(soft music)
- [Batia Wiesenfeld] Hi, I'd like to welcome
everyone to the latest edition
of Stern Faculty Insights on COVID-19.
For today's session, I am so
happy to have my colleague,
Jon Haidt who is gonna talk to us about
the insights that we can
get from positive psychology
to feel better about all of this.
So Jon, thank you so much for joining us.
Just a quick reminder to everyone,
you can feel free to lodge your questions
on the Q&A box and I will
be sure to raise them
with Jon after the presentation.
Thanks so much again,
Jon and take it away.
- [Jon Haidt]Okay, well, thanks so much, Batia.
We're all struggling to make
sense of what's going on
and it's been a pleasure to
try to make sense with you,
our faculty meetings and
all the things the Stern
has been doing I've been
finding very, very helpful.
So I'm thrilled to be part of this.
By coincidence, I was teaching
a positive psychology course
this semester and so I
was deep into the research
on positive psychology
when all of this hit
and I had a couple weeks to really work
this out with my students.
And so with this talk coming up,
I decided, actually yesterday,
that I would actually try to turn this
into a real talk with
slides and everything.
So these slides are not quite done,
but here it is, I'll try to tell a story
about how to thrive in the age of COVID.
Let me see, I will share my screen.
So what I'm gonna do
here, in about 20 minutes,
I'll share these ideas and
then Batia and I will talk.
And I think there are
three essential ideas,
three big ideas from positive psychology,
that I think can help us all make sense,
both as individuals and
within organizations.
So antifragility, reappraisal
and then happiness comes from between.
And then we'll try to apply
those in conversation,
I'll be focusing on the individual level,
but, with Batia, we'll work
on the other levels as well.
So I wanna start with a question,
I guess, I can't really see people
and I can't really see their responses,
but maybe just raise your
hand even in the privacy
of your own quarantine,
would you say that this pandemic
is among the worst things to have happened
to humanity in the last 50 years?
Yes or no, if you'd say yes,
just raise your hand right now.
Follow-up question, do you
wish it had not happened?
If you could wave a magic wand
and stop that first viral transmission
where it jumped from a bat to
some other person or animal,
would you stop that?
Yes, or no, if yes, raise your hand.
Okay, now, I think, I would
say yes to both questions,
but I would be kind of
afraid to wave that wand.
I'd do it only with trepidation
and I might not do it
at all and here's why.
So many of you have heard some version
of this Chinese folktale
about a farmer, this is long ago in China,
in Northern China, near the Great Wall,
a man loved his horses and his son.
One day his prized horse ran away,
neighbors came to commiserate and say,
"Oh, we're so sorry, what bad luck,"
and he said, "Is it good
luck, is it bad luck?
"It's too soon to tell."
So the neighbors go away puzzled
and then a few days
later, the horse returns,
bringing with it 12 wild horses.
"A stroke of great
fortune," say his neighbors
and they come to congratulate him.
But he says, "Is it good luck, bad luck?
"It's too soon to tell."
So a few days later, his
son is taming or training
one of the horses and he falls,
the horse falls on him and breaks his leg,
he'll walk with a limp.
Neighbors come, "Oh, we're so sorry."
Once again, "Is it good luck, bad luck?"
And then, a few weeks
later, a war breaks out,
there's a draft, all the
young men are drafted.
The war goes terribly,
most of the sons die.
The Neighbors come to commiserate
and once again, the standard
goes on and on, like that.
Now, let's apply that
to our current crisis.
So we were warned, we were
told over and over again,
"It's not a matter of if,
it's a question of when,"
that's what Bill Gates
said in his 2015 Ted Talk.
"We are facing the possibility
of a mega catastrophe
with hundreds of millions dead.
Ed Yong said the same
thing in The Atlantic,
"Plagues, pandemics are
coming, we're not ready."
So this was not a black swan,
this was not, "Oh, my God,
where did this come from?"
This was a gray rhino, we were warned,
it was coming and we didn't do
very much to prepare for it.
It's worse than that, the
scariest talk I have ever seen
was the Ted conference a year ago,
in which Rob Reid pointed
out, "You know what?
"There's a bunch of
men, they're always men,
"who have tried to kill as
many people as they could
"and usually they commit
suicide in the process.
"Well, what will happen in the 2030s,
"when these men can just type out
"if they have a biology undergrad degree,
"they can type out the DNA sequence
"of any virus they wanna invent
"and they can come up with a killer virus
"that will wipe out humanity?
"Would someone do it?
"Quite possibly, yes."
But you know what?
thanks to the COVID crisis,
our risk of extinction,
our risk of a mega catastrophe,
is a lot lower today than
it was back in January.
Bill Gates just yesterday,
in The Economist,
Bill Gates said that the coronavirus
is gonna cause all kinds of breakthroughs
and that's just on the medical side,
think about the institutional side,
the political side, the economic side,
research in all kinds of ways.
We will be much more ready now,
the chance of being wiped out
by a virus is now much lower.
We might even say that the coronavirus
is a giant inoculation for all of humanity
against future viral diseases
and other threats that
require global cooperation.
So I ask you again, is
this among the worst things
to have happened to us?
Well, yes, but would you wave that wand?
Would you erase it so it didn't happen?
Too soon to tell.
So I open this way,
basically to illustrate
the first two of my points.
Antifragility, we grow from adversity,
that's what's gonna happen to us
because of the virus
and we can choose how to frame things
and this whole catastrophe, you might say,
looks very different if we reframe it,
if we reappraise it as I just did.
And so think to yourself,
did that give you any
hint of positive feeling?
Did that give you a sense
of release or relief,
or did that reframing feel good?
All right, let's dig in a little deeper.
So what I'm drawing on here
is that book that I wrote,
in 2006, called The Happiness Hypothesis,
for which I read ancient
wisdom, east and west,
and I picked at every psychological idea
and organized them into 10 chapters.
The three ideas I'm talking about today
are three chapters in the book.
So let's start with Chapter
Seven on antifragility.
You all know the phrase,
what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
It's been discovered in every culture
that leaves us writing
as far as I can tell.
Mencius, or Meng Tzu, said,
"When heaven is about to
confer a great responsibility
"on any man, it will exercise
his mind with suffering,
"subject his sinews and bones to hard work
"and place obstacles in
the paths of his deeds,
"so as to stimulate his
mind, harden his nature
"and improve wherever he is incompetent."
The ancients knew we are antifragile,
we must have adversity to grow.
The word antifragile was
invented by Nassim Taleb,
the guy who wrote The Black
Swan, because we needed it.
A lot of things are fragile, like a glass,
we don't let kids play with a wine glass
'cause it'll break.
So we give them plastic,
we give them sippy cups
'cause plastic is resilient.
If your kid get drops
it, it doesn't break,
but it doesn't get better.
And Taleb wanted to know
what's the word for things
that get better when ya' drop them?
And there isn't one, but
here are some examples.
The immune system's the best example,
peanut allergies have been
rising rapidly in America
and other countries since the 1990s,
but only in countries
that tell pregnant women
to stop eating peanuts.
So when experiments were done,
it turns out exposing
pregnant women or infants
to peanut dust actually
prevents peanut allergies
because the immune
system is an open system
that requires challenge, threat, attack
in order to learn what to respond to
and what not to respond to, like peanuts.
Immunization, we all understand it now
a lot better than we did a few months ago.
There's an interesting special case,
you might have heard
the phrase viral dose.
So if you inhale a couple of droplets
and yet, a bit of virus, odds are,
you're not gonna have symptoms
because your immune system reacts
and it can kinda get ahead of the virus.
But many healthcare providers
who were breathing in
large quantities, the
virus had an advantage,
it got ahead of the immune system
and they had much more serious cases.
So when you understand
immune system is antifragile,
you understand a lot about
what's going on around us.
Here's a different example,
trees are antifragile.
In the 90s, there was this experiment
called the Biosphere
in the Arizona desert.
They built this thing to
see if people could live
in a self-contained world in
preparation for living on Mars,
but they found that while trees
would grow actually very fast,
the trees tended to fall over
before they reach maturity
because they forgot to include wind.
Trees need to be blown by wind,
that causes their root
system to spread out
as far as is needed
and it causes a special kind of wood,
a special kind of cell
structure called reaction wood.
As the tree is blown, it
compresses on one side.
That sends a signal, grow
more of the ultra hardwood
right there where it's bending.
And that way, the tree learns
to grow to respond to the
threats in its environment.
And so here's an interesting book.
Our third example is Children.
Children are very, very antifragile.
So this is a book written
for wealthy people
who tend to spoil their children.
And the author goes through the story
about how palm trees are antifragile
and then he says, "What do parents do?
"We take our beautiful little palm tree,
"we pull it indoors, feed it,
"give it everything it needs
to grow, it looks great.
"And then we roll it out into the wind
"and the first breeze that
blows, the tree cracks."
Anyone working on campus has
seen this happen since 2014.
All of a sudden, right around 2014,
we were hit by a tidal wave
of anxiety and depression.
Every mental health center at
every school in the country
was flooded and it's still going on.
The numbers are stunning
and they keep rising
because 2014 is when
Gen Z arrived on campus.
So this is nationally representative data,
rates of major depressive disorder.
When the millennials were teenagers,
those were the rates of boys around 5%,
girls around 11 or 12%,
but once Gen Z becomes the teenage sample,
the teenage population,
rates for boys go up,
rates for girls go way up,
so that more than one in
five American girls, now,
has had a major depression
in the last year
and is likely, also, to
have an anxiety disorder.
Now, why?
So Greg Lukianoff and I
wrote a whole book on this.
Social media is involved with the timing,
but the bigger factor, we believe,
is the vast overprotection
that Americans and Brits
and Canadians and others
put on their kids in the 1990s.
We stopped letting them outside,
we freaked out about child abduction,
so we stopped giving them
free play unsupervised.
We raised them to fear
strangers, to fear others,
to fear new situations,
we over supervised them,
we tried to protect them from stress,
we thought stress was bad for them,
we tried to protect them from all risk.
And in response, in part,
Gen Z has much lower rates
of having worked summer jobs,
or work ever for money,
rates of going out on a date,
driving a car, drinking, or
basically having autonomy.
This is not their fault,
we did this to them,
but the results, I believe,
are this enormous rise of
fragility, anxiety, depression.
Now, to go a bit deeper,
we completely messed
up what we already know
about the attachment system.
So all mammals, I mean, mammals,
the whole idea is we've a
high investment in the infant,
the infant stays close to the mother.
So the mother has to provide, any parent,
has to provide a secure base.
An infant needs the secure base,
but the whole point of the secure base
is that gives them the
confidence to go play.
All mammals play a lot and
they take risks in play.
Play isn't fun if there's no risks.
So all mammals have this system,
we get the secure base and then we go out
and we explore and that's
where the learning happens.
The learning doesn't happen
when you're clinging to your parent.
The learning happens when
you leave the parent,
have adventures, take risks
and expand your abilities.
What we did to Gen Z is
we disrupted the process
and we said, "No more of that,
"the world is dangerous, you stay close."
So what lessons does
this have for parents?
If you don't understand antifragility,
you can't make progress.
Short-term stress is actually
essential for growth.
Think about your kids as
needing to develop stress wood,
chronic stress is what's bad,
yes, stress is bad if it's chronic,
you get all kinds of,
high levels of cortisol
are bad for the brain and the body.
So do give your kids a secure base,
but then don't shelter
them from routine stress,
from failure and from bad news.
And for God's sake don't
shelter them from news
about the pandemic, let
them watch the news.
Let them see that people
are dying, talk about it,
don't freak out, don't
show that you're afraid,
but talk about it, expose them,
that's what kids need.
We're all locked up with our kids,
but we have to work extra
hard to not supervise them,
to give them more independence.
You can get a lot of great
ideas if you go to letgrow.org,
it's an organization I
co-founded with Lenore Skenazy,
who wrote Free-Range Kids.
Download the LetGrow project
and figure out with
your kids what new thing
they can do that they've
never done before.
Now, applying this as a leader.
This, you see this meme going around,
"I never lose, I either win or learn."
Having written a whole
book based on quotations,
after a little bit of searching,
I realized it does not appear that Mandela
actually said this, but
he's said things like it.
So let's give him credit,
it's a great, great saying.
How can you apply that as a
leader of an organization?
Well again, if you don't
understand antifragility,
it's much harder to have
these conversations,
but if you do and if
everyone in your organization
has that word, now you can talk about
what we need to do to grow
together to get stronger.
We're all gonna make
mistakes, we're all human,
the key thing is that we
learn from our mistakes
and systematically get better.
I've made Chapter One of
The Coddling available
at the book's website
and this explains the
concept very succinctly.
A second piece of advice, everywhere I go
when I talk with business
people, I often hear,
"Wow, it's really difficult
to incorporate Gen Z,
"our recent college
grads, into the workplace.
"They're more anxious,
"they'll get upset at things more easily.
"They were raised on social media
"and some of them engage
in kind of call out culture
"which makes cooperation difficult."
So nobody knows how to integrate them,
it's brand-new, but my
suggestion is do give them
a secure base, do focus on their need
for a sense of security,
but then you've got to make
it that they leave that base,
that they take risks.
I often hear people say,
"My young employees,
"it's like if a light bulb burns out,
"they don't go change it,
they ask me what to do."
So encourage them to be more autonomous,
make more decisions,
"I understand, sometimes,
"you'll make the wrong decision,
"that's okay because we're all learning."
A final point, trust is gold,
that's always been true,
but in a time of crisis,
people tend to come together
if there is some trust.
If they don't trust leadership,
if they don't trust each other,
then you're not gonna get the benefits
of that coming together.
So work on trust, deserve
trust, all in the same boat.
If things are going down, take
a pay cut, shared sacrifice.
In that way, you're most likely
for your organization to reap the benefits
of the coming together,
the all for, one one for all mindset
that tends to happen in crises.
All right, that's the first idea.
I'll go more quickly through the others.
The second one, reappraisal.
So Chapter Two of The
Happiness Hypothesis,
"This is the most
widespread of all insights
"from the history of humanity,
"that it is not things that disturb us,
"but our interpretation
of their significance."
So that's the heart of Stoic doctrine,
Shakespeare said it in Hamlet,
"There's nothing either good or bad,
"but thinking makes it so."
Buddha and the Hindu
and Buddhist traditions,
"Your worst enemy cannot harm you
"as much as your own thoughts unguarded."
You've gotta tame your
thoughts, train your thoughts.
And that's what a lot
of Buddhist practice is,
it's training the elephant, as it were.
If the mind is divided like
a rider, conscious reasoning,
on an elephant, which is all the other
emotional and automatic processes,
you need to develop techniques
for training the elephant.
And that's what Buddhist meditation does.
That's what cognitive
behavioral therapy does,
invented by Aaron Beck
and others in the 1960s,
it's a technique for training
your automatic thoughts
to the point where you
don't distort things,
you don't freak out about
things, you're more focused,
more practical, more
likely to find the truth.
Recently, since we've been on lockdown,
I've been reading this wonderful book
called The Stoic Challenge
by William Irvine.
And he teaches you a technique
for assuming whenever there's set back,
assume that these are not
simply undeserved tribulations,
but these are tests of our
ingenuity and resilience
administered by imaginary Stoic gods.
It's a wonderful book,
I highly recommend it
because if you think about
how we grow from adversity,
I could have put this
slide in the last section,
but I put it here.
Research shows, when really bad things
happen to people, the vast
majority people do not get PTSD,
rather most people grow over time from it.
And the three ways are, first,
adversity changes our self-concept
because we don't die from it,
we realize that we
actually can survive it,
we're stronger than we thought.
Secondly, our relationships often improve.
We lose our fair weather friends,
but those that stay often get stronger.
When people's hearts
open, bonds get tighter.
And finally, major adversity
tends to change our values
and our priorities in
ways that are conducive
to later happiness.
We tend to not be so focused
on competing with others,
on amassing money or
reputation and beating others,
we tend to more focus on the present,
what's happening now and
more focus on people,
relationships, supporting each other.
We become more grateful and forgiving,
or at least we can if we take
advantage of the opportunity.
So a crisis like this
can be very powerful,
it's an amazing spur or
opportunity for self improvement.
Research shows that as
countries get wealthier,
they don't actually get happier
because our expectations often rise faster
than our wealth.
Secondly, as people get wealthier,
well, we adapt really quickly.
We're on what's called
the hedonic treadmill,
we can go faster and faster,
consume more and better stuff,
but we get used to it, we
don't get additional pleasure.
A setback can reset the treadmill
and it can destroy a sense of entitlement.
So I'd like you all to think now,
what have you been taking for granted?
What do you now appreciate
that you didn't even think of before?
It's like when you travel,
you often appreciate
things about your country,
you didn't think of.
Or when you're sick, you
come to appreciate health,
the ability to walk,
the ability to just think
straight without a fever.
We take things for granted so easily
and this crisis can help us all
by lowering our expectations,
our sense of entitlement.
Another way that it can improve us
is it's a major opportunity for us
to improve our life narratives.
Early research on
happiness, some researchers,
including Dan Kahneman in his early work,
thought that how happy you are
is a function of how many
happy moments you have,
total amount of happiness
you experienced in your life,
that's your happiness.
But over time, he and others realized,
no, that's not what people want,
that's not a good life,
there's a lot more to it.
And one piece of it is that
we tell ourselves stories,
we develop a narrative about our life
and a life that has lots of happy moments
and then ends with terrible misery
and unhappiness and the sense of failure
is a miserable life.
Well, all of us just got
a major new chapter in
our life narratives.
All of our stories are
getting more interesting.
And maybe this is a small bit of justice,
but the baby boomers,
including, I'm at the tail end
of the baby boom, the
baby boomers and Gen X,
American had an amazing 20th century.
Lots of progress, became
the envy of the world,
enormous amounts of wealth were developed,
many people became very successful
and many of those people, now,
are seeing so much ripped
away, so much fail,
so much go wrong.
Well, that's not a very
good life narrative
unless you take steps to reinterpret it.
So we do know that
economic crises like this
are likely to reduce the
lifetime earnings of Gen Z
and the millennials
and that's a huge loss.
That's sad, but at least structurally,
their life narratives, if you
start off with more negativity
and you have a chance to rise,
that at least is a better story.
And there's every reason to think that
if you read Steve Pinker's
books, or Matt Ridley's,
there's every reason to think
that things do get better and better,
we just have some setbacks
and then we continue to rise.
So how can you apply this?
This crisis is the best
chance you may have
to reset and reappraise.
I recommend keeping a gratitude journal,
in particular, one that
I'm really enjoying,
my co-teacher in the Work,
Wisdom, Happiness course,
Mira Dewji, recommended this
to me, the five-minute journal.
It's a really great morning routine,
takes a few minutes, practice gratitude,
what would make your day go well?
And if you're prone to anxiety,
now is the time to really work on it
because people who are
anxious or depressive
tend not to benefit as
much from adversity.
So work on overcoming your anxiety
and then you will grow more
from adversity as well.
Very briefly now, happiness
comes from between,
that was the conclusion of
The Happiness Hypothesis.
The simple-minded notion of
where happiness comes from
is that we have goals
and when we achieve
our goals, we're happy.
And so if you had money
and power and fame,
you'd be happy, but think about
this amazing passage
from the Hebrew Bible,
from Ecclesiastes, "I made great works,"
it's presented as though from a man
who says he was king of Jerusalem,
"I made great works, I
also gathered for myself
"silver and gold and
the treasure of kings,
"delights of the flesh
and many concubines.
"So I became great and surpassed all
"who were before me in Jerusalem.
"Whatever my eyes desired
I did not keep from them."
So that sounds like a
recipe for happiness,
but then he says, "Then I considered all
"that my hands had done and the
toil I had spent in doing it
"and all was a vanity and
a chasing after wind."
Achieving our goals
does bring us happiness
at the moment of achieving
it, but it's very short-lived.
We adapt, it's actually
more of a sense of relief,
like, "Okay, we can let go."
We actually get more happiness
from making progress,
steady progress towards our goals.
So here's a more sophisticated
happiness hypothesis,
happiness comes from within.
And this is what the Stoics
and Buddhists have always said,
"Do not seek to have events
happen as you want them to,
"but instead want them to
happen as they do happen
"and your life will go well."
Work on yourself, don't try
to make the world conform,
work on yourself.
And that's a better hypothesis,
that is part of the secret of happiness,
but it turns out, in the
modern world especially,
there are some things that
are really worth striving for.
You should have some goals
about changing your life,
your environment and especially
the way you connect to it.
So in psychology, it's quite famous
that Sigmund Freud was asked something
to the effect of, "What
is a successful person,"
or, "What is mental health?"
And he said, (speaking
in foreign language)
German for love and work.
So that's a very famous
phrase in psychology
and more recent research shows
that while that really
holds up, those two,
we also, especially in the workplace,
we should be thinking about a
sense of meaning and purpose.
There's a lot of empirical work showing
that people and companies that have that
have all kinds of
benefits to productivity,
engagement, ethics, all kinds of things.
So the final version of
The Happiness Hypothesis,
to summarize the entire book,
is that happiness doesn't come
from getting what you want,
it doesn't come from outside,
it comes from between,
it comes from getting
the right relationship
between yourself and others,
yourself and your work and yourself
in something larger than yourself.
Get those conditions right, then just wait
and happiness will grow slowly,
but under those conditions,
you will be the happiest that you can be.
So happiness during the pandemic.
Do a between audit, that is for yourself,
or your parents, or your employees,
or anyone who's isolating alone,
how are they doing on
love and relationships?
And I would especially
advise really focusing on
synchronous communication, face to face,
rather than by email, or
social media, or text.
We need that, we miss that,
the give and take, the quick reaction.
As I said before, I advise
keeping a gratitude journal
and then write letters to people,
or call them up is even better.
Well, write the letter and
then call them to say it.
Research by Marty Seligman and others
shows that this actually
improves happiness
as much as taking Prozac.
Secondly, work, focus on making progress.
It might be difficult to
achieve a lot of your goals,
but use this time to make
progress to improve your routine,
your training, improve your habits.
And finally, there are
now so many opportunities
to be involved with something
larger than yourself.
For the first time in my life,
we have team humanity.
Team humanity, or a sense
that there's team humanity
is united, we all hope
somebody invents a vaccine
and we don't care what country it's in,
just somebody, some human,
we are all in this
together, we all need it.
So there are many
opportunities to really feel
that we're part of larger struggles
and larger trials and tribulations
and eventually, victories.
So to conclude, I've offered three ideas
from positive psychology
that I think will be helpful
in helping us all navigate
through this crisis.
I focused on the individual level,
not so much an organization, a nation,
I hope we'll talk about that with Batia.
And that is my presentation
on how we might thrive in the
COVID and post COVID world.
This map happens to show
nitrous oxide levels over Europe
declining, yet one more silver lining.
Thanks very much for your
attention and let's talk.
- Thanks so much Jon,
I really appreciated it.
It's great to have a
little bit more positivity
in this context and some ideas
for how to increase that sense.
So a question for you,
you alluded to the economics research
on how imprinting affects people,
an imprinting of crises,
that the crises can create
an imprinting of that.
You particularly mentioned
the economics research
on how graduating in a time of recession
negatively impacts lifetime earnings.
We also know that it increases
people's sense of happiness
and job satisfaction over
the course of their lifetime
and their feelings of
gratefulness about their job,
but it also influences
things like their opinions.
So just how a single bout of unemployment
influences people's beliefs
about how much involvement
the government should have
in anti-poverty programs
and things like that.
It also seems like it influences
how unethical people will be.
So CEOs who had graduated in crises
are more likely to, when they become CEO,
they were more likely to have backdated
their stock options, which is a form of.
- Ooh, I didn't know that study,
you gotta send that to me.
- But I'm wondering, so
given all this evidence
of imprinting, I'm wondering,
what will the COVID-19 crisis mean
for the generation that's
coming of age at this time?
And you highlighted that,
but what will it also mean
for what our society will be like,
in the US, in the world, what
do you see as the outcome?
- Yeah, so it's very
difficult to make predictions,
I've certainly learned that
from my friend, Phil Tetlock,
who writes about just how bad
we all are at making predictions,
but I can at least point to
a few psychological processes
that others can use to
make bad predictions.
So a couple things we know,
so first of all, there's a recent book out
by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister,
called The Power of Bad.
Bad is stronger than good,
especially when you're young.
Young people need all kinds of experience
and they actually learn faster
from bad experiences than from good.
Furthermore, there's research showing
that when bad events, when crises hit,
if you're a young child,
there's no benefit at all
and there could be no
adverse childhood experience,
there could be lasting damage.
But from eight, nine, ten,
from that period of childhood,
but especially in your teen years,
that's where the evidence that I've seen
shows the most likelihood
of growth through adversity.
And I've covered this in
The Happiness Hypothesis,
I forget whose work this was,
it's in part because if tragedy happens,
your parents get divorced or something
when you're eight, nine, ten,
you're not really making a
story about your life as much,
but in your teen years, you are.
And so teen through 20s,
that is the period where
the research indicates
you get the most growth from adversity.
The most relevant study
here is by Glen Elder,
a sociologist at UNC who wrote a book
called Children of the Great Depression.
What I learned from him
is that people who had not had adversity,
when they're in their 30s and 40s,
they had not had much adversity,
depression often broke them.
They were damaged by it for life,
but younger people tended to grow from it
in the ways that you said.
So I think we can expect
that, our undergrads
are in their teens and early 20s
and our MBAs are in their 20s,
so here at NYU, our students are exactly
in that maximum growth range.
And I think we all need
to be thinking with them
about how do we maximize
their growth in that way?
So I think we can expect that,
also, on politics, I found
some interesting research
by some professors at Columbia
showing that white Americans,
they only looked at whites
because race interacts with
party in interesting ways.
But if you just look at white Americans,
they tend to vote Republican
unless they were born
between 1950 and 1954.
Those four birth years
vote Democrat for life.
And the reason, they think, is 1968,
that period '68 to '72
was so intense it shifted.
If you are in that 18 to 22 period,
that's the most sensitive.
Whatever the politics of the
world look like to you, then,
that's gonna burn in and stay for life.
So I think that the Trump presidency
and the extinction rebellion,
this has been an intense few years.
And I think it is going to
shift Gen Z more to the left,
more to the Democratic Party.
That would be, again, who knows?
But unless the Republican
Party changes very quickly,
I think we can predict that.
And as for social capital,
how it changes citizenship,
that remains to be seen.
For an attack, if we were attacked,
as in 911 or Pearl Harbor,
very reliably causes a huge
increase in coming together,
in unity, but a pandemic
historically doesn't.
It makes people more afraid of each other.
So this can go a lot of
different directions,
but it's gonna really impact young people
more than anyone else.
- Right, yeah, that's really interesting,
that different crises result
in different outcomes.
And we have both a health crisis
and also an economic crisis.
And as you said, there
are ways that some crises
can pull people together,
like September 11th,
we saw American flags
everywhere in New York,
but after the 2008 financial crisis
and the very slow recovery
that followed that,
we saw that marriage rates declined
and suicide and opioid
addiction rates increased
and I wonder what does
your, or your research
and the research you've related,
what does it suggest about
how these different types of crises affect
how we're likely to cope,
especially given that this is
kind of a double-barreled one?
- Yeah, that's right,
this is so complicated.
And so, in one sense, it
is just a spectacular time
to be a social scientist.
I mean, all these mega
variables are changing
and they're gonna interact
in all kinds of ways
that are hard to predict, right now.
So let's see, I'll just talk about
a couple of probable interactions.
So one is you have to distinguish
between what level you're
talking about of society.
And I think, what we're
seeing is at the local level,
I think we're seeing
vastly more positivity,
pro-social behavior,
neighbors helping neighbors,
than the occasional stories about
people who are price
gouging or things like that.
I think a lot of companies are,
I can't tell, but a lot of companies,
I think, are handling it well,
at least, some are in economic situations
where they have to do massive layoffs
and they can't give a sense of security.
But I think at the local
level and organizations
it's possible to handle it really well
and grow stronger and more cohesive.
Unfortunate, the national level,
which I think we desperately need,
we desperately need a
reset and a few weeks ago,
I had some hope that this would be
the big chance for a reset
and it could still be.
I think things could get a lot worse
and then they might still
get better in the future,
but it's incredibly unfortunate
that now that whether you
take the crisis seriously
and think we need to stay in lockdown,
or whether you think,
"Ah, it's just the flu
"and we need to open the economy,"
that is now a marker of
which team you're on.
And I don't want to get too political here
and I recognize the insights
we need from both sides,
but when the president tweeted
about liberate Virginia,
that, I think, as a leadership move,
here, I'm just speaking as
a professor of studies leadership,
to pit people against each other,
to make it a partisan crisis,
I think was a very bad leadership move.
And I think that's gonna really hurt us.
So I don't know what's gonna
happen at the national level,
although, right now,
things don't look good.
They could really turn around,
but right now, they don't look good.
So I would distinguish between
what level you're talking about.
I would also distinguish between people
who come into this with anxiety disorders
versus people who come,
optimists tend to grow from adversity,
so it's gonna be very mixed effects.
And I just have to put my
faith in Steve Pinker's graphs,
that in the long run,
things do get better,
but we have some major
setbacks, here and there.
- Yeah, it relates,
actually, to a question
posed by our colleagues, Naomi Diamant,
who was asking about
political partisanship,
that it seems like, I think, early on,
it seemed like political
partisanship had reduced
and now it seems like
it's coming roaring back.
And you're definitely seeing
that influencing the discussions
of how we should be coming back,
how we should be opening up
the economy, going forward.
And I wonder, what are the recommendations
that you would have for how we could
handle the recovery from this crisis
in ways that diminish those divisions
and maybe set us up as a society
for something more antifragile?
- Yeah, no, thank you, yeah,
that's the million dollar question.
I'm involved in a lot of
democracy reform groups
and that's what we're
all trying to figure out.
I guess, I have two comments, I think.
One is, in the social media age,
so I have an essay in The
Atlantic, from November,
about how social media
changed between 2009 and 2012.
It got much more effective
as an outrage machine.
It amplifies the extreme voices,
we have no idea what
those people are thinking,
just the extremes.
So what you say is right,
that, visibly, the
partisanship has just exploded,
but survey research by More In Common
and other groups, survey research shows
the great majority of Americans
actually think this is very serious
and we need to stay in lockdown longer,
we should not becoming out.
So there is often much more consensus
and in the More In Common
study from a few weeks ago,
a great increase in the people saying,
"Yes, we're all in this together."
So yes, the partisanship is
exploding on social media
and major media, but there is still hope
that Americans are basically sensible,
mostly centrist and not
rabid culture warriors.
As for what we can do to enhance
that basic well of goodness and decency.
I would say this.
Yeah, I'm very, very
interested in the power
of viewpoint diversity.
I'm very alarmed, I
co-founded an organization,
called Heterodox Academy,
to encourage viewpoint diversity.
in the academy, we need the healthy
back and forth between left and right.
And so I would actually say,
the left is taking it very seriously
and I think that's correct,
you need critiques,
you need people saying,
"Well, now, wait, we have to
"also include these other costs."
And if it turns out
that the antibody test,
as we saw in New York yesterday,
if the antibody rate
is actually very high.
Well, then actually we
can come out a lot sooner,
you need people pushing for that.
Unfortunately, the more
the partisanship heats up,
the more intensely people have blinders on
and not listen to contradictory evidence.
So I would say, hyper-partisanship
is what has messed up
our political system,
I think it greatly affected
the election of 2016,
we would not have had that outcome
if we had not been so hyperpolarized.
And it is, now, directly
interfering with our ability
to address the virus crisis.
So I would say all Americans, we all,
I don't know if I can say, have a duty,
but to the extent that we can actually
be part of the solution by not saying,
"Oh, let's all agree," no,
but let's stop demonizing each other.
Let's recognize, you know what?
This is incredibly complicated
and we were all wrong
about many aspects of it,
so we actually need to
listen to critiques.
We need to incorporate
conflicting viewpoints,
I'm not saying both sides are
equally right on any issue,
I'm just saying, if you're orthodox,
if you're only listening to your side,
I guarantee, you're gonna
get a lot of it wrong.
I co-created a program called OpenMind,
so if you go to openmindplatform.org,
you can use it in an organization,
you can use it in a classroom.
It teaches those skills of
how do you engage with
people who disagree with you?
I think, now more than ever,
if we're not gonna get out
of this from leadership
from the top on overcoming
our differences,
we all have to try to do it
in whatever organizations
we have access to.
- Thank you, actually,
so I wanna come back
to that social media point
that you made earlier,
but first, address a question
from Antione Washington
who was raising the
question of what should,
you mentioned OpenMinds
and we know you've been a
proponent of Heterodox Academy
and an argument for
academia's role in this.
And I wonder what you think
academia's role should
be in setting the tone
for a different way of
coming out of this crisis
and a way of creating a new
normal that's a better normal?
- Well, I think the natural
sciences are doing a great job.
The natural sciences, that
natural scientific instinct of,
"We are a guild of scientists.
"We don't care what country you're in."
So I think the natural sciences
are really emerging as heroes
and showing a way that the academy,
at least one portion of it,
can really work beautifully
and earn the respect of the world.
I would hope that the social sciences
can follow their example.
By our very nature, we're
dealing with much more polarizing
and politicized topics,
but I do think that we have
to get our house in order.
My God, I mean, higher ed
is always in crisis, right?
I mean, as long as you
and I have been in it,
there's a claim of some crisis.
And as you told us, as you informed us,
what NYU is going through,
what all schools are going through,
we ain't seen nothing yet.
I mean, it's gonna get a lot harder
and this is all happening
after a few years
in which public trust in higher ed
has been dropping and
dropping and dropping.
First, it dropped on the right,
after 2015, and things
happening on campus then,
but then it began
dropping on the left, too.
So talk about growth through adversity,
this is really the crisis
for higher education.
We can't get out of this,
we can't go back to business as usual.
We're gonna lose a lot of money,
all kinds of teaching
methods are now possible.
If we go back to business as usual,
then we should be ashamed of ourselves.
We need to do what we do best,
which is use research and scholarship
and collect data, evidence
to try to figure out
a variety of new techniques
and then test them to see if they work.
And to do that, I believe,
we need viewpoint diversity
and really good norms of civil
engagement with each other.
No taboos, no idea is to
be punished or shamed.
We need to recover norms
of collegial disagreement
that were very prevalent
when I entered the academy, in 1987,
when I started graduate school.
- Yeah, yeah, thank you, one of the points
that you made earlier,
just a few minutes ago,
was talking about how social
media is a outrage machine.
And in your presentation, you
highlighted how social media
might be part of what is
creating the Gen Z problem
that we're seeing.
Yet, right now, because
of social distancing,
we have lost many of the mechanisms
that we usually use for
connecting with others
and you said, "Happiness is between,"
and a lot of that is about relationships.
And so we simultaneously
lost these mechanisms
for having these real deep connections
that you often create in
interacting with people
as part of your life routine.
And those have gone virtual
and people are looking for
ways of recovering that.
What do you think about, on one hand,
social media being an outrage machine
and causing fragility, on the other hand,
it being kind of our only mechanism,
or one primary mechanism,
that we have for
creating happiness between?
- Yeah, okay, thank you.
That's a really important question
and really this is a great
chance to clarify a few things.
So let's really distinguish
three very separate kinds of things.
There is digital device use,
which is everything from watching movies
and looking things up on
Wikipedia, there's digital device.
There is communication technology,
which is a subset, which is
what we're doing right now,
like face-to-face, especially synchronous
communication technology.
And then there's social media,
in which people create content
and other people rate it.
Three very, very separate
kinds of activities.
In The Coddling of the American Mind,
Greg and I were going on research,
we thought that screen
time was part of the cause
of the problem for kids.
Well, by the magic of viewpoint diversity,
we published our results
and people pushed back.
I create these lit reviews
to put all the relevant studies together.
And what we learned is that the evidence
is not so much about screen
time or digital devices,
there's not much evidence that
those are harmful overall,
it's really social media and
it's especially for girls.
So what I think that
both the correlational
and experimental evidence shows,
is that spending time on digital media,
watching movies on Netflix,
is not bad for your kids.
Now, there's an opportunity cost,
if it stops them from
going outside and playing,
or doing other things, well, that's bad,
but right now, there's
no opportunity cost.
There's nothing else for
them to do practically,
so don't worry so much about
digital media or screen time.
Second bucket, synchronous communication,
more and more, encourage your kids
to leave a FaceTime screen
open with their best friend.
It's not as good as face-to-face,
but it's more than half as good, I think.
And if anybody on this call,
if you have not reached out to someone
to share a dinner, or a
drink together, or dessert,
my wife and I are doing that
with our old friends from Charlottesville.
If you haven't used this as
an opportunity to reconnect
at very low cost with all the people
you love from your past, you're
missing a great opportunity.
So those two buckets are,
the first bucket is fine,
second bucket is wonderful, do more of it.
And it's really just the social media
that is the problem.
And it doesn't seem to have
damaged the millennials.
It's not that it's necessarily
the problem for adults
in terms of mental health,
it's especially in middle school.
That's where we see the biggest increases,
so middle school girls
seem to be the most damaged
by putting things out there
and then having people make nasty comments
about them and their appearance.
That's what parents need to watch out for.
- So a lot of your talk has been,
kinda the main theme is how
we can use positive psychology
to be happier, to feel better,
but we also know that emotions
are an important source of information.
When we feel bad, it kind
of is our brain's way
of telling us that we
need to make some change,
we need to do things differently.
And so this idea of, I guess,
just to be provocative,
it is possible that these
efforts that we undertake
to make ourselves happier
can be kind of the opiate of the masses.
That they make us happy with a
situation that's not optimal,
then we start to feel good
and then we don't have as
much desire to make change,
as we otherwise would.
And there's so much in the
world that requires change,
some of what you touched on,
but so many other things,
is it possible that efforts
at feeling grateful,
at looking down instead of looking up,
at reframing, just get us to accept
what should not be an acceptable thing?
- Yeah, that makes a
lot of sense logically,
but I think if we look at history,
if we look at who has
been really successful
at changing systems that
seemed impossible to change.
I mean, certainly there are plenty
of examples of anger leading to change.
Now, it's not necessarily
always good change
and angry, violent
revolutions have a, generally,
pretty bad track record of
actually being good for people,
but if you look at, say,
the civil rights struggle,
if you look at Nelson
Mandela in South Africa,
these were cases of people
trying to change the most,
I mean, if you talk about
institutional racism,
I mean, it was codified in law
and backed up by police departments.
And key to both of those movements,
now, there were diverse movements
through a lot of threads,
but key to the leaders, who
we think really got it done,
was the four-squaring of anger
and the commitment to draw a larger circle
and not do us versus
them, but to appeal to,
so in the book, Greg and I
refer to common humanity
identity politics.
That's what reduces people's
defensiveness and anger,
that's what ultimately
wins in these hard cases.
Whereas common enemy, just saying,
"Us versus them, we're good, they're evil.
"We're perfectly good,
they're perfectly evil,"
it doesn't have a very good track record.
So if you just go with your feelings
and you don't think, either
what will work, or what is true,
you're not gonna be very effective.
And the most spectacular case of this
is a man named Daryl Davis,
he's a blues musician, African-American.
And he ended up playing in
a bar somewhere in the South
where there were a bunch
of Ku Klux Klan members
and he actually got to know what them
and had a conversation with him
and he befriended him and he convinced him
to give up his robe and he's now done this
with 100s of clan members.
And that's his secret,
is he doesn't get angry,
he listens, he commits to listening,
he makes them feel understood
and in creating a relationship,
he's able to actually change them.
So especially for young
people, might be watching this,
who are idealistic and who are
involved in change movements.
I would say you gotta decide,
what do you wanna do,
express yourself as visibly as possible,
or actually change people
and solve the problem?
- That relates to my last question here,
unless others come in.
And so one of the points
that you've highlighted,
this is all about what we can
do to make ourselves happier
and you highlighted ways that things that
those who maybe have a
little control can do things
to make other people happier,
like the way that a parent
can help make a child
happier over a lifetime.
The way leaders can
empower their followers,
the way that perhaps even professors
can help their students,
what about many of us are dealing
with people who are
unhappy who are around us
that we don't have that
kind of control over?
And maybe that's similar to your example,
where you're walking into a bar
and meeting up with a Ku Klux Klansmen,
but it feels a little bit different.
So the question is, what
happens when it's our
socially isolated parents
who are feeling depressed?
What happens when it's our life partners
who are feeling depressed,
or our close friends?
What are the things that,
in your recommendations,
that people can do to really help,
other than just being a role model,
what can you do to create
happiness for those,
or to help them find happiness?
- Yeah, okay, well first, Batia,
I wanna just point out, you
took over the leadership,
you're now the chair of the
Business & Society Program,
and I just wanna note that
the way you've handled this
from the beginning is making it clear
you're here for us, you're
doing everything you can
to help us achieve our goals.
There are all sorts of, I mean,
a model of leadership through a crisis,
you're a social psychologist too.
I can see, you know the literature
and you're using it in certain ways,
but you also have a big-heart
and you're leading in a way
that you are affecting us by what you do.
So now, do we have that much
influence over other people?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Yes, if somebody who was struggling
with depression or anxiety all along,
that's often what happens in these cases.
You're talking about
someone who has a tendency
towards depression and anxiety.
Well, especially if that's
the way they're wired,
this might be the really, really good time
to start Lexapro, Prozac or an SSRI.
I'm serious about that.
That while, in general, using CBT
or using a non-pharmacological approach
is generally the best
thing if you can do it
and so I recommend that vary widely,
but for people who you know
this is a lifelong struggle,
this might, well, I'm not a psychiatrist,
I shouldn't just think of
a blanket recommendation.
But you should talk to a
psychiatrist about your parent
and try to decide might this be helpful
because, again, an underlying
anxiety disposition,
my God, I mean, this is a super stimulus,
like everything coming
at you is telling you,
"Worry, be very, very afraid."
So I think that psychiatry and psychology
can be very, very helpful here.
And yeah, we all need to think creatively
about how to customize our help
for the particular people in our lives.
- Yeah, thank you so much.
This has just been really terrific, Jon,
and you've given us some great ideas
for how to be able to
move forward productively.
And it's so nice to hear,
after so much discussion of all the things
that are gonna go wrong and go bad.
(laughing) So thank you for kind of shifting
the conversation and giving
us something to focus on.
Thanks so much and we'll be
back on Tuesday. (laughing)
- Okay, thanks, Batia, thanks everyone.
(soft music)
