Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt Quotes

“But [social media] is also the greatest enabler of relational aggression since the invention of language, and the evidence available today suggests that girls' mental health has suffered as a result.”

Mental Health Social Media Girls Aggression

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“The loss of political diversity among professor, particularly in fields that deal with politicized content, can undermine the quality and rigor of scholarly research... when a field lacks political diversity, researchers tend to congregate around questions and research methods that generally confirm their shared narrative, while ignoring questions and methods that don't offer such support. The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students, too, in three ways. First, there's the problem that many college students have little or no exposure to professors from half of the political spectrum. Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States... Second, the loss of viewpoint diversity among the faculty means that what students learn about politically controversial topics will often be "left shifted" from the truth. [The third problem] is the risk that some academic communities- particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country- may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university... Politically homogenous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts”

Students Diversity University Professors Problems Universities

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Safetyism is the cult of safety-- an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined)”

Safety Obsession

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Efforts to protect students by creating bureaucratic means of resolving problems and conflicts can have the unintended consequence of fostering moral dependence, which may reduce students' ability to resolve conflicts independently both during and after college.”

Students College Independence Dependence Administrators Universities

Author:Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

“Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages-- even college students”

Children Students Safety Trauma Justifications

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“The abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is among the most horrific crimes one can imagine. It is also, thankfully, among the rarest. According to the FBI, almost 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated their plans, misunderstood directions, or runaway from home or foster care, and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home. The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing- roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors. And since the 1990s, the rates of all crimes against children have gone down, while the chances of a kidnapped child surviving the ordeal have gone up.”

Children America Crime Statistics Abductions

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Skenazy sees [cognitive distortion] discounting positives when parents overmonitor. "Any upside to free, unsupervised time (joy, independence, problem-solving, resilience) is seen as trivial, compared to the infinite harm the child could suffer without you there"...”

Children Safety Parents Monitoring

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child's perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety.”

Children Anxiety Parenting Overprotection

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Gray notes that the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings: They seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate... All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose.”

Children Play Fear Risk Danger Playtime

Author:Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

“Gray notes that the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings: They seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate... All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose. Unfortunately, outdoor physical play is the kind that has declined the most in the lives of American children.”

Children Play Risk Child Outdoor Playtime

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“If you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. As Marcus Aurelius advised, "Choose not to be harmed- and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed- and you haven't been." The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels... words don't cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat.”

Choices Emotions Words Speakers Universities Colleges Fake Danger

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Practice the virtue of "intellectual humility." Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.”

Humility Intellectual

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“The college admissions process nowadays makes it harder for high school students to enjoy school and pursue intrinsic fulfillment. The process "warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy" and "jeopardizes their mental health”

Students College High School Problems College Admissions

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive..... Girls, in contrast, are more "relationally" aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals' relationships, reputations, and social status-- for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out. When you add it all up, there's no overall sex difference in total aggression, but there's a large and consistent sex difference in the preferred ways of harming others.”

Differences Psychology Aggression Girls Vs Boys

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Beck [a psychiatrist who developed Cognitive behavioral therapy] noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the "cognitive triad" of depression: "I'm no good," "My world is bleak," and "My future is hopeless." Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure.”

Psychology Depression Thoughts Beliefs

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“... feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships.”

Feelings Distortions

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Some of these [hovering and oversupervising] parents may think that making sure their children do whatever it takes to succeed in advance courses helps their children develop "grit." But grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that's tragic... Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.”

Parenting Bad Parents College Admissions High Schoolers

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group's efforts to find the truth”

Fear Groups Solidarity Groupthink

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“No one should have to pass someone else's ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life- along with civic life- dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, no shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think. Realizing and accepting this has made me- an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD- realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students. If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem? [Lucia Martinez Valdivia]”

Fear University Professors Speakers Speak Up Practice What You Preach

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Girls may be suffering more than boys [mental illnesses] because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.”

Aggression Teenagers Smartphones Comparisons Adolescents Teenage Girls Girls Vs Boys Social Media Mental Illness

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“... a culture of defensive self-censorship seemed to be emerging, partly in response to students who were quick to "call out" or shame others for small things that they deemed to be insensitive... We called this pattern vindictive protectiveness”

Culture Students Vindictive

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“...there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.”

Kids Parenting Social Media Adolescents Limiting Device Use

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework. Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen. When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevate risk of depression. But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.”

Kids Depression Suicide Social Media Electronics Screen Time Rates

Author:Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

“In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this: The thought process that went into building these applications Facebook being the first of them... was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"... And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone like or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you... more likes and comments... It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Earlier in the interview, he said, "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." In short, iGen [beginning with those born in 1995] is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?”

Social Media Teen Facebook Generation Generation Z Igen What S Wrong With Society

Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Prior to the era of polarization, ingroup favoritism, that is, partisans' enthusiasm for their part or candidate, was the driving force behind political participation. More recently, however, it is hostility toward the out-party that makes people more inclined to participate. In other words, Americans are now motivated to... take part in political action not by love for their party's candidate but by hatred of the other party's candidate. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them.”

Politics Candidates Americans Political Party

Author:Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

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