The Perilous State of the University： Jonathan Haidt & Jordan B Peterson (4IBegL_V6AA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4IBegL_V6AA

in Manhattan talking to Dr. Jonathan Height, who’s a professor at NYU. And I’m 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, what he regards as a reasonable diversity of views to university faculty and campuses and discussions. So I first met Jonathan, it’s gonna be just about 30 years ago, 25 years ago. That was in 2014. Yeah, I’m sorry, it was in 1994. Oh, it was in 1994, yeah, right, right. So yeah, you came to do a job talk at Harvard for an assistant professorship position and I’d been aware of your work on disgust then 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. 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 welcome or wanted. And then I had my session with you in which here was this guy who was, he actually got a job at Harvard and he was studying Jung, which is like almost taboo and he was talking about dreams of creativity. And so 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 and now in the biological basis of behavior, right? And so, and 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 psychological study of disgust. Well, the way to explain it is that Paul Rosin, my advisor at Penn, is the pioneer in the study of disgust and he’d studied it as a food related emotion. And 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 Colbrook 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 does 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. And I went to talk to him and that started one of the best collaborations of my life. And what it led to is a broadening of the moral domain, basically. There’s a sort of a Western secular approach that you see in Western philosophers. Either morality is about harm and utilitarianism, and it’s minimize harm, or it’s about rights and principles, you know, Manuel Kant. And a much better way psychologically to 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 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 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 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 culture were with heating up and as left and right were essentially becoming like different countries, different cultures. 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 how it plays out, as far as I can tell, because conservatives, for example, are less neurotic than, in the big five trait sense, than liberals, although it’s a minor difference. But the disgust issue seems to be particularly relevant. So can you tell us a little bit about why disgust per se? Well, first, conservatives are a little less neurotic, but they also, if you do very low level perceptual experiments, 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 there are all these interesting personality differences that lead to different politics. But as for why disgust, so I’m a Durkheimian, I would say. I love the sociologist Emil 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 groupish, 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 have all this software, all these predispositions, these mental predispositions for life 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. 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 the link for it, it’s about a year old, that was based on high resolution imaging of neuronal connections. It’s actually reviewed in Kurzweil’s book, How to Build 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 older, let’s say, connectionist idea was that neurons that fire together wire together, right? That’s HEB, and of course, that’s pretty standard neurology, but the columns are already pre-wired, so it’s actually columns that fire together that wire together, 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 connective tissue that are pre-prepared. So the columns have the option to connect 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 level, say nothing of subcortical organization, there’s already pre-existent likelihoods that certain neurons will fire, will wire together. Yeah, and what else is cool is that this is actually architecturally quite regular. So they found that these super highways are arranged in lines and 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 the viewers here why this isn’t just some 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 the idea is, well, if something is innate, then 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’s actually a neuroscientist here at NYU. He says, innate doesn’t mean hardwired. There’s 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. For fears. Yeah, that’s right, almost everything. 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 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 it is. Well, otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to communicate, which is one of E.O. Wilson’s comments, right? I mean, Wilson is the entomologist who studied ants at Harvard and also wrote a 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’d 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 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 I miss you, and I wanna play with you. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and that bonding. Yeah, okay, so back to discuss, back to discuss. So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rosen is to see us as these amazing omnivores. This is part of our survival strategy, even more than other apes. We are just brilliant omnivores. And we have the omnivores dilemma, which is we’ve gotta be interested in all kinds of new stuff. We’re not tied to any place. We can roam onto a whole new continent. So we’re interested in stuff. But stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes. We have to be careful about that stuff. And so these motives have to be intentioned. 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, a little more like, whoa, no, let’s not try that. Let’s stay with what’s tried and true. I mean, that’s progressivism and conservatism. 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 disgust is part of a regulatory system about our engagement with the world. And whether we are just sort of out there and 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 can actually, 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, going back a few decades, sex, drugs, the flag, immigration, all of these things. I have a study with my colleagues, it was led by Sena Koleva, in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people and we also had their scores on 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 what people’s left right, how they place themselves on the left right scale, you can pretty much predict where they fall on most cultural war attitudes, except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity. So what I mean is, flag burning. 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 give some answer on a one to seven scale, and people on the right think, more likely to say no, people on the left, 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, something sacred about it, which must be protected. And so this is true. They think of it as a unifying center. Exactly, that’s right. So if there’s something sacred, and 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, Muslims at prayer in Mecca, they literally circle the kabbah. Circling is a very primitive, ancient, it feels right to circle something. But 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 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 mother. So they move out until they trip over their uncertainty threshold. Oh, neat. Is it a distance? It’s a distance, yeah, yeah, yeah. And 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 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 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 important, 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 in the last couple years is that the older idea we had, that it’s a place for contesting ideas, it’s a zone of enormous choice. People can take what courses they want, say what they want. It’s kind of a wonderful free for all 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, they’re blaspheming us basically. And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury protest when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury. And as everybody knows, he was shouted down. So the students are chanting, they’re chanting in unison, and it seems like a religious revival meeting. And they’re swaying and they’re saying their sacred, 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 in a kind of maternal way. Not yet, not yet. So far all that’s happening is they’re binding together, they’re moving, synchronous movement and call and response. So 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 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, but that describes sort of the core, those who really have their identities wrapped up in this movement. Okay, so with disgust, 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 trade openness and low in trade conscientiousness, and the conservatives are the reverse. But we’ve fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with the big five aspect scale. And orderliness is strongly associated with disgust. It sounds like Freud, yeah. Right, exactly, it does sound a lot like Freud, but it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces, for example. So now- And their meetings start on time. Yes, yeah, exactly, right. Right, so then the nexus for political belief 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 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 frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs and found a walloping correlation, it was like 0.6. It was one of the highest, 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 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 from two perspectives simultaneously. At the time, okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness. So it’s say a fundamental sub-trait. And I was reading this book that was called Hitler’s Table Talk. And it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942. Yeah, so it’s a spontaneous utterance, I’d say. 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 Hitler’s basic metaphor was that the Aryan race and country was a pure body. And that it was assaulted by parasites. 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 because of smallpox and measles. And so that border issue that separates conservatives from liberals, let’s say, is 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 contaminated. 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 omniverse dilemma right there. Right, 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. And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea. That’s right, I’m a big fan of George Lakoff, metaphors we live by, that we use our bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics and 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 the behavioral 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 social and moral. 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 what you saw there was both of those forces that worked 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% 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 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. It’s for that precise reason that I’ve been so interested in free speech as a value. Because 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. It’s openness and IQ fundamentally. But for managerial and administrative expertise, it’s IQ and conscientiousness. So the liberals start businesses, but they can’t run them because their interests flit and they don’t have the organizational ability and the conservatives can run them, but they can’t continue to transform and expand them. So they can’t run them. Yin and yang, yin and yang, yep. So one more thing about what happened in Nazi Germany that’s very relevant and interesting because it’s useful to get these motives right. First of all, if something disgusts you, 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. You try to get rid of it or expel it. That’s right. You wanna get it away and destroy it. So when Hitler first came to power, he put in a bunch of public health schemes. Like he had vans that went around and screened people for tuberculosis. Then he went on a factory cleanliness campaign. So the factories were supposed to be tidied up and he bathed about four times a day, by the way, and was also a great worshiper 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 understand that connection either. So he convinced factory owners in Germany to get rid of the rats and the mice 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. 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 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 appeal to purification because the idea of purification by fire is a very ancient idea. So, okay, 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 sort of 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 disgust. So a lot of some religious practice in Judaism and Islam 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, baser animal biological nature, is there an opposite emotion? Is there an emotion that we feel when we see some manifestation of 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 in 1995, and I read the set of Thomas Jefferson’s letters. And in one letter, 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 serious works of law and philosophy. And he describes the feeling of having your sentiments be elevated. Does it not dilate your breast or 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’d been studying disgust, I then started studying its opposite, which I and some others call moral elevation. So there’s this kind of vertical metaphor of elevation and degradation. Maps onto the body too, with regards to this. 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 see a lot of things happening. It allows me to even manipulate, like if I’m applying for a grant proposal, I can get very good at having an elevating ending to end with a note of uplift. And so it just broadened my thinking about morality. And this was around 1995. And so again, it just prepared me. 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. I didn’t try to just bring in my own Western left leaning perspectives. And this was all under the guidance of Richard Schwader, my postdoc supervisor at the University of Chicago where I did a postdoc. It was only then that I was able to 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 at the time. The Matrix movies were very popular. So the metaphor of the Matrix as a consensual hallucination made a lot of sense. It’s where I came up with the idea of just speaking about moral matrices, whichever different moral matrices. That are grounded in biology. Biology in the sense that it gives us the potential. It’s like the building blocks of this matrix can’t be just anything. 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 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, I can see that they’re striving for 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, great awakening or scales falling from my eyes. But, you know, since, well, it took a few more, it 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 through a partisan lens. And I’m not on any side now. I’m just trying to understand what the hell is going on. 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 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 exchange of information that that dialogue allows, we can maybe specify the center of that moving target 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 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 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, we’re, as individuals, we’re 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 systems, the whole can be vastly smarter than the components that go into it. Which is true of the brain too. The brain is composed of neurons. Each neuron’s really kind of a stupid little switch. If you put them together in the right way, then 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 well, 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 people have to do their best. We’re really bad at disconfirming our own ideas. 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 always leaned left in the 20th century. But leaning isn’t a problem. So people think, oh, viewpoint diversity, we need everybody, we need Nazis, we need every, no, we don’t need everybody. What we need is no orthodoxy. That’s what’s fatal, orthodoxy. So if you have a 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, common sense, are there evidence that you’ve missed? And then the system works. But what I learned when I started down this road in 2011, I gave a talk at the big conference with 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. So what I’ve learned since then is that the ratio in psychology was between two to one and four to one left to 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 to right, which would be okay. But then between 1995 or four and 2010, it goes to 14 to one. Do you have any idea why and why that time? Yes. So you get the same story, whether you look at Republican-Democrat ratios or liberal-conservative, they tell the same story. So 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 II, 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 the motives are fine, and if it was balanced, it’d be totally fine. But as you get these young junior people on the left coming 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 positive feedback loop developing in there? Like you said, if it’s like three to one, it’s okay. But maybe when it hits four to one, it goes to like 20 to one. Exactly. So then you start getting hostile climate. So I wrote a review paper on this with Joe Duarte and Phil Tetlock and Lee Jussam, Jared Crawford. And so we reviewed everything that we could find. And we concluded that most of what’s going on is self-selection. That is, people on the left are more open to experience. They’re always gonna grab a ticket, so they’ve got self-selection. But then there’s really good evidence that there’s also hostile climate. I mean, 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 over-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 2000s has changed. So it is true that the conservatives were not in any way anti-science until much more recent times. Now, actually, both sides are anti-science about different sciences. But in America, the right wing, the Republican Party, it’s controversial, but I do believe that the polarization starts with the right moving further out. So what it means to be conservative. To be anti-evolutionary, which is actually what’s happening on the left now too. Exactly, that’s what they said. Yeah, so well, I talked to Brett Weinstein the other day and one of his claims is that evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone. So it’s a science that’s very likely to be targeted by extremists. You also brought up something that actually touches 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 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 reviews, he starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about immigration, from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, a bunch of other people on the left, who used to be able to say, on the one hand, compassion, economic, on the other hand, we have to have a legal process and there’s a threat to low-wage workers. So people on the left used to be able 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 suggest that, well, maybe immigration is on 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. Now. 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 gonna do? Look at the data? Weigh up the pluses and minuses? No. 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. Yeah, and there’s multiple causal factors as well. Always in the 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 was 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- Yeah, 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 think that’s true. Okay, okay, so that’s definitely worth thinking about. So- Yeah, that’s right. So that’s right. The thing to think, right, with religions, we have to clarify, fundamentalism is the problem, not religion. And so if you get a- And 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 it’s not psychology. Suppose it’s, you know, geology. So someone applies to a geology program and they’re 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 not in the scientific paradigm. They’re not in the scientific, that’s right. 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 showing signs of closed mindedness, I don’t think they belong in a grad school. 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? Because these things spin out of control so fast. Yeah, so 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 and 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. There have 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, universities are bad things, they’re making things worse. Now how is this news greeted? Pundits on the left are saying, 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, 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 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 polling, showing Republicans like the military more than Democrats, but both really like it. Then suddenly in 2015, we started seeing video from all over military bases, the military academies, in which the military leaders are overtly right wing. 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 American universities. We are losing the support of half the country. This is unsustainable, especially in red states where 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 Nocic and others, the Open Science 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 duties. Okay, so let’s talk about Heterodox Academy because you set that up, this organization that you should tell everybody about in precisely to deal with this issue. And so 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 you’re right. I have some data on this. So the five of us, six of us, wrote this paper. It came out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Oh, Charlotte 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 of 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. It was just the nature of the academic community, the research community. So we got these two things going on, summer of 2015. And then that summer, I hear from Nick Rosencrantz, a law professor, who says we have the same problem in law. It might even be worse in law. It’s really bad in Canada in law. Okay, 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’ve got to train. So, and I hear from a sociologist, Chris Martin, same thing in sociology. So the three of us said, hey, you know, this is a big problem for the whole of Canada. Have you looked at faculties of education by any chance? Oh my God, those are the worst. I don’t know the numbers, but in terms of the vindictiveness, the pressure put on any nonconforming opinion, my impression, I don’t have data, but my impression from the letters I get is that education schools and social work schools are the worst. That’s exactly in keeping with 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. Well, in terms of their effects, yes, far more pernicious, yeah. But equally warped, let’s say, but more pernicious. And the things that are happening in the Canadian education system as a consequence of that are so reprehensible. 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 by the time they arrive. Yes, and purposefully, like in Canada, increasingly 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. So let’s finish up with Heterodox Academy and then we’ll get back to the earlier grades. So originally three of us decided to put up a website. I invited all the other authors from 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, of 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 was 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, a lot of these 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 a racist place, we have to reform Yale, then it spreads nationally. Now, suddenly this is not just a faculty issue anymore. So even though at Heterodox Academy we’ll 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, 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 someone takes to be a bias act. Oh, so 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 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? 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, people will think, oh, we must be right-wing, but we’re not. 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 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 spreading like mad. And it’s not just in the US. It’s spread, in 2015, I thought it was a uniquely American problem. Boy, it’s in Canada and the UK. And Australia, and 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, 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 has pioneered. The idea that, so in Britain, they’ve always had no platforming, they call it. So if there’s an, and there was an actual British national party, it’s an actual fascist party. So if a BNP member is gonna speak on campus, you mob him, you shut it down. No platform, don’t give him a platform. So 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 somehow essentializing gender, and then saying that women are inferior, whatever. Yes, well, that happened to James DeMore, for example. Exactly, exactly. 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 harmed and they’re suffering, it’s that this was violence. Yes, right, yeah. Violence. Well, that’s part of the postmodern narrative that contributes everything to power. This is so dangerous, the crossing the line into violence. It just occurred to me just like yesterday, I 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 speech of those people in that academic movement, or on the, if their speech is violence, well, the state is supposed to have a monopoly on their speech then. 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 morally motivated. So just the Orwellian and authoritarian implications of this move, once you say that speech is violence, you’re unlocking, you’re opening Pandora’s box. I mean, you’re five steps down the road to hell. And I’d say we’re about seven steps down the road to hell. Okay, so you’re that concerned about it. Okay, so now tell me, how many members, if you, 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, so originally it was just for 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, all right, 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 post-docs. 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 being a professor, I love the academy, and I feel like it’s not just losing public respect, it’s losing its ability to function, it’s losing its ability to teach and do research on politicized topics. And there are more politicized topics all the time. That’s right, and there are a few in the natural sciences, not many, but there are some in the natural sciences as well. My point is, we’re now growing very rapidly, and something I’m very excited by is, since we’ve started having more violence on campus, beginning with Berklin and Middlebury, we’re seeing a pervasive sense among people on the left that there really is a 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, which is 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 illiberal left was also high in orderliness. That’s interesting, that’s the authoritarian and the predisposition. Exactly, yeah. And also kind of markedly declined, was also characterized by a marked lack of verbal intelligence. Oh, that’s interesting. So yeah, the correlation was about .4. Well, that’s beautiful, that’s beautiful, because one of the simplest formulations I’ve heard, a really great formulation, from Mark Lilla. So Mark Lilla wrote this fantastic op-ed, in the New York Times, 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. 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 the mask with eye holes falls from his face, like he’s a Ku Klux Klan member, or something like that. And so 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, oh, you’re winking at Nazis, or you’re comfortable. Yeah, that’s happened to me over and over. My neighborhood was just postered with. I saw that, I’m like, again, the intimidation. 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 reason. 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 not only can you say something. There’s accountability for words. That’s right, there’s accountability built into it. That’s right. So I didn’t mean to say you can say whatever you want, at a 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. Well, something contemptible. Something contaminated. Contemptible, disgusting. You bet, and those are the things that are not only worthy of being destroyed, but that you have a moral duty to destroy. Exactly, that’s right. So it’s almost like the immune system. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but there’s some cell that tags a cell as enemy, enemy, and once that tag is put on the cell, that attracts other, I forget what kind of cell, to mob it. So we should look into this, this metaphor of the immune system. Yeah. Because 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 by the others. Well, it’s also too that once you’re labeled that way, if someone defends you, the label is contagious. That’s right, and that’s the dynamic of a witch hunt. 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, and 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 read, there was a bit of a counterrevolution at read, the students had to get together somehow and decide, should I like that post? How about if we all like it at the same time? Then we’ll get in less trouble, okay? 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, but in what manner is that going to be utilized to, I don’t want to use the word combat, but to deal with this emergent problem of ideological rigidity in universities? 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 in no clothes, they’re afraid to say it until one person says it. So, and this is also the Ash experiment. Everybody says that that line is the same as that line, and that’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 what, 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 Brett Weinstein was mobbed, so I wrote an essay that stood up for him. We’ve done that for some of them. It’s happening so fast, I can’t keep up. I’ve got books to write, and every week, there’s some new member who’s getting mobbed. And so we’re gonna develop a team of people who will write. We’re just knowing that there are people who will stand up for you, knowing that there are people who will say, wait a second, this is not what we do in the academy. So that’s one thing, is we just stand up for each other. 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 is 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 mostly to talk about race. What about the administrators? Everyone’s afraid of the students. They’re afraid of the students. Oh, so, okay. I don’t have, we have not surveyed them. I’ve only surveyed students. Okay, okay. But from what we hear, people are afraid of the students. Well, that’s also appalling in its own manner. Was that real? That’s a failure of leadership. Where, 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, 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 show up and teach the class? I don’t understand that. So. Again, people are afraid to stand up if it means that people will call you a racist. Yeah, but God, I mean, it’s weird in that situation, though, because you’re also afraid to go to your class. That’s right. And there’s a much more proximal threat there. That’s what I’m most alarmed by, is the rise of intimidation. Intimidation is now a factor in many aspects of academic life, and that’s just terrible. That’s completely incompatible with what we do and who we are. It’s especially appalling, given that whatever happens in the university campuses. One of the questions I’ve faced in Canada is, well, why should we care about what’s happening in the Ivy Towers? Because you’re going to hire these people next year. Yeah, well, what’s happening in the campuses is going to happen in society in five years. That’s how it goes. It’s already happening. So this is actually an 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 diversity. Why is diversity good? And so they have 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. Most of that’s coming in through human resources. That’s right. That’s right. But it’s the same dynamic we have on campus. And the answer to it, so if anybody watching here, if you run a business, if you have friends who are in business, there are only two stable equilibria. One is that every organization is just either all right-wing or all left-wing. But that would be disastrous. So either you just say, OK, we’re on one side. That would be terrible. The other is what we call the Chicago principles of free expression. 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 anyone’s side. That’s the only other stable alternative. And I think leaders need to do this in business, certainly at 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. And so that has to stop. So how effectively is the Chicago statement being disseminated? How rapidly are universities signing up? A few signed on early in this whole crisis. Purdue, there are about 10 or 15 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 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 Hedredox 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 another product, the one that we’re most excited by. So it just went online actually today. It’s called the Open Mind 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’ve 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 hypocrites. We have quotes from wisdom traditions around the world. And we’ve all heard this. So just a little bit of, 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, calm down. We’re all too self-righteous here. And 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 that at the end of it, the measures show that students are more open to other ideas. So the Open Mind 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 the benefit of the doubt, the open minded, if we do that first. That’s like behavioral exposure to some degree. The idea would be that 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 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, where you need to be protected. That’s right. The safe space idea is the worst thing you could possibly do for the very people you’re trying to protect. Exactly. I mean, 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, 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 for them. 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 student’s well-being, let’s say, to the short term lack of fear and conflict. They’re infantilizing them essentially. So yeah. OK. All right. So I was thinking about 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 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. Well, first of all, because they’re going to run into people like that always, right? 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 beneficial axiomatic presuppositions. So all right. So now this has 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 I was in the psychology department at the University of Virginia 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 do promotional work for it. And my second child was just born, and I knew it would be hard to fly from Charlottesville. So I just happened to get 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. I knew nothing about it. It was fascinating. And I started seeing how free enterprise and free markets have helped raise living standards around the world, radical decline of poverty. In a staggeringly rapid fashion that’s completely unprecedented, especially since the year 2000. That’s right. So here I was, 48 years old, discovering I knew nothing about. It was like when I first learned about evolution. Wow, this explains 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 there was also all these business scandals. This was 2011, the wake of the financial crisis. And I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology to help corporations have better ethics. So everything I do 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, almost like being back in grad school, a whole bunch of new things to learn. Must be a kind of a shock, an existential shock, to be in a business school in some sense. No, 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 a way that we do things here. And it’s much more open to applied projects, to actually having impact on the world. Yeah, to applied projects, yeah. And so it was a perfect time for me. The Righteous Mind, that wraps up the first half of my career. 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 it help or hurt the working poor? If you’re an economist on the left, it obviously helps them. If you’re an economist on the right, it obviously hurts them because fewer than 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 Lukian off The Coddling the American Mind. The BBS article was published. And I thought, OK, now I can get back to this, keep writing this capitalism book. And then the universities 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 basically a full-time job in addition to trying to write. I’m also working on a book. 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 ago was that? Well, we wrote it in late 2014. And then we 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 the problem is so much more serious than it was. And the evidence, my god, the evidence about the mental health crisis of adolescents. When Greg and I wrote the article, we saw lots of hints that depression and anxiety were going way up. And we think that’s related to the overprotection. OK, so let’s talk about that just for a second 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 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. That’s true. OK, so 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. And wait a second. 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 childbirth wouldn’t explain it. OK, 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. And then there’s a lot of dominance. And they fight a lot more. They play and fight. Exactly. It’s the free play and the fighting, the working things out for themselves, those are essential skills of adulthood. OK, so then all right. So smaller family 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. There are three giants. There are a lot of causes. I mean, this is such, actually it’s really 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 universities. The big three, I would say, are one is the loss of unsupervised free play. Yeah, OK. 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. And getting in conflict. Thanks for showing that too. Exactly. So getting in conflicts and then dealing with it, and sometimes losing, and you 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. It’s only recently, beginning of the 90s, that they’re always supervised. Because we’re afraid if we take our eyes off them, they’ll be kidnapped. And it was never a risk. It was never a risk. I’ve kind of wondered about this gender flexibility issue as a form of delayed fantasy play. You’re getting Freudian on me. Go ahead. Well, because it looks to me like that. When kids are little, three and four, say three to seven, they do a tremendous amount of identity play. They pretend they’re animals. They pretend they’re parents. They pretend they’re girls if they’re boys. They pretend they’re boys if they’re girls. 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 they never have an opportunity for that? Because they’re not engaging in fantasy play. Maybe it’s just delayed till adulthood. Oh, that’s interesting. Because play, 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 enable people to handle both victory, but even more importantly, loss. That’s right. That’s plausible. That could well be. That I have no opinion on. But the big three factors that I think are explaining part of 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 or 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 Gene Twenge’s work. We used to think that the millennial generation ends in 1998 or 2000. But Gene Twenge shows, looking at four large data sets, 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 11-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 Facebook and other social platforms. And this is just devastating, especially to girls, because it’s not texting. Texting is just me to you. That’s back and forth. That’s fine. When we were kids, you called your friends on the phone. That’s fine. The problem seems to be, according to Twenge, it’s especially platforms in which you put something out and then you wait and see what everyone says about it. And that especially is damaging to girls, who already are at risk of eating disorders and image disorders. So girls become more susceptible to negative emotion when they hit puberty? Well, yes. That’s always been the case. But then there’s another issue, too, with regards to female aggression. So 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 right. So that’s Nikki Crick’s work. Nikki Crick passed away a couple of 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 are 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, what are the boys going to do? They’re going to play video games. And that doesn’t hurt anybody. 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 catastrophe. It’s a crisis. And we’re really hurting, especially the girls. So we’ve got to change something about that. Anyway, social media is possibly the largest single reason why things are going haywire on campus. The third big factor is- And do you think it’s primarily Facebook? Or can you tell? Well, the kids use a lot of different platforms. But from what I hear, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, again, the thing is it’s one to many. That’s what’s bad. If you put something out there and you see how many people like it, that’s what’s bad. Right. And there’s always the threat that it’ll go viral in a terrible way. So that’s like a hammer. Exactly. Or a sword of damage. There’s an unlimited- That’s perfect. Unlimited damage. Unlimited downside to saying something. So what do you do? So they’re all careful. So I don’t know if I want to like that post, because I could get in big trouble for it. Right. Well, the benefit to liking it is minimal and the potential catastrophe for discipline. Unless you’re expected to like it, in which case you’d better like it, because if you don’t like it, you’ll get in trouble. So it’s much more of a mob mentality. I’m not blaming the kids. I’m very sympathetic to them. These are my kids. My kids are 11 and 7. They’re going to come up into this. So the kids have been raised in a social environment that’s much more about mob formation and mob attacks and defenses against mobs. And so the third factor then is the political polarization and the purification of our 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, not that hard, not that nasty. But it’s been getting much, much more hostile, so that now, if someone goes to a campus Republicans meeting, it’s a Democrat who goes to a meeting of the campus Republicans, as happened at UC Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago. And someone finds out that 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 in 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’ve got to get the tribe together and mob her and shut her down. So there are many other reasons. But the loss of unsupervised play, social media, and rising polarization, those are the three big ones. Well, those are big problems, especially a loss of unsupervised play. It’s not obvious at all how that might be addressed. Yes, it is. OK, good, good. I’d like to hear about that. Everyone should just buy Lenore Scanesy’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. I tried to get my son to go out across the street to buy groceries when he was nine years old. And he’d say, 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. OK, we’ll put all this in the description, all of these things. So I’m on the board of it as an advisor. 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, kids do 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 you can’t do this on your own. But the thing is, we all know something’s wrong. So that’s a very practical piece of advice for schools. It’s like open up the unsupervised play facilities and facilitate their use. That’s right. Give everyone a place which is safe. And by safe, I mean physically safe. 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 them go. Now, there will arise problems of bullying. So if it’s repeated harassment, you know. Well, I know a book about that. What book? 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 incidents 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 0% to 20% reductions in bullying. So the effects are much smaller. In the US. In the US. Yeah, the question is whether or not they were able to implement them with the rigor he did in the US. 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, so it’s now got to the point. I can imagine what concept creep looks like even. That’s right. So now it’s the case that 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 this is also something that really bothers me about the misuse of the IAT. Because it’s not that easy to distinguish in-group preference, which no one when in 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 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 development. 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 they’re overweight, or they’re skin color. So 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 friends. Right. This is madness. This is a vice. So I think that inclusion, again, 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 anything else that you wanted to talk about. We talked about the role of religion and the fact that people are naturally religious thinkers. 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 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, as you had under communism. When you have a whole system where almost everybody thinks this is terrible, I hate this, but I don’t dare say anything. When you have preference falsification, this is a work by Timur Koran. And here’s everybody else’s preferences. So they think, OK, 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 pushback at Reed last week or that was written up last week. So I think because most people, what we’re starting to see is that a lot of people of color also, they say, you’re not speaking for me. I mean, every group is diverse. And so when you have a variety of people, and you have progressive speaking, you have a variety of people, I think we’re going to see more and more people standing up saying, 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 going to start seeing a lot more people standing up. And one of our goals at Hederox Academy is to just help put out the ideas that people need. And this is what you’re doing too. Just put out the ideas. Critique the bad ideas. And put out concepts that can contest in this space of ideas. Get good information. So if people go to HederoxAcademy.org on our research pages, we have all the information about what do all the polls say, what’s the current information about students’ attitudes. We have the history of this. We have a lot of research on who is more biased, left or right. Well, it 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 HederoxAcademy.org and sign up. OK, so let me ask you one more question. That sounds good. And 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? 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 the faculties of education now as well. I think they’re in the same bin. Let’s put it that way. The women’s studies programs in particular, their express goal, expressed on their websites, is to produce social justice radical left leaning activists. And so for a while, one of the things I proposed in Canada was that the conservatives, in particular, cut the university funding by 25% so that the universities would have to sort themselves out. But then 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 conservative left. No, that’s right. But the academy’s 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 Fiamenco, who used to be, yeah. Yeah, she is. And she’s not in her natural milieu when she’s doing such things. She’s a brave and tough person. And she’s gone after the women’s studies types on methodological grounds, particularly. But there are people who are working full time at doing nothing but producing the kind of polar. So do you have any thoughts about that? Yes, I do. 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 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. I’m not sure if we should call 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 duty to the truth. And political ideological commitments clearly warp us. They make us do things. They push us. So we’ve got to recognize that if we let our systems get out of whack, we are betraying the truth. We are systemically, we have a systemic truthism 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 ourselves 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 ideological purposes? If we say, you’ve given me your children to educate. I’m waging a political battle. I’m going to try to get used to this. Use them as tools. That is horrific. That is unacceptable. We are violating our duties. So I think we need a- Right, but the response to that, especially from the postmodernist types, is that that’s all there is. There’s only ideological conflict. Yeah, well, that’s it. Perfect. 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. 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 that don’t live up to those goals. Other universities, and I think Brown is leading the way on this one so far. Early in 2015, the president had all kinds of statements about Brown is committed to social justice, a fundamental, a 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 going to 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 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 ones. It’ll be a marketplace choice. Exactly. That’s right. So that’s why I said when I talked about the emperor’s new clothes, we have a situation. We have a gigantic market failure in which our top universities are offering a 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 to follow suit. They’re going to 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 and 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 going to see a big change. And that’s why I’m optimistic, because I think we’re going to see that. All right. Well, thank you very much. It was great talking with you.