeze
But if something disgusts you you try to burn it or kill it right you try to get rid of it or
Expel it that's that's right though. You want to get it away and destroy it
What so when Hitler first came to power he
Put in a bunch of public health schemes like he had vans that went around and screen people for tuberculosis
then he went on a
factory cleanliness
campaign
So the factories were supposed to be tidied up
And he washed, he bathed about four times a day by the way, he was also a great worshipper of willpower which is associated with
Orderliness and seems maybe to be associated with disgust sensitivity in some way that isn't yet understood
Yeah, yeah
I don't I don't understand that connection either
so they he convinced factory owners in Germany to get rid of the rats and the mite and mice and the and the
Insects in the factories and also to clean them up and beautify them
But the gas they used to clean up the factories was Zyklon-A and
It was the variation of that gas, Zyklon-B
That was then used in yeah, so you could see this ramping up, eh. So it was yeah absolutely
So it was public health, then it was
Social cleanliness, then he went into the asylums and cleaned them up
And so it was just this expansion of of who was contaminated and who was impure
and I think also his fascination with fire and his use of fire symbolism was also associated with that with that appeal to
purification because the whole idea of purification by fire is a very ancient idea so
okay, so
so how did your work on disgust change the way that you looked at things
Fundamentally, I mean you gave some indication of that already, but what else has it changed
so
since I was coming out of a
Psychological literature that was very focused on on sort of secular
secular ethics about justice and fairness, and then I began studying disgust and
Looking at the broader moral domain that almost all societies have
That then also led me to think about well. Okay, if disgust is a reaction to things that seem to be
Degrading so an interesting element of disgust is this notion of degradation there are always these vertical metaphors
In which disgust brings us down and and disgust it so a lot of some religious practice and Judaism and Islam
and and Hinduism is about preparing your body to approach God and
Purification and so that led me to think well if there's an emotion which is about seeing our lower, base or animal
Biological nature is there an opposite emotion is there an emotion of that we feel when we see some manifestation or a higher
Nobler nature, and I was just beginning to think this when I moved to UVA. I got my first job at the University of Virginia
1995 and I read the set of Thomas Jefferson's letters and in one letter he describes
He describes the feelings you get from reading great fiction
He advises a cousin of his that he should buy fiction for his library. Not just you know serious works of law and philosophy
And he described he says doesn't he describe the feeling of
Of having your sentiments be elevated does it not dilate your breast, give you an open feeling in your chest
When you see these acts of beauty and kindness and gratitude. I thought wow that's exactly it
And so because I've been studying disgust. I then started studying its opposite, which I and some others called moral elevations
So there's kind of vertical metaphor of elevation and degradation-- maps onto the body too with regards to-- that's right high, low
clean, dirty
yeah, it's a beautiful pairing and so having this language of elevation and disgust just really has helped me see a lot of things I
Just I could just see a lot of things happening it allows me to like
even you know manipulate like if I'm applying for a grant proposal like I get very good at like having an
elevating ending you know to
to end with a notable uplift
And so it just broadened, it just broadened by thinking about morality and this was around 1995 and so again
It just prepared me so that
And I'd already been to India by that point I spent three months doing research in Orissa in eastern India
So it just broadened my thinking and that's what allowed me
Finally to understand conservatives because I had always been on the left. I hated Ronald Reagan
I
Thought Republicans were stupid and evil and it was only when I'd gone to India and really tried to understand a traditional
religious
Hierarchical, gender stratified society tried to understand it in their terms
They didn't try to just bring in my own my own Western left. You know left-leaning perspectives
That I was and this was all under the guidance of Richard Shweder, my postdoc supervisor at the University of Chicago, where I did a postdoc
It was only then that I was able to
Sort of get inside their minds and their moral system and see that there were alternative moral worlds
They each had their own logic and that was the metaphor I came to it. You know the time
You know The Matrix movies were very popular so the metaphor, The Matrix as a consensual hallucination
Made a lot of sense. It's waking up with the idea of just speaking with moral matrices
Which every different moral matrices. That are grounded in biology
They're biology in the sense that gives us the potential it's like the building blocks of this matrix
Can't be just anything that comes it comes from our
experiences our embodied experiences and again George Lakoff is the master of that thinking and so it was only then that
that I was able to now listen to conservative talk radio and
Christian religious radio and see rather than just saying oh those stupid terrible people say like oh wow yeah
You know I can see that they're striving for a certain virtues. Right right so you started to understand their metaphorical language essentially
That's right, and that was like kind of like my you know I know great awakening or scales falling from my eyes
But you know since well it took a few more you took a number of a lot more years
But eventually I kind of just like pulled out the implants from my eyes
And I stopped seeing everything so through a partisan lens
And I'm not on any side now and just trying to understand what the hell is well. It's really useful
It's really useful to understand that there are
Actual reasons why people see the world differently and that you can't just easily say that one is right
and the other is wrong because
The Liberals are correct when it comes to borders that if you thicken them too much and diminish the information flow
You risk making the society so static that any radical
Environmental transformation will sink it it's the case
But the Conservatives are right in that you pay a big price
with regards to newcomers and new information with regards to risk to exposure to
contaminating, well to contamination period but also to
contaminating ideas and so then I've always thought you know the the
Environment itself moves back and forth like a snake in some sense and what we're trying to do is stay on the center of its
back
And the only way we can do that is by people
By having people pull to the right and say be careful and people pull to the left and say well
Yeah
but be open with that dialogue and the the
exchange of information that that dialogue allows we can maybe specify the center of that moving target and stay and stay
Well and stay on the back
Yeah, okay, so that's a really complicated metaphor with the snake
But I think it's a perfect way in to what's going on on campus and to why viewpoint diversity is so important because that's I
agree exactly with what you just said and
So what I the view that I've come to in studying moral psychology, is that we is that humans are
ultra social Apes
We we evolved to live in these small groups that are fighting with each other
We evolved to have these low-level animistic religions. That's our steady state. That's the way we were for at least 100,000 years or much more
probably closer to a million in some form
So that's sort of our design. That's what we were designed for in a sense
and
In that sense where as individuals were really kind of stupid tribal creatures designed to do post hoc reasoning
But if you put us together in the right way with the right checks with the right the right systems
The the whole can be vastly smarter than the components that go into it
Which is true of the brain - the brain is composed of neurons each neurons really kind of a stupid little switch
But you put them together in the right way, and you get something really brilliant and in the same way
I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that science begins or
the culture of science the scientific revolution begins in Europe
In the 17th century as you begin getting you get the printing press so people can share their ideas
but you get communities of people who are challenging each other's ideas and
That's what makes it so brilliant is that is that people have to do their best
We're really bad at disconfirming our own ideas
It's very hard to make it's very hard to do that, but you put your ideas out there and then
Everyone else is motivated to challenge them and so if you put us together in the right way the truth comes out and so adversarial
systems of law
Journalists know this they have to listen to both sides
Scientists know this social scientists should know this okay, what happened well
The Academy has has always leaned left in the 20th century
But leaning isn't the problem
So people think oh viewpoint diversity. We need we need everybody we need Nazis. We need every view. No we don't need everybody
What we need is no orthodoxy
That's what's fatal
orthodoxy
so if you have if you have to field like sociology or
Social psychology in which it's two or three to one left to right that's totally fine with me. That's totally fine
Because if someone makes some claim, that's just like ideologically blind
Someone will say you know common sense other evidence that you've missed and then the system works
But what what I learned when I started down this road in 2011 I gave a talk
at a big conference of social psychologists
I gave a talk about this problem that we're losing our diversity that I
Could only find one conservative in the entire field. I gave a talk on this
and
And
So what I've learned since then is that
The ratio in psychology was between two to one and four to one left-right all the way up to the early 90s
We've gathered together all the studies we could find so all the way up to the early 90s
It's only three or four to one left or right which would be okay?
but then between 1995 or four and 2010 it goes to
14 to 1. You do you have any idea why and why that time? Yes, so
So you get the same story whether you look at
republican-democrat ratios or liberal-conservative
They're they tell the same story so the two the big things going on there are one
Is that the Greatest Generation which had a lot of Republicans
so a lot of men go off to World War Two, they they're on the GI Bill they enter the Academy in the
1950s a lot of them are conservative or republican
So you have a lot of them
but in the 60s and 70s one of the main reasons to go to grad school in the social sciences is either a)
To stay in school to escape the Vietnam War draft or b) to fight for social justice and against racism
so in sociology and psychology in particular in political science
Maybe I'm not sure you get a huge influx of left-leaning people who are there to pursue
Social justice, so you know the motives are fine, and if it was balanced to be totally fine
but
As you get these young junior people on the Left come in in the 70s and 80s
And then you get the older people that are more politically balanced retiring in the 80s and 90s
By the time you get to the late 90s, it's all Baby Boomers. And so do you get a
Do you get a positive feedback loop developing in there? Like you said it's like three to one
It's okay
But maybe when it hits four to one it goes to like twenty to one? Then you said exactly so you so
Then you start getting hostile climate so I wrote a review paper on this with
with Joe Duarte and Phil Tetlock and Lee Jussim, Jarret Crawford
and
And we
So we reviewed everything that we could find we concluded that
Most of what's going on is self selection that is people on the Left, and we're open to experience they're always gonna
Get self selection, but then there's really good evidence that there's also hostile climate
I mean, it's it's undeniable now that if you are not on the left in a grad program
There's just constant little subtle or not so subtle reminders that you don't belong and look in the Academy
We're all about saying hey, if there are subtle hints here and there you can't succeed right
I mean, that's what we do for a living is we say that little things will stop people
Well little things are put in the way of anyone who doesn't fit politically
And so you do get hostile climate you do get overt discrimination
There's evidence of that and then there is also
It is part of the story here that what it means to be a conservative in the 90s and especially two thousands has changed so
It is true that
You know that that conservatives were not in any way anti-science
until much more recent times now actually all sides are anti science about different Sciences, but
in America the the right wing the Republican Party had
it's controversial
But I do believe that the polarization starts with the right moving further out so what it means to be concerned to be anti anti
Evolutionary which is actually what's happening on the left now - exactly that's yeah
So well-- postmodern left-- I talked to Bret Weinstein the other day, and you know he one of his claims is that
Evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone, so it's a it's a science
That's very likely to be targeted by extremists
you also brought up something that actually touches on the I on the
Difficult problem of how it is that you might define someone who's ideologically possessed
Let's say or ideologically rigid because the idea was that you
Can make a valid case for the utility of
free
information flow and
and the free flow of people that would go along with that and you can make a good case for the danger of that and
So the idea might be that if you're only making a case for the danger of that then you're tilted too far to the right
And if you're only making a case for the utility of that then you're tilted too far to the left
Exactly, that's right, and so we can look at immigration as a nice example. There was a recent essay in the Atlantic
I think it was by Peter Beinart
Where he
He reviews
it starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about
immigration from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman and a bunch of other people on the Left
Who used to be able to say on the one hand you know
Compassion, economic on the other hand you know we have to have a legal process, and there's a threat to low-wage workers
so people on the Left used to be ale to talk about immigration and talk about the pros and cons the pluses and minuses but
Beinart shows how in the last four or five years you can't if you so much as suggests that well maybe
Immigration is a net good, but it might have some deleterious effects on certain classes of low-wage American workers
You could get in big trouble
Right because that's instantly prejudicial
You know because immigration has become a sacred topic so this is the key thing that I want everyone to keep in mind
We are fundamentally religious creatures, we're built for religion and it's a great achievement to create a scientific
Establishment and an academic establishment that keeps that way of thinking out
scientific thinking is not natural thinking religious thinking is natural thinking and what's happening to us in the last few years especially is a
flooding in of
Religious thinking and so let's get a bunch of social scientists to talk about immigration
What are they going to do look at the data, weigh up the pluses and minuses? No they're going to many of them feel
They're on a team and that team is fighting the right the right is anti-immigrant it includes racist elements therefore that justifies us in
being Pro immigration and
Social Sciences are always there's always ambiguity. There's always conflicting studies. Yes, there's multiple causal factors
And there are always in a social science study. That's right so Beinart's point was that
The left used to be able to think straight about immigration clearly it had a you know
It's generally Pro immigration, but it used to be able to think straight
But in the last few years a religious Orthodox mindset has overtaken it
Okay
So we might as well also point out that it's a primordial religious mindset right because I mean there are
I don't mean Christian or Jewish I mean
ancient, tribal
small-scale lots of gods. Right right well so then one of the things that you might suggest is that when you throw out a
sophisticated religious structure an unsophisticated
Religious structure comes in to fill the gap. I do so that's true. Okay
Definitely worth thinking about so. That's right, so that's right the thing with religions. We have to clarify
Fundamentalism is the problem not religion, and so-- it's close to tribalism. That's right if you get a fundamentalist
You know I'm happy to say and if you have people applying to a grad program in psychology
And I find out that they're Christian that's fine. There's no problem, but if they're fundamentalist Christian
I would think well let's say let's say it's not psychology suppose. It's you know
geology
So someone applies to a geology program they are a fundamentalist Young Earth Creationist
Are you gonna admit them? No. I don't think you should they're not able to do the right kind of thinking based on
What we know to be the case, they're-- They're not in the scientific paradigm-- Not the scientific, that's right
So so if we wouldn't admit a fundamentalist Christian to a geology program
why would we admit someone who is just as fundamentalist about certain moral and political issues into a
Sociology program or into a psychology program if they come in knowing what the right answer is committed to that right answer
likely to get angry at anyone who contravenes that right answer and and
Showing signs of closed-mindedness, I don't think they belong in a grad program-- Yeah
I guess the question is how in the world do you set up mechanisms to ensure that you're not
swamped by
Fundamentalists of any sort so those are people who are reducing everything to a single cause it's something like that
How can you implement a structure that protects the organization against that without the structure itself becoming
Totalitarian you know because these things these things spin out of control so fast. Yeah
But so you know, I think what we have to realize in the Academy is that we face. I think we face an existential crisis
We rely an enormous amount on public goodwill, we get enormous tax subsidies
direct research support and
recent polling shows that
While Democrats have always had a higher opinion of the universities than Republicans until two years ago
Everybody thought universities are a good thing. They make life better so Americans have been very supportive of higher education
They're been rising gripes on the right
But it's only between
2015 and 2017 that now Republicans go from saying mostly universities are good things in two years
They go way down and say the universes are bad things. They're making things worse now. How is this news greeted?
Pundits on the Left are us that oh those Republicans are so anti science look how ignorant. They are they now hate universities
Come on. Anybody who's been watching the news anybody who's seen the mobs, the shout-downs to the illiberal behavior
You know the metaphor I use is like you know
Americans on the right and left are
really supportive of the military we have it's one of the few institutions that we still hold in high esteem on both sides and
So the Republicans more than Democrats, so suppose you had Gallup poll
And I showing Republicans like the military more than Democrats but both really liked it
Then suddenly in 2015 we started seeing video from all over military bases and military
Academies in which the military leaders are overtly right-wing they're there
They're saying terrible things about
Leftists and progressives and the Midshipmen and the cadets and everybody is mobbing the occasional liberal and they're behaving in a really despicable
scary and intimidating way
What do you think the left would now think about the military obviously support for the military would plummet
That's what's happening in America with universities. We are losing the support of half the country. This is unsustainable
Especially in red states where you know they control the purse strings
So I think we have a major crisis
I think we've got to go into crisis mode
And we've got to clean up our act so just as we're doing in psychology with Replication Project
We recognize that our methods weren't good enough, and we're doing a crash course
Thanks to Brian Nosek and others, The OpenScience Project. We're really trying to improve our game. Thank God
We need to I think we have to do the exact same thing about partisanship and our [???] Okay
So let's talk about Heterodox Academy because you set that up this organization that you should tell everybody about in in
Precisely to deal with this issue, and so I'd like I'd like to know about it
How it's growing what it's doing what your aims are all of that. So I gave this talk in 2011 laying out
the fact that we have no more conservatives in social psychology, and why this makes it hard for us to find truth and
In the months after that a few social psychologists resonated with the message
They said wow I think that I think you're right. I have some data on this so the five of us
Or six of us
Wrote this paper. It came out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Oh, Charlotta Stern, I'm sorry was the sixth one that I forgot to add in before
We got this paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It came out
It was sort of online in 2014
But it came out for good in the summer 2015 which coincidentally was the same summer that my article came out with Greg Lukianoff
Called The Coddling of the American Mind that was about things going on with undergrads
But our concern was entirely faculty was just the nature of the academic community the research community
So we got these two things going on summer 2015
And then that summer I hear from Nick Rosencrantz a law professor who says we have the same problem in law
Is worse in law well, it's really bad in Canada, in law. Okay, because and as he points out
We're training all these students
They never meet a conservative then they have to go argue cases in front of judges half of whom were appointed by Republicans
They have no idea. What a conservative thinks this is malpractice
We got a train so say and I hear from a sociologist Chris Martin same thing of
Sociology so the three of us said hey you know
This is a big problem for the whole academy-- Have you looked at faculties of Education? Oh my God, those are the worst, by worst
I don't know the numbers
But in terms of the vindictiveness that the incred the pressure put on any non-conforming opinion my impression
I don't of data, but my impression from the letters I get is that education schools and social work school
Yeah, are the worst that's exactly in keeping with my my understanding as well
It's hard to tell which of those two are worst
I would say it's the faculties of Education because they have a direct pipeline to kids. Oh, in terms of their effects. Yes far more pernicious
Yeah, yes, yeah, but but equally equally warped let's say but but more pernicious
And and the things that are happening in the Canadian education system as a consequence of that are so reprehensible it-- We should get to that
Because it's happening here too with these ideas filtering down to high school. I've been so focused on college now
We're discovering the problem is actually baked in the illiberal attitudes are often baked in
Yes, and purposefully like in in Canada increasingly the the radical leftists have control over curriculum development
And they're starting to develop social justice curriculums, which is what they call them
For kindergarten kids so it's really it's been another get back through the earlier grades
So so the originally three of us decided to put up a website
I invited all the other authors from the the BBS paper
We invited a few other people working on this and so for the first year we had this project, it was called heterodoxacademy.org
We put the site up on about September 10th. I think it was
2015 and it was just a community of researchers who are studying
the problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity, well five days later the protests start at Missouri, so these are
racially motivated protests or protests about racial
insensitivity and racial problems at Missouri
And at first it seemed like this is just a Missouri problem, but coming in the wake of course of
Ferguson and all the videos we saw of unarmed black men being killed by police
The a lot of his concerns spread to other universities the protests aren't just about race
But it was that fall of 2015 especially the Yale protest
When the president of Yale validates their narrative that Yale's are racist place we have to reform Yale
Then it spreads nationally and now suddenly
This is not just a faculty issue anymore so even though at Heterodox Academy we mostly focus on the faculty
We're now seeing it's a complex ecosystem
With all kinds of forces acting on universities so that between 2015 and 2017
the danger of
Speaking honestly about what you think about an academic or intellectual proposition has skyrocketed the risk of being mobbed
Ostracized, formally investigated-- by Title IX people for example-- By Title IX people
Here we're sitting here at NYU, go to any bathroom. I'll show you on this floor go to any bathroom
There's a sign telling students exactly what number to call to report you or me if we say something that is
That someone takes to be a biased act. Oh, so you have bias you have bias investigation teams here. That's right
See we haven't got to that point that particular point in Canada yet
So I think we're farther ahead down that path in some ways, but not quite as far in others
Yeah, that's really that's really unbelievable. So things are changing very very fast
It's not at all schools, but then again things are changing so fast
We don't really know we don't have good data on what's going on what I can tell you though is that
At Heterodox Academy when we started out in 2015
There was a lot of suspicion a lot of people on the Left were afraid like oh is this some
Right-wing group now very few of us are actually on the right
But because we end up mostly speaking up for libertarians and conservatives who are attacked or silenced
You know people will think oh, we must be right-wing, but we're not I mean I'm I've never voted for Republican in my life
I've never given money to a Republican campaign
I'm now increasingly calling myself a liberal now that we see a illiberalism flourishing
But so when we started out there was a lot of suspicion of us from
Many professors, but now that it's clear that the problems these are not just a few anecdotes. This is the new normal
And it's not just in the Universities as you pointed out. That's right. It's already
It's like mad. And it's not just in the U.S. It's spread when in 2015 I thought it was uniquely American problem
Yeah, boy, it's in Canada and the UK and it is really what New Zealand that's right
It is a uniquely Anglosphere problem. This is really interesting
It's not on the continent very much at all. What about in the Nordic countries? No
I mean they have so political correctness you have lots of places the unique thing that
Identifies this new culture is linking the political correctness with the sense of fragility
And this is something America's pioneered the idea that
So in Britain they've always had
No platforming they call it so if there's an, there was an there's a British National Party, an actual fascist party
You know so if a if a BNP member is gonna speak on campus you mob him you shut it down no plat...
Don't give a platform, so you know you've had
Passionate politics certainly since the 60s so that's not new and that's everywhere
What's new is the American idea that if someone says something and it could be a sincerely expressed idea
Not a racist rant just like well. I don't know I think that maybe hormones do affect gendered behavior
Can you say that? Well what if someone takes that as as somehow
essentializing gender and then saying that women are inferior or whatever if they. Yes, well, that happened to James Damore, for exact exactly exactly so
So, that's what's new is the idea that if someone says something that
Someone a member of a protected or marginalized group is offended by that person is harmed. If that person is harmed
We must protect that person and more ominously just in the last year or two. It's not just that they're harming their suffering
It's that this was violent. Yes, right violence well
That's part of the postmodern
Narratives that attribute everything to power-- this is so dangerous the the crossing the line into into violence
It just occurred to me
Just like yesterday was thinking about this wait the state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, right
But if speech especially his speech and her speech and the people the speech of those people in that academic
movement or on the and that if their speech is violence well the state is supposed to have a monopoly on their speech then and
And if it's violence well
Then we have a right to use violence back
The state doesn't have a monopoly on our violence because our violence is you know it's morally motivated
so just the Orwellian and
Authoritarian implications of this move once you say that speech is violence you're unlocking you know you're opening Pandora's box
I mean you're you're five steps down the road to hell and I'd say we're about seven steps down the road
Okay you so you're or you're that concerned about it. Okay, so now tell me how many how many members
If you don't have to discuss any of this obviously
But how many members of Heterodox Academy are there now? We have 1,300 members so once we opened up it's originally
It was just four researchers who were studying this problem, but we had lots of people wanting to join and so we said well
Okay, why not and so we just said alright if as long as you're a professor
That is you have a PhD you're living more or less the life of a professor you have a university affiliation so we now take
adjuncts if they have a PhD
We take postdocs basically if you're in the guild if you're living the life of a professor and you're concerned about
the
Rise of intimidation frankly if you're concerned that our wonderful institution, I love I love being a professor
I love hmm, and I feel like it's not just losing public respect. It's losing its ability to to function
It's losing its ability to teach and do research on politicized topics
There are more politicized topics all the time. That's right, and there are few in the natural science
It's not many
But there are some in the Natural Sciences as well anyway my point is we're now growing very rapidly and something
I'm very excited by is
Since we've started having more of violence on campus with beginning with Berkeley and Middlebury
we're seeing a pervasive sense among people on the left that there really is this problem here that something has to be done and
So we are finding much more acceptance now
From professors on the left so I like to think about there's the liberal left
Yeah, just the great majority
And there's the illiberal left. We did a factor analysis of politically correct beliefs and found exactly that
And that the and that the illiberal left was also high in orderliness-- That's interesting, that's the authoritarian-- Exactly
and also
kind of markedly decline
Was also characterized by a marked lack of verbal intelligence. That's yeah it
The correlation was about 0.4-- Well that oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful because one of the simplest formulations
I've heard were the great formulation from Mark Lilla so Mark Lilla wrote this fantastic op-ed the New York Times
A week after Trump was elected saying identity politics is a really foolish thing to do
It pushes lots of people over to Trump's side, the identity politics is part of the problem well
He writes this op-ed and one of his fellow professors at Columbia
I forget how she does it, but she basically says something about that
you know the the mask with eyeholes falls from his face like you know he's a Ku Klux Klan member something like that and
So Lilla, Lilla who is in the humanities, he's an intellectual historian
Lilla has this simple formulation. He says that's a slur not an argument and once I had that simple formulation
I realized wow that's almost all the pushback I've ever gotten it's somehow. You know
Oh, you know you're winking at Nazi's or you are-- Yeah, that's happened to me over and over
I was just my neighborhood was just posters with-- I saw that get the intimidation so so this is really key
We're supposed to be all about
you can say anything you want you can make any argument you want if you can support it if
You can back it with reasons. This is critical thinking
This is what we're supposed to train our students to do. Well, and it's not only that you can say anything
But you can say it
There's a boundary on that which especially if you're a scientist less so in the humanities
But if you're a scientist the things you say have to be vetted by people who are going to be critical of them right so
So not only not only is a new facility. That works is accountability. That's built into it. That's right
So I didn't mean to say you can say you know are racist rant
I mean you can put forth any idea you want if you can back it up what we're seeing
with anything politicized is it's not about backing it up students are learning rhetorical techniques to link their enemies to
Something racist as-- Well something contemptible, something contaminated-- Something disgusting
You bet and that and that and those are the things that are not only worthy of being destroyed
But that you have a moral duty to destroy that's-- Oh, that's right, so it's almost like the immune system
Yeah, I don't know exactly how it works
but there's some cell that tags a cell as
You know enemy enemy and once that tag is put on the cell that attracts other I don't know
What kind of cell to it-- Yeah, mob it so we should look into this this metaphor of the immune system
Yeah, because you know once they once you're labeled as a racist
Students don't have to read you that it doesn't matter what you actually say you will now be attacked. Well
It's also too that once you're labeled that way if someone defends you the label is contagious, right?
In exactly the same manner-- That's how we know we're in this super-religious territory of witch-hunts that if you stand up for someone you are tagged and then you
will be mobbed. Right and that's an infectious disease
Exactly, That's why there's so much cowardice on campus among both students and faculty
People are afraid to stand up even if the majority think that what's going on is nuts or is
Unfair they're afraid to stand up and that's in part due to social media because it's just I mean students today have been raised with
Various platforms that make it easy for people to join in attack someone
They look at who liked what so if in that article. We just saw on Reed there was a bit of a counter-revolution at Reed
The students had to get together somehow and decide
Should I like that post how about we all like it at the same time then we'll get in less trouble, okay like. Okay
So to what degree, so let's talk about the aims of the Heterodox Academy, so you've brought people together who are in
principle interested in a
Diversity of opinions and but but in what manner is that going to be utilized to - - I
don't want to use the word combat but - but to deal with this emergent problem of ideological rigidity in the universities? Yeah, so
Two useful concepts here one is The Emperor's New Clothes
We all know that story
Even if most people even if everybody sees this is nuts the Emperor's walking around with no clothes
They're afraid to say it until one person says it so and this is also the Asch experiment
Everybody says that that line is the same as that line. It's obviously not true
If one person says the truth then nobody conforms after that
So the mere presence of a group of people who say you know
But we actually need a diversity of opinions and the fact that on our site
We'll publish things so sometimes when professors are mobbed like when Bret Weinstein
You know was mobbed you know so I wrote an essay that stood up for him. We've done it for some of them
It's happening so fast. I can't keep up. I can't I've got books to write like you know every week
There's some new members getting mobbed and so we're gonna develop a team of people who will write
But just knowing that there are people who will stand up for you
Knowing that there are people who will say wait a second
You know this is not what we do in the Academy
So that's one thing is we just stand up for each other. Um two is we develop products that
We think can basically fix the situation
So one of our products is called the campus expression survey
It's a survey designed to actually measure who was afraid of speaking up about what topics and why what are they afraid of?
And it turns out everyone's afraid of the students more than the faculty
They're afraid to mostly to talk about race-- What about the administrators? Everyone's afraid of the students. They're afraid of the students.
Oh, so I don't have we've not so made them. I've only surveyed students. I don't okay, okay, but from what we hear
People are afraid of of the students
That's also appalling in its own manner like was that Reed where-- It's a failure of leadership, yeah-- that's for sure
They let those kids come into the classroom the actual classroom and disrupt a class on an ongoing basis. I mean-- For months--
Yes, and I couldn't understand that exactly I mean my response to that would be
First I would tell them to leave second I would call campus security
Third if something wasn't done about it
I just wouldn't teach the class
So I don't understand like it seems to me that it's also up to individual professors to draw a line
Which is that if you're being intimidated by students, why do you why do you show up and teach the class?
I don't understand that-- Yeah, so um again
People are afraid to stand up if it means that people will call you a racist
Yeah, but God. I mean it's it's weird in that situation though-- It's carried to an absurd--
You're also afraid to go to your class you know and there's a much more proximal threat there
That's what I mean. That's what I'm most alarmed by is the rise of intimidation intimidation is now a
In many aspects of academic life, and that's just terrible that's completely incompatible
With what we do and who we are. What's especially it's especially appalling given that whatever happens in the university campuses
You know like one of the questions I've faced in Canada is well, why should we care about what's happening
Yeah-- In the ivory tower? If you're gonna hire these people next year. You are well. Yeah well
They're it's the heart like what's happening in the campuses is going to happen in society in five years
It's already that goes it's already happens. This is actually important point
I just gave a talk at a big law firm here in New York where they're very devoted to diversity, but they're doing it
Right they're really thinking about diverse like why is diversity good, and spent a whole month on viewpoint diversity
which is just fantastic and
What I'm learning from talking to a number of people in the business world is
That in the last year there are now all these pressures on leaders to endorse this condemn that sign this open letter
That's right, that's right, but it's the same dynamic. We have on campus and the answer to it
So if anybody anybody watching here if you run a business if you have friends who are in business
I think the only the there are only two stable equilibria
One is that every organization is just either all right wing we're all left-wing
But that would be disastrous you so either you just say okay, we're on one side, but that would be terrible
The other is what we call the Chicago principles of free expression
The University of Chicago has the best statement out there on how the University provides a platform on which
Multiple views can contest the university does not take any one side
That's the only other stable alternative, and I think leaders need to do this in business, certainly in universities
So we're encouraging every University to adopt the Chicago principles because a lot of what mass action is is an attempt to
Compel the authority to come in on your side and punish your enemies. Yeah
And so that has to stop-- So so how how effectively is the Chicago statement on on
How effectively is the Chicago statement being disseminated how rapidly are universities signing up or or?
They're, a few signed on early in this whole crisis
Perdue, they're about 10 or 15 that have that have endorsed it or something like it
It's not enough to just endorse something but if you have leadership that's committed to
Creating an open platform in which people can disagree
And and one thing that's very encouraging. I've been invited by a number of university presidents to come speak
We have all kinds of innovations at Heterodox Academy
To foster a more inclusive climate in which people can actually
engage with difference
There's a lot of interest so I think the university leaders were very slow to react they didn't want to alienate certain factions of students
But they're almost all reasonable people they're almost all liberal left
Not illiberal, they're horrified by what's going on. They know they're sitting atop a powder keg
They don't want things to blow up in their face as happened at Evergreen so this brings us to our
Another product the one that we're most excited by so it just went online
Actually today, it's called the OpenMind Platform. If you go to openmindplatform.org
You can find we've developed an app we have a whole library of readings and videos, we developed an app that guides you through
We don't just say here's how to engage with different viewpoints we start by saying why is it good?
And we make the case that you need this everybody needs this and two
We remind people that we're all basically
Self-righteous hypocrite so we have quotes from wisdom traditions around the world and we've all heard this so just a little bit of you know
you can call it emotional manipulation if you like but just
Get people into a mindset in which they're willing to say oh yeah, whoa you know calm down. We're all we're all
too self-righteous here
And then we then we teach them some psychology
About motivated reasoning and only then do we teach them to engage with views that are not their own
So we've already run this in about 15 or 20 classes
The results so far look promising. In that, at the end of it the measures show that students are more open to other ideas
So the OpenMind Platform, we think is a tool that
We think a lot of universities are going to adopt. There's a lot of interest in it and
If there's leadership if the professors generally do support viewpoint diversity and open inquiry if we change freshman orientation
so that students are trained first and foremost in how to
Step back, give people that benefit of the doubt the open-minded if we do that first
You know that's like behavioral
exposure to some degree right the idea would be that if you're if you're
Afraid or disgusted by something that you don't understand
the appropriate first treatment first of all the treatment is necessary because otherwise you'll you'll isolate yourself in the ways that you already described and
Second that brief exposure
Voluntary exposure is going to be the best curative
That's the opposite of the safe space idea
Exactly need to be the safe space the same space idea is the worst thing you could possibly
Do for the very people yeah exactly exactly
I mean the psychology what you know
The psychology behind safe spaces and microaggressions is just the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we want to create kids
Especially black kids, gay kids, women, whatever if you think that they are
Vulnerable to more stigma more conflict if you think that they are vulnerable. That's especially when a safe space will be
temporarily
Pleasant but in the long run bad. Right and that's the critical issue too with regards to safe spaces is that they're
Sacrificing the medium and long term of the students' well-being
Let's say to the short term lack of fear and conflict
They're infantilizing them essentially so yeah, okay, so all right
So I was thinking about the the discussion idea
I've got a personality test online now that's based on this Big Five aspect scale
but it might be interesting as something for us to think about to to find people who are high in openness and low in
Conscientiousness or orderliness and offer them the opportunity to engage in dialogue with people who have the opposite personality traits
you know because well first of all because they're gonna run into people like that always right and and and maybe even establish a
relationship with them
inadvertently and so being able to tolerate that might give them the kind of insight that you said you developed when you realized that the
conservative ethos was based on a reasonable, but not complete set of
of
Beneficial axiomatic presuppositions so alright so now
This is pretty much taken over your life this Heterodox Academy as well as the writing now
you're writing a couple of new books I understand yeah, so
so since so I was in the psychology department at the University of Virginia for
For 17 years and when my book The Righteous Mind was coming out
I wanted to move to New York City for a year, so I could you know do promotional work for it
And I just had my second child was just born
I knew it would be hard to fly from Charlottesville
So I just happened to get a position a temporary position here at Stern at the business school and when I first arrived
I wasn't that interested in business
but as soon as I got here Occupy Wall Street happened and suddenly it was like everyone's talking about morality and politics and
Capitalism and business, and then I started learning about the history of capitalism
And I knew nothing about it was fascinating and I started seeing how free enterprise and free markets have helped
Raise... raise living standards around the world. Yes
Radical decline in poverty-- In a staggeringly rapid fashion that's completely
Unprecedented, especially since the year 2000. That's right so since so you know here
I was 48 years old discovering
I had nothing about it was like when I first learned about evolution like wow this explains like
Everything in the natural world and learning about capitalism business explained everything about the built world and the world that we actually live in
and
They were also all these business scandals
This was 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis, and I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology to help
corporations have better ethics
So I then everything I do is involves applying moral psychology to help complex systems work better
So I've been focused on political polarization and governance for years before then and that led to The Righteous Mind
And then I got here to Stern they offered me a job during that first year, and I took it and it's been fantastic
It's been really exciting. It's like a whole new
you
know almost like being back in grad school a whole bunch of new things to learn. It must be a kind of a shock and
Existential shark to be in a business school in some sense. It's not a shock. I mean it's a different culture
It's much more open in the sense that it's so diverse like the things people are doing
There's not like a way that we do things here
And it's much more open to applied projects to actually yeah to applied projects yeah
And so is a perfect time for me like I just you know The Righteous Mind thing that wraps up like the first half of
My career like everything I did is in that book and now it's time for something new and that new thing was going to be
Looking at how morality or moral psychology both
underlines, or is the foundation for our ability to do capitalism like contracts reciprocity all sorts of things and how our
left-right divide
From The Righteous Mind makes it hard for us to figure out
What's true like if you raise the minimum wage does that help or hurt the working poor right if you're an economist on the left
Obviously helps them they're economist on the right it obviously hurts them because fewer of them have jobs. And you can
Gerrymander the measurement devices to produce the conclusions that you want which is a big problem. That's right
So I'm supposed to be writing a book called Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life
And so I started traveling around the world looking at how
Development is going in various countries
I did a three-month trip to Asia in 2015 I came back from Asia
My article came out with Lukianoff on The Coddling the American Mind, the BBS article was published
And I thought ok now I can get back to this you know keep read this capitalism book
And then the university is kind of began melting down in the fall, and then we started Heterodox Academy
And so yes it has taken over my life. It's it's basically a full-time job in addition to trying to write
the I'm also working on a book so
Lukianoff
And I didn't want to turn our article into a book because we thought we'd said everything but man have things been happening fast
We've learned so much more since we wrote that article. And you wrote that article when? How long-- Well we wrote it in late 2014
And then we you know edited it in early 2015 and it finally came out in August of 2015
And so in last October Greg wrote to me and said John
I think I do want to turn the article into a book because we know so much more now
And it's the problem is so much more serious
Than it was then and the evidence, my God, the evidence about mental the mental health crisis of adolescents when Greg and I wrote the article
We were you know we saw lots of hints that depression and anxiety were going way up-- Yeah--
And we think that's related to the overprotection
Yeah ok so let's talk about that just for a sec and then go back to the book
So I've got a potential demographic explanation for that in part well
And I don't know if you guys have looked into this or not well
There's there's two things that I think might be contributing to it
One is two or three things one is the average age at which children are
The average age at which people have children has gone way up
Why does that matter? Well because I think people get more conservative and cautious as they get older. A little bit, true
But it's a very small effect okay, and it's wait a second, okay
It's the having of the kids, which is what makes them more conservative when you have kids you are more threat sensitive
You're more likely to vote for the right-wing party so
Just delaying child child
Birth wouldn't okay. What about what about fewer siblings?
That would yes that's part of it, and this is what we're seeing in Asia too when you have a lot of kids
You're not quite as worried. You don't have all your eggs in one basket. Well
And you can't be quite as worried and the siblings raise each other-- that's right-- right and then there's a lot of dominance hierarchies
struggle. That's right, exactly-- They play and fight
It's the free play and the fighting the working things out for themselves those are essential skills of adulthood
Okay, so good, so then all right
Yeah, let me only size is part of it right well, and then also what's happening increasingly in schools
Is that kids aren't allowed free play, and they're certainly not allowed
Rough-and-tumble free play. Exactly that's right. That's one of the biggest things as well so the two that there are three giant
There are a lot of problems
I mean this is such actually it's really a fun puzzle because it's like the biggest social science puzzle of our age. What is happening
That's making so many of our systems go haywire, and I'm focusing on the university the big three
I would say our one is the loss of free of unsupervised free play. Yeah, okay, and Peter Gray has been brilliant on this
He's at Boston College showing how even among young animals they have to practice the skills for adulthood
Yeah
And getting in conflicts and then dealing with it and sometimes losing and will come back
Having a game in which there's a problem, but you have to work it out or the game stops
That's what kids always did. Yeah.
It's only recently the 90s in the 90s that they're always supervised because we're afraid if we take our eyes off them
The moderate left puts its best foot forward, arguing traditional liberal values of the university, explaining how extreme leftism on campus is a deep threat to the identity of the University at virtually all levels.
They'll be kidnapped, and it was never a risk was never you know
I've kind of wondered about this gender flexibility issue as form of delayed fantasy play
You're getting Freudian on me, go ahead. Well because because it looks to me like that is you know when kids are little and three
And four say three to seven they do a tremendous amount of identity play you know they pretend they're animals they pretend
They're their parents they
They pretend they're girls if they're boys they pretend they're boys
If they're girls like they really do a tremendous amount of identity play and one of the things that's been really
Puzzling me is well. What happens if that isn't
If they never have an opportunity for that because they're not engaging in fantasy play, maybe it's just delayed till adulthood
So because played it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of that rough-and-tumble play
And then the fantasy play that enables you to adopt different identities
And then the negotiated games that you talked about that enabled people to handle both both victory, but even more importantly loss
That's possible that could well be I that I have no opinion on you know, but the big three factors that I think are
Explaining to explain what's happening on campus are one the loss of the unsupervised play so that the kids
have always there's always an adult present and so they come to college and they expect there to be an adult and Dean somebody if
There's a conflict that's one
Two is social media, which hit just as iGen, so iGen, internet generation. This is Jene Twenge's work
You know we used to we used to think that
We used to think that the millennial generation ends in
1998 or 2000 but Jene Twenge shows looking at four large datasets that birth year 1995
Kids born in 1995 and after are really different, their values are different
They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression especially the girls boys have gone up, girls have gone way up
And the reason seems to be that Facebook lowered its age
So in 2005 you had to be a college student at a certain number of colleges to get Facebook
In 2006 you could be any eleven-year-old who lies and says that she's 13 and you've got a Facebook account
But then you're using it on your parents, PC and in 2007 the iPhone comes out
And it saturates the market faster than any consumer product ever has
so by 2010 or 11
A lot of adolescents have have Facebook and other social platforms
And this is just devastating especially to girls because it's not texting texting is just me to you
You know that's back and forth that's fine that you know we, when we were kids we called our friends on the phone
That's fine the problem seems to be according to Twenge. It's especially
Platforms in which he put something out, and then you wait and see what everyone says it right and that
Especially is damaging to girls who already are at risk of eating disorders and image issues. Okay, okay
So so girls become more susceptible to negative emotion when they hit puberty. Well, well they're-- Yes-- Yes, ok
then there's another issue too with regards to female aggression so
You know it's clearly the case that males are more likely to be physically
Damaging slash aggressive than females are but what females use is reputation savaging
That's Nicki Crick's work, Nikki Crick passed away a couple years ago
Showed that if you add it all up boys and girls are equally aggressive
But the boys aggression is more physical the girls the more relational so if you imagine a bunch of 13, 14 year-olds in
their middle schools, and then you parachute in a whole bunch of iPhones
Everybody's got one in their pocket now. What are the boys gonna? Do they're gonna play video games that doesn't hurt anybody. Yeah
But the girls are going to use it to amplify the social interactions, so this is Twenge's explanation
I think it makes a lot of sense, so it's a it's a catastrophe. It's a crisis, and we're really hurting especially the girls
So we've got to change something about that anyway
But social media is is possibly the largest single reason why things are going haywire on campus the third big factor
and do you think it's primarily Facebook or can you tell well, it's it's a
The kids use a lot of different platforms, but from what I hear Instagram
Facebook, SnapChat
Again the thing is it's one too many
That's what's bad is anything if it's if it's you put something out there, and you see how many people liked it, right
That's what's right, and there's always the threat that it'll go viral in a terrible way so that's a hammer exactly
Or the Sword of Damocles
That's like unlimited damage. Unlimited downside to saying something. So what do you do, so they're very careful. Right.
So I don't know if I want to like that post because you know I could get in big trouble for it. Right
Well the benefit to liking it is minimal and the potential catastrophe
Unless you're expected to like it in which case you better like it because you if you don't like it
You'll get in trouble, so it's a much more of a mob
Mentality kids are afraid. You know I'm not blaming the kids. I'm very sympathetic to me. These are my kids
You know my kids are 11, and 7. They're gonna come up into this
So the kids have been raised in a in a social environment
That's much more about mob mob formation and mob attacks and mob defend defenses against mobs
And then the so the third factor, then is the political polarization and the purification of institutions
So if you imagine coming up in the 90s when political polarization is going up
We're beginning to hate each other more across party lines, but it's not that hard not that that nasty
But it's been getting much much more hostile so that now if someone like if someone is if someone goes to a campus
Republicans meeting if it's a democrat who goes to a meeting of the campus republicans has happened at UC Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago
and someone finds out you know that so the the
hatred the cross party hatred is so much stronger now and
Many of our institutions are much purer, so if you went to college the 90s there might have been a few conservative professors around
But now there aren't so as you said before it's like exposure therapy if you've never
Encountered a conservative idea and then a conservative like Heather McDonald comes to speak on your campus well
This is like a major immune response problem. We got to get the tribe together and mob her and you know shut her down
So those are the I mean they're many other reasons, but the loss of unsupervised play social media and rise of polarization
Those are the three big ones. Right, well, those are big problems especially the loss of unsupervised play
It's not it's not obvious at all how that might be addressed. Yes, it is! Okay, Good good. I everyone should buy
Everyone should just buy Lenore Skenazy's book Free-Range Kids
And then they should loosen up and give their kids more unsupervised time now. You can't do this alone. You'll be arrested
Yeah
I tried to get my son to go out across the street to you know buy groceries when he was you know nine years
Old yeah, and he'd say like, but you know daddy people look at me funny. There are no other kids out there
And so Lenore has started a fantastic organization called Let Grow so if viewers go to letgrow.org
Okay, we'll put all this in the description all of these things
So I'm on the board of it as an adviser Peter Gray an expert on play is on the board and they're doing these
simple things
Simple simple things like you convince a school to just open up the playground an hour early
Or keep it open after school
Why should kids always have organized activities and soccer practice?
Just give them a place to play where there's a nurse available if someone gets hurt
There is an adult, but he's not supervising. He's just over there right so don't worry parents
There is an adult, but beyond that is what they want and they just started this a few weeks ago, and the results are fantastic
The kids are having so much fun. They are becoming more independent. They're more willing to do projects on their own
It's working out great. So oh, that's really can't do this on your own, but the thing is
So those are very practical that's very practical piece of advice for schools. It's like open up the unsupervised play
Facilities and and and facilitate their use. That's right. Give give everyone a place which is safe and by safe
I mean physically safe right never use the word safety to describe emotions and ideas safety means physical safety
So you've got to provide a physically safe place for the kids to play and beyond that you let him go now there will arise
Problems of bullying so if it's repeated harassment, oh, you know well
I know a book about that which it's by Dan Olweus
Called Bullying: What We Know and What We Can Do About It, and it was written
it's got to be 30 years ago and Olweus cut the...
the the the
Incidence of bullying in the Scandinavian countries down by 50% and he really really targets
What bullying means, so he's not a safe space guy by any stretch of the imagination
I don't know what the origins of it are
I know that evaluations of his program in America show anywhere from zero to 20 percent reductions
Yeah, well like so this are much smaller-- in the U.S?-- In the U.S.
Yeah, the question is whether or not they were able to implement them with the rigor he did, in the U.S.
Yeah, but bullying programs are part of the problem because bullying clearly is a problem
We need to do something about it, but because we have what's called concept creep
Yes, oh so, it's now my joint concept creep looks like even yeah, that's right
So now it's the case that if if kids don't invite if some kids want to do something
And they don't invite another kid they've excluded that kid right. Well. That could be bullying right?
I've read of schools in Europe that don't allow kids to have best friends for exactly that reason
Yeah
Well because the this is also something that really bothers me about the misuse of the IAT [Implicit Association Test]
Because it's not that easy to distinguish in group preference
Which no one can know one when their right mind would want to eliminate in group preference given that it
Governs your choice of mate and your behavior towards your family members
Let's say
to distinguish that between out group
Exclusion is no in no simple matter and to tell kids that they can't have a best friend is another thing that
interferes with an important part of their-- That's right
Yeah, I think both of us have spent a lot of time looking at ancient wisdom at the writings of
People long ago, and I often come back to Aristotle's claim that any virtue carried to extremes becomes a vice
so inclusion is a good thing if people are being excluded because they have a physical stigma or
Because or they're overweight or their skin color, so you know we need to be looking at the reasons
Why kids are excluded, but if you say inclusion is the primary virtue
Inclusion over everything else and so if those two best friends are excluding others. No more best friend. All right. This is madness
Yeah, this is a vice so I think that inclusion again. You know it's a virtue unless it's carried to extremes
Well, that's probably a pretty good place to stop
I would say unless you have do you have anything else that you wanted to talk about we were we talked about the role of
Religion mm-hm and in the fact that people are naturally religious thinkers. Yeah, we talked about the Heterodox Academy
We talked about your work on disgust and your plans for the Academy you talked about your books. Is there anything else that
That might be of interest that you can think of just
That I'll just say that I'm actually
Optimistic about what's going to happen on campus. I think things might continue to get worse this year
But I think there's an interesting phenomenon called preference falsification when you have
People not speaking honestly
They as you had under communism
When you have a whole system or almost everybody thinks this is terrible. I hate this, but I don't dare say anything
When you have preference falsification, work by Timur Kuran
And everybody hears everybody else's preferences, so they think okay, that's what everybody thinks
When you have an unraveling it can unravel very quickly and that's what happened in the communist countries because everybody hated it
And it fell amazingly quickly, and I think the you know the the push back at Reed last week
Or there was really last week, so I think because most people we're starting to see is that a lot of people of color also
Is they you know you're not speaking for me. I mean every group is diverse and so
when you have a variety of people and you have progressives speaking you have a variety of people I
Think we're going to see more and more people standing up saying wait, what's happening is this is not right
This is illiberal. This is opposed to the values of the academy
This is not what I want for myself or my kids or my students
So I do think that we're gonna start seeing a lot more people standing up
And one of our goals at Heterodox Academy is to just help put out the ideas that people need and this is what you're doing
to just put out the ideas critique the bad ideas and
put out
concepts in that that can contest in this space of ideas
Get good information, so if people go to heterodoxacademy.org on our research pages
We have all the information that what about the polls say? What's the current information about about students' attitudes?
We have the history of this we have a lot of research on who is more biased left or right well turns out both sides
Are about equally biased
so we think that by just doing what we actually do well as
Academics, that is research, making arguments, being calm and civil
We actually think that we can turn this around so if anybody watching this is a professor I would
Invite you to join go to heterodoxacademy.org
Okay, so let me ask you one more question
I mean I'm that that sounds good, and I'm it's good to hear that you're optimistic. I mean I waver
Although I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic
I just think we're in one of those situations where things could spiral in either direction very rapidly and that worries me
What about the disciplines on campus that seem to be primarily devoted to the activist cause?
Like because my view is or my fear is that we've subsidized the activist disciplines
Let's say women's studies as a good example, but we could say social work, and then the faculties of Education now as well
I think they're in the same in the same
Bin let's let's let's put it that way
the Women's Studies programs in particular their their express goal
Expressed on their websites is to produce
social justice radical left-leaning
activists and so like for a while one of the things I proposed in Canada was that the
Conservatives in particular cut the university funding by 25 percent so that the universities would have to sort themselves out
But then that was that was a provocative claim obviously, but then I thought well
That's not a good idea because it opens up the door to political interference in the Academy and that's bad. That's
That's right, but the Academy has done a very bad job of policing itself methodologically, and we have these disciplines Women's Studies
I think is a prime example and that's been very much criticized in Canada by Janice Fiamengo who used to be yeah
Yeah, she is and she's she's not in her natural milieu when she's doing such things
you know she's a brave and tough person and she's gone after the Women's Studies types on methodological grounds particularly, but
But there are people who are working full-time at doing nothing, but producing the kind of pol...
So what do you have any thoughts about? Yes, I do I think so
Here I teach in the business school here, and I teach a course called Professional Responsibility
And I teach my students about their fiduciary duties their duties to their employers the duties that we have to each other
And fiduciary duty refers to a very very high standard of care if you're managing someone's money
You know you you really have to be committed to doing what's in their interest not in your interest
And I think we need that concept in the Academy we have I'm not sure if recall fiduciary duties or just professional duties
But I think we have two primary professional duties that we must never never betray
One the most important one in our role as scholars is our duty to the truth
we must never
Say things that we think are false or allow people to say things that we think are false because we're afraid
if we challenge them we'll get in trouble so we have a fiduciary due to the truth and
political ideological commitments clearly warp us they make us do things they make they push us so
We've got a whole we've got to recognize that if we let our systems get out of whack we are betraying the truth
We're systemically what you want to we have what a systemic truth-ism problem
We are systemically betraying the truth in many of our disciplines
So I think we need an awareness of that and we need to hold herself to a higher standard
Then in our role as teachers we have and here we really can call it a fiduciary duty
These are people's children who are sent to us to educate to enlarge their minds to teach them skills
If we were to use them for our sexual pleasure it's obviously a horrific crime
But what is it if we use them for our ideological purposes if we say you've given your children to educate
I'm waging a political battle. I'm gonna try to get use this as tools tools. That is horrific that is unacceptable
We are violating our duties so I think
Right, but the the response to that especially from the postmodernist types is that
That's all there. Is there's only
ideological aspect
so back to your original question are there problem departments absolutely so I wanted to put forth these two commitments to truth and
to educating not indoctrinating yeah, and
Universities that embrace these highest goals like the University of Chicago. I think is the best candidate
will probably find that they need to
Do something about departments they don't live up to those goals
Other universities, and I think Brown is leading the way on this one so far
I mean the
Early 2015 the president had all kinds of statements about Brown is committed to social justice a fundamental bedrock commitment to social justice she said
so if some universities choose to devote themselves to social justice
That's fine. Just be upfront about it say so so students will know if you want social justice training you go to Brown
but if you want to actually be trained to find the truth to do research you go to Chicago and
I think we're gonna see people
Flooding to Chicago and schools like it so what I'm hoping
What I'm hoping so that's the mechanism there if they if they make it if they make their statements public
That the choice of the students will be
To go to the universities that hold the principles that you just described over the other one so it'll be a marketplace choice exactly
That's right, so that's why I said when I talk about the Emperor's New Clothes
We have a situation
We have a gigantic market failure in which our top universities are offering the product that most consumers don't want
and
So my prediction is that Chicago is going to see a huge surge of applications this year, and if that's true
I think other universities are going
They're gonna take notice so I'm hoping that we'll see a schism in the American Academy
Between those universities that stand up and say this is madness. We are committed to providing a platform
We don't discriminate based on viewpoint politics
That's the Chicago Way, and those that say no we're about social justice come here
And we will train you to fight for social justice and against the right
So if people have clear choices, then I think we're gonna see a big change
And that's why I'm optimistic cuz I think we're gonna see that
All right, well. Thank you very much. It was great talking with you
