The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 2 The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning Always Trust Your Feelings

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The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings

Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2019-8-20 Review Date: Status:💥

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Imagine that you are a sophomore in college. It’s midwinter, and you’ve been feeling blue and anxious. You attach no stigma to seeing a psychotherapist, so you take advantage of the campus counseling services to see if talking through your issues will help.

You sit down with your new therapist and tell him how you’ve been feeling lately. He responds, “Oh, wow. People feel very anxious when they’re in great danger. Do you feel very anxious sometimes?”

This realization that experiencing anxiety means you are in great danger is making you very anxious right now. You say yes. The therapist answers, “Oh, no! Then you must be in very great danger.”

You sit in silence for a moment, confused. In your past experience, therapists have helped you question your fears, not amplify them. The therapist adds, “Have you experienced anything really nasty or difficult in your life? Because I should also warn you that experiencing trauma makes you kind of broken, and you may be that way for the rest of your life.”

He briefly looks up from his notepad. “Now, since we know you are in grave danger, let’s discuss how you can hide.” As your anxiety mounts, you realize that you have made a terrible mistake coming to see this therapist.

“Always trust your feelings,” said Misoponos, and that dictum may sound wise and familiar. You’ve heard versions of it from a variety of sappy novels and pop psychology gurus. But the second Great Untruth—the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning—is a direct contradiction of much ancient wisdom. We opened this chapter with a quotation from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, but we could just as easily have quoted Buddha (“Our life is the creation of our mind”)2 or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”)3 or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).4

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From the Enchiridion. Epictetus & Lebell (1st–2nd century/1995), p. 7.
Mascaro (1995), chapter 1, verse 1.
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. II.ii, ll. 268–270.
Milton (1667/2017), bk. I, ll. 241–255.

Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. Happiness, maturity, and even enlightenment require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning and learning instead to question our feelings. The feelings themselves are real, and sometimes they alert us to truths that our conscious mind has not noticed, but sometimes they lead us astray.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jon drew on Buddha and other sages to offer the metaphor that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider sitting on top of a large elephant. The rider represents conscious or “controlled” processes—the language-based thinking that fills our conscious minds and that we can control to some degree. The elephant represents everything else that goes on in our minds, the vast majority of which is outside of our conscious awareness. These processes can be called intuitive, unconscious, or “automatic,” referring to the fact that nearly all of what goes on in our minds is outside of our direct control, although the results of automatic processes sometimes make their way into consciousness.6 The rider-and-elephant metaphor captures the fact that the rider often believes he is in control, yet the elephant is vastly stronger, and tends to win any conflict that arises between the two. Jon reviewed psychological research to show that the rider generally functions more like the elephant’s servant than its master, in that the rider is extremely skilled at producing post-hoc justifications for whatever the elephant does or believes.

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In his best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2011), Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman refers to automatic processes as System 1, which is fast, and controlled processes as System 2, which is slow.

Emotional reasoning is the cognitive distortion that occurs whenever the rider interprets what is happening in ways that are consistent with the elephant’s reactive emotional state, without investigating what is true. The rider then acts like a lawyer or press secretary whose job is to rationalize and justify the elephant’s pre-ordained conclusions, rather than to inquire into—or even be curious about—what is really true.

Typically, the rider does his job without objection, but the rider has some ability to talk back to the elephant, particularly if he can learn to speak the elephant’s language, which is a language of intuition rather than logic. If the rider can reframe a situation so that the elephant sees it in a new way, then the elephant will feel new feelings, too, which will then motivate the elephant to move in a new direction.

If you engage in this “talking back” process on a regular basis, it becomes easier and easier to do. Over time, the rider becomes a more skillful trainer, and the elephant becomes better trained. The two work together in harmony. That is the power and promise of CBT.

Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry. Clinicians assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict. To treat depression, you had to fix the underlying problem, and that could take many years of therapy. But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck 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. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.

Note: What the thinker thinks, the prover proves

Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle between negative beliefs and negative emotions. If you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it gives them at least some moments of relief from negative emotions, and if you release them from negative emotions, they become more open to questioning their negative beliefs. It takes some skill to do this—depressed people are very good at finding evidence for the beliefs in the triad. And it takes time—a disempowering schema can’t be disassembled in a single moment of great insight (which is why insights gained from moments of enlightenment often fade quickly). But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.

The evidence that CBT works is overwhelming.7 A common finding is that CBT works about as well as Prozac and similar drugs for relieving the symptoms of anxiety disorders and mild to moderate depression,8 and it does so with longer-lasting benefits and without any negative side effects. But CBT is effective for more than anxiety and depression, including anorexia, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder, anger, marital discord, and stress-related disorders.9 CBT is easy to do, has been widely used, has been demonstrated to be effective, and is the best-studied form of psychotherapy.10 It is therefore the therapy with the strongest evidence that it is both safe and effective.

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Thousands of studies and hundreds of meta-analyses have now examined the effectiveness of CBT for treating depression and anxiety disorders. For a recent and accessible review of the literature, see: Hollon & DeRubeis (in press). We can summarize a common view with this sentence from the website of the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Psychiatrists: CBT “is one of the most effective treatments for conditions where anxiety or depression is the main problem … [it is] the most effective psychological treatment for moderate and severe depression, [and] is as effective as antidepressants for many types of depression.” Blenkiron, P. (2013, July). Cognitive behavioural therapy. Royal College of Psychiatrists. Retrieved from https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinformation/therapies/cognitivebehaviouraltherapy.aspx
“Cognitive therapy can be as efficacious as antidepressant medications … unlike medication, its benefits persist after treatment ceases … cognitive therapy is at least as efficacious and quite possibly longer lasting than alternative approaches [to Generalized Anxiety Disorder].” Hollon & DeRubeis (in press).
Blenkiron (2013); see n. 7. See also: CBT outcome studies. (2016, November 25). Academy of Cognitive Therapy. Retrieved from http://www.academyofct.org/page/OutcomeStudies
We make no claim that CBT is more effective for all psychological disorders, but because it is so easy to do and it is the most researched form of psychotherapy, it is often thought of as the gold standard to which other forms of treatment, including drugs, should be compared. See: Butler, Chapman, Forman, & Beck (2006).

The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT. It is these distorted thought patterns that Greg began to notice on campus, which led him to invite Jon out to lunch, which led us to write our Atlantic article and, eventually, this book. (Different CBT experts and practitioners use different lists of cognitive distortions. The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT—how it works, and how to practice it—please see Appendix 1.)

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”

CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”

OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”

DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”

MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”

LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”

NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”

DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”

BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”11

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Nine common cognitive distortions from the list in Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, & Lata K. McGinn’s book Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 2012).

As you read through that list of distortions, it’s easy to see how somebody who habitually thinks in such ways would develop schemas that revolve around maladaptive core beliefs, which interfere with realistic and adaptive interpretations of social situations.

Everyone engages in these distortions from time to time, so CBT is useful for everyone. Wouldn’t our relationships be better if we all did a little less blaming and dichotomous thinking, and recognized that we usually share responsibility for conflicts? Wouldn’t our political debates be more productive if we all did less overgeneralizing and labeling, both of which make it harder to compromise? We are not suggesting that everybody needs to find a therapist and start treatment with CBT. Greg’s original realization about cognitive distortions was that just learning how to recognize them and rein them in is a good intellectual habit for all of us to cultivate.

Learning about cognitive distortions is especially important on a college campus. Imagine being in a seminar class in which several of the students habitually engage in emotional reasoning, overgeneralization, dichotomous thinking, and simplistic labeling. The task of the professor in this situation is to gently correct such distortions, all of which interfere with learning—both for the students engaging in the distortions and for the other students in the class. For example, if a student is offended by a passage in a novel and makes a sweeping generalization about the bad motives of authors who share the demographic characteristics of the offending author, other students might disagree but be reluctant to say so publicly. In such a case, the professor could ask a series of questions encouraging the student to ground assertions in textual evidence and consider alternative interpretations. Over time, a good college education should improve the critical thinking skills of all students.

There is no universally accepted definition of “critical thinking,” but most treatments of the concept12 include a commitment to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence in a proper way—which is the basis of scholarship and is also the essence of CBT. (Critical thinking is also needed to recognize and defeat “fake news.”) It is not acceptable for a scholar to say, “You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I’m sticking with it.” When scholars cannot rebut or reconcile disconfirming evidence, they must drop their claims or else lose the respect of their colleagues. As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances.

But what would happen if some professors encouraged students to use the distortions in our list above?

Microaggressions: The Triumph of Impact Over Intent

A prime example of how some professors (and some administrators) encourage mental habits similar to the cognitive distortions is their promotion of the concept of “microaggressions,” popularized in a 2007 article13 by Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Sue and several colleagues defined microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” (The term was first applied to people of color but is now applied much more broadly.)

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For various definitions of “critical thinking,” see: Defining critical thinking. (n.d.). The Foundation for Critical Thinking. Retrieved from https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766
Sue et al. (2007). The definition quoted is on p. 271. The term was first coined and discussed by Pierce (1970).

Many people from historically marginalized groups continue to face frequent acts of bias and prejudice. Sometimes people make thinly veiled bigoted remarks, and in cases where the speaker is expressing hostility or contempt, it seems appropriate to call it aggression. If the aggressive act is minor or subtle, then the term “microaggression” seems well suited for the situation. But aggression is not unintentional or accidental. If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one.

Unfortunately, when Sue included “unintentional” slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions. He encouraged them to engage in emotional reasoning—to start with their feelings and then justify those feelings by drawing the conclusion that someone has committed an act of aggression against them. Those feelings do sometimes point to a correct inference, and it is important to find out whether an acquaintance feels hostility or contempt toward you. But it is not a good idea to start by assuming the worst about people and reading their actions as uncharitably as possible. This is the distortion known as mind reading; if done habitually and negatively, it is likely to lead to despair, anxiety, and a network of damaged relationships.

Sue’s original essay included a number of examples of microaggressions, some of which imply that a person holds negative stereotypes toward various groups—for example, a white woman clutching her purse when a black person passes by; a taxi driver passing by a person of color to pick up a white passenger; a white person praising a black person for being “articulate.” A person who has experienced these things repeatedly might be justified in suspecting that bigotry or negative stereotypes motivated the behaviors.14

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Unconscious or implicit associations are very real, although the relationships of such associations to discriminatory behavior are complex and are currently being debated by social psychologists. See: Rubinstein, Jussim, & Stevens (2018). For a defense of the role of implicit bias in causing discriminatory behavior, see: Greenwald, Banaji, & Nosek (2015).

However, many of the examples offered by Sue do not necessarily suggest that the speaker feels hostility or holds negative stereotypes toward any group. His list of microaggressions includes a white person asking an Asian American to teach her words in the Asian American’s “native language,” a white person saying that “America is a melting pot,” and a white person saying, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” These all hinge on the fact that listeners could choose to interpret the statement or question in a way that makes them feel insulted or marginalized. Sue explains that an Asian American could take the language question as an assertion that “you are a foreigner”; a Latino student could take the “melting pot” comment as an injunction to “assimilate/acculturate to the dominant culture”; a black student could interpret the “most qualified person” comment as an implicit statement that “people of color are given extra unfair advantages because of their race.”

Yes, one certainly could interpret these everyday questions and comments in this way, as tiny acts of aggression, rebuke, or exclusion—and sometimes that is exactly what they are. But there are other ways to interpret these statements, too. More to the point, should we teach students to interpret these kinds of things as acts of aggression? If a student feels a flash of offense as the recipient of such statements, is he better off embracing that feeling and labeling himself a victim of a microaggression, or is he better off asking himself if a more charitable interpretation might be warranted by the facts? A charitable interpretation does not mean that the recipient of the comment must do nothing; rather, it opens up a range of constructive responses. A charitable approach might be to say, “I’m guessing you didn’t mean any harm when you said that, but you should know that some people might interpret that to mean …” This approach would make it easier for students to respond when they feel hurt, it would transform a victimization story into a story about one’s own agency, and it would make it far more likely that the interpersonal exchange would have a positive outcome. We all can be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they are bigots when they harbor no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback. It may also make them less interested in engaging with people across lines of difference.15

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Even when a person interacts with a bigot, CBT can help that person reduce the amount and likelihood of suffering.

By Sue’s logic, however, CBT itself can be a microaggression, because it requires questioning the premises and assumptions that give rise to feelings. Sue gives the example of a therapist asking a client, “Do you really think your problem stems from racism?” Depending on the therapist’s intention, such a question could indeed be improperly dismissive. But if the intention of the therapist is to help the client talk back to his emotions, search for evidence to justify interpretations, and find the realistic appraisal of events that will lead to the most effective functioning in a world full of ambiguities, then the question may very well be appropriate and constructive. Teaching people to see more aggression in ambiguous interactions, take more offense, feel more negative emotions, and avoid questioning their initial interpretations strikes us as unwise, to say the least. It is also contrary to the usual goals of good psychotherapy.

Shadi Hamid, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, describes his approach to dealing with potential microaggressions in an article in The Atlantic: “As an Arab and a Muslim, I get the questions ‘Where are you from?’—by which people usually mean ‘Where are you really from?’—and ‘Were you born here?’ quite often. It doesn’t usually occur to me to get offended.”16 As Hamid notes, “In our identitarian age, the bar for offense has been lowered considerably, which makes democratic debate more difficult—citizens are more likely to withhold their true opinions if they fear being labeled as bigoted or insensitive.”

Note: Chilling effect

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Hamid, S. (2018, February 17). Bari Weiss, outrage mobs, and identity politics. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/

Hamid’s point has important implications for the challenge of building a community on a college campus, where we want students to freely engage with one another rather than keeping their thoughts hidden. Imagine that you are in charge of new-student orientation at an American university that is very diverse—there are students from a wide variety of racial groups, ethnic groups, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. There are international students from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, some of whom don’t speak English well; many don’t understand the nuances of English words and American customs, and as a result, they often choose the wrong word to express themselves. There are also students on the autism spectrum who have difficulty picking up on subtle social cues.17

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Miller, G. (2017, July 18). The neurodiversity case for free speech. Quillette. Retrieved from http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech

With all this diversity, there will be hundreds of misunderstandings on your campus each day. The potential for offense-taking is almost unlimited. How should you prepare these students to engage with one another in the most productive and beneficial way? Would you give them a day of microaggression training and encourage them to report microaggressions whenever they see them? To go along with that training, would you set up a Bias Response Team—a group of administrators charged with investigating reports of bias, including microaggressions?18 Or would you rather give all students advice on how to be polite and avoid giving accidental or thoughtless offense in a diverse community, along with a day of training in giving one another the benefit of the doubt and interpreting everyone’s actions in ways that elicit the least amount of emotional reactivity?

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FIRE. (2017). Bias Response Team Report. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/special-collections/fire-guides/report-on-bias-reporting-systems-2017

More generally, the microaggression concept19 reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from “intent” to “impact.” In moral judgment as it has long been studied by psychologists, intent is essential for assessing guilt.20 We generally hold people morally responsible for acts that they intended to commit. If Bob tries to poison Maria and he fails, he has committed a very serious crime, even though he has made no impact on Maria. (Bob is still guilty of attempted murder.) Conversely, if Maria accidentally kills Bob by (consensually) kissing him after eating a peanut butter sandwich, she has committed no offense if she had no idea he was deathly allergic to peanuts.

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For a review and critique of research on microaggressions, see Lilienfeld (2017).
For example, Heider (1958). One exception to this principle is very young children, who will often judge a well-intentioned act to be wrong if it accidentally causes harm. See: Piaget (1932/1965).

Most people understand concepts related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in this way—they focus on intent. If, on the basis of group membership, you dislike people, wish them ill, or intend to do them harm, you are a bigot, even if you say or do something that inadvertently or unintentionally helps members of that group. Conversely, if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbor no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.

However, some activists say that bigotry is only about impact (as they define impact); intent is not even necessary. If a member of an identity group feels offended or oppressed by the action of another person, then according to the impact-versus-intent paradigm, that other person is guilty of an act of bigotry. As explained in an essay at EverydayFeminism.com, “In the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us?”21

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Utt, J. (2013, July 30). Intent vs. impact: Why your intentions don’t really matter. Everyday Feminism. Retrieved from https://everydayfeminism.com/2013/07/intentions-dont-really-matter

It is undeniable that some members of various identity groups encounter repeated indignities because of their group membership. Even if none of the offenders harbored a trace of ill will, their clueless or ignorant questions could become burdensome and hard to tolerate.

Comedian and diversity educator Karith Foster, a black woman who is married to a white man, had a particularly difficult experience when her husband was taken to the emergency room after a nearly fatal motorcycle accident. As hospital personnel asked him about his medical history, he slipped in and out of consciousness. Foster began to answer for him, but nobody seemed to be listening to her. “For the first time in my life I felt invisible,” she said. She told us that a doctor glanced at her indifferently and finally asked—in a detached tone of voice—what her relationship was to the patient. Then, as they treated her husband, more members of the all-white staff asked her that same question with a similar intonation, until finally Foster was on the brink of tears. “It wasn’t the question,” she told us. “I understand that by law and hospital protocol it needed to be asked. What was so disconcerting was the tone I perceived.” She remembers clearly thinking, “Am I seriously having to deal with this racist bullshit RIGHT NOW? As my husband’s life is on the line?!” She described what happened next:

I wanted so badly to lose it and scream at the hospital staff: “We’re living in the twenty-first century! It’s called a mixed-race marriage!” But I knew my emotions were getting the best of me in this incredibly stressful moment and were leading me to label the doctors and nurses as racists. I was assuming that I knew what they were thinking. But that’s not the way I normally think when I’m not under so much stress. It took everything I had, but I took a deep breath and practiced the C.A.R.E. model22 that I teach: I reminded myself that everyone was doing their best to save my husband’s life, that the stress of the situation might be influencing my interpretations, and that I needed to keep the lines of communication open. Doing that must have shifted how I was coming across, because although I don’t remember acting any differently, it seemed like all of a sudden the doctors began showing me X-rays and explaining the procedures they were doing. One of the attendants even went out and bought me a cup of coffee and refused to let me pay for it. That’s when I had the epiphany that what I had experienced wasn’t racism. No one was being malicious because I was black and my spouse was white. But for them to fully comprehend our relationship, they had to change their default ideas of what a married couple looks like.23

Foster told us that in dealing with hospital personnel’s insensitivity, “without taking a step back, I could have made an awful situation a lot worse.” After the emergency—her husband is doing fine now—Foster made sure to speak with the hospital administration about the insensitivity and lack of awareness she and her husband experienced, and the administrative personnel were receptive and apologetic.

It is crucial to teach incoming students to be thoughtful in their interactions with one another. A portion of what is derided as “political correctness” is just an effort to promote polite and respectful interactions by discouraging the use of terms that are reasonably taken to be demeaning.24 But if you teach students that intention doesn’t matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts), and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are “aggressors” who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world—and even their university—as a hostile place where things never seem to get better.

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Karith created and teaches the C.A.R.E. model (Conscious Empathy, Active Listening, Responsible Reaction, and Environmental Awareness) in her workshops and presentations.
K. Foster (personal communication, February 17, 2018).
Zimmerman, J. (2016, June 16). Two kinds of PC. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.inside-highered.com/views/2016/06/16/examination-two-kinds-political-correctness-essay [inactive]

If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it. Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.

And, to add injury to insult, this sort of environment is likely to foster an external locus of control. The concept of “locus of control” goes back to behaviorist days, when psychologists noted that animals (including people) could be trained to expect that they could get what they wanted through their own behavior (that is, some control over outcomes was “internal” to themselves). Conversely, animals could be trained to expect that nothing they did mattered (that is, all control of outcomes was “external” to themselves).25 A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.26 An internal locus of control has even been found to make many kinds of adversity less painful.27

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Rotter (1966).
For reviews, see Cobb-Clark (2015).
Buddelmeyer & Powdthavee (2015).

Disinvitations and the Ideological Vetting of Speakers

Another way that emotional reasoning manifests itself on college campuses is through the “disinvitation” of guest speakers. The logic typically used is that if a speaker makes some students uncomfortable, upset, or angry, then that is enough to justify banning that speaker from campus entirely because of the “danger” that the speaker poses to those students. In a typical case,28 students pressure the organization that issued the invitation, or petition the college president or relevant deans, demanding that someone rescind the invitation. The threat is made (sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly) that if the speaker comes to campus, there will be loud, disruptive protests in an organized effort to stop the talk from taking place. Strategies include blocking entrances to the building; shouting expletives or “Shame! Shame! Shame!”29 at anyone who tries to attend; banging loudly on doors and windows from outside the room; and filling up the auditorium with protesters, who eventually shout or chant for as long as it takes to prevent the speaker from speaking.

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See, for example, the shout-downs of Charles Murray at Middlebury College and Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College, which we’ll describe in chapter 4. FIRE maintains a database of disinvitation attempts: Disinvitation Database. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database
Bauer-Wolf, J. (2017, October 6). Free speech advocate silenced. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/06/william-mary-students-who-shut-down-aclu-event-broke-conduct-code

As the idea that the mere presence of a speaker on campus can be “dangerous” has spread more widely, efforts to disinvite speakers have become more common. Greg’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been tracking disinvitation attempts going back to 2000; the FIRE disinvitation database currently contains 379 such events. About 46% of the attempts were successful: the speaker was disinvited, or the event was otherwise canceled. Of the events that proceeded, about a third were disrupted by protesters to some degree. For most of the events, the disinvitation effort can be clearly categorized as coming from one side of the political spectrum or the other. As you can see in Figure 2.1, from 2000 through 2009, disinvitation efforts were just as likely to come from the right as from the left.30 But after 2009, a gap opens up, and then widens beginning in 2013, right around the time that Greg began noticing things changing on campus.

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About a third of the cases in which the push came from the right originated off campus, and half these cases involved religious organizations objecting to someone speaking about issues related to abortion and contraception. Of disinvitation efforts from the left, fewer than 5% were initiated from off-campus sources. To examine the data yourself, visit https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database

Part of this change is because, on some campuses, conservative groups began inviting more provocateurs, especially Milo Yiannopoulos, a master of the art of provoking what he calls “mild rage.” Yiannopoulos describes himself as a “troll” and even named his 2017 speaking tour “Milo’s Troll Academy Tour.”31 While trolls have, of course, been around for a long time, the dynamic of troll versus protesters became more common in 2016, and we have used asterisks in Figure 2.1 to show where the line for the left would have been had we not included the seventeen Yiannopoulos disinvitations.32 Many of the speakers who faced disinvitation efforts from the left in 2013 and 2014 were serious thinkers and politicians, including conservative political journalist George Will, and managing director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde. Some of them were even clearly left leaning, such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, comedian Bill Maher, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

FIGURE 2.1. Disinvitation attempts each year since 2000. Solid line shows efforts initiated by people and groups on the political left; dashed line shows efforts from the right. Asterisks show where the solid line would have been had Milo Yiannopoulos been removed from the dataset. (Source: FIRE.)

Something began changing on many campuses around 2013,33 and the idea that college students should not be exposed to “offensive” ideas is now a majority position on campus. In 2017, 58% of college students said it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”34 This statement was endorsed by 63% of very liberal students, but it’s a view that is not confined to the left; almost half of very conservative students (45%) endorsed that statement, too.

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Yiannopoulos, M. (2016, August 20). Trolls will save the world. Breitbart. Retrieved from http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/08/20/trolls-will-save-world
Stevens, S. (2017, February 7). Campus speaker disinvitations: Recent trends (Part 2 of 2) [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/02/07/campus-speaker-disinvitations-recent-trends-part-2-of-2
For more analysis of these trends, including a response to critics who claim that surveys show no recent changes in attitudes toward speech on campus, see Stevens, S., & Haidt, J. (2018, April 11). The skeptics are wrong part 2: Speech culture on campus is changing. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-2
Naughton, K. (2017, October). Speaking freely—What students think about expression at American colleges. FIRE. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/publications/student-attitudes-free-speech-survey

The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.35

Note: yeah but eventually you have to give people some space otherwise you just look like a dick and people won’t listen to you

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Socrates’ fellow citizens ultimately accused him of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens. He was convicted by a jury and forced to drink poison. We’d like to think we are better able to tolerate “impiety” today.

It was in this spirit that Zachary Wood, a left-leaning African American student at Williams College, in Massachusetts, led the “Uncomfortable Learning” series. Like Socrates, Wood wanted to expose students to ideas that they would otherwise not encounter, in order to spur them to better thinking. In October 2015, Wood invited Suzanne Venker,36 a conservative critic of feminism and an advocate of traditional gender roles, to speak as part of the series. Wood’s co-organizer, Matthew Hennessy, explained:

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Venker, S. (2015, October 20). Williams College’s “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series dropped me. Why? FIRE. Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/10/20/williams-college-dropped-me-from-its-uncomfortable-learning-speaker-series-why.html

We chose [Venker] because millions of Americans think her viewpoints carry weight, or even agree with her. We think it’s important to get an understanding of why so many Americans do think these really interesting and difficult thoughts, so we can challenge them and better understand our own behaviors and our own thoughts.37

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Paris, F. (2015, October 21). Organizers cancel Venker lecture. The Williams Record. Retrieved from http://williamsrecord.com/2015/10/21/organizers-cancel-venker-lecture [inactive]

The response from Williams students was so ferocious that ultimately Wood and Hennessy decided they had to cancel the event. One student wrote on a Facebook page:

When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist men’s rights activist to campus in the name of “dialogue” and “the other side,” you are not only causing actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm to students, but you are also—paying—for the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters… . Know, you are dipping your hands in their blood, Zach Wood.38

Note: There seems to be some subtle fear that they could be convinced. Probably because their beliefs are ill-founded in the first place, there’s nothing really stopping them besides dogma

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Wood, Z. (2015, October 18). Breaking through a ring of motivated ignorance. Williams Alternative. Retrieved from http://williamsalternative.com/2015/10/breaking-through-a-ring-of-motivated-ignorance-zach-wood. See also Wood’s 2018 TED Talk: Why it’s worth listening to people you disagree with. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/zachary_r_wood_why_it_s_worth_listening_to_people_we_disagree_with

This response clearly illustrates the cognitive distortions of catastrophizing, labeling, overgeneralizing, and dichotomous thinking. It is also a textbook example of emotional reasoning, as Wood himself put it when explaining the decision to cancel the lecture:

When an individual goes so far as to describe someone as having blood on their hands for supporting the idea of bringing a highly controversial speaker to Williams, they are advancing the belief that what offends them should not be allowed on this campus precisely because it offends them and people who agree with them.39

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Wood (2015); see n. 38.

Should a student saying “I am offended” be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture? What if it’s many students? What if members of the faculty are offended, too?

It depends on what you think is the purpose of education. Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”40 This, of course, was Zach Wood’s belief, too, and Gray’s principle allows us to distinguish the provocations of Wood and Socrates from the provocations of Yiannopoulos. Unfortunately, the president of Williams College had a different philosophy, and personally intervened to cancel a later invitation made to another controversial speaker.41 In doing so, he implicitly endorsed Misoponos’s dictum that “uncomfortable learning” is an oxymoron. He might as well have posted a sign on the entry gates to the college: EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE INTENDED TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK; IT IS MEANT TO MAKE THEM COMFORTABLE.

Note: the point of giving bad views a platform is not because they’re valid, but it’s so that you can develop stronger rebutted against such ideas and therefor become even more convicted of your beliefs because they hold up

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Gray, (2012), p. 86.
Falk, A. (2016, February 18). John Derbyshire’s scheduled appearance at Williams. Williams College Office of the President. Retrieved from https://president.williams.edu/letters-from-the-president/john-derbyshires-scheduled-appearance-at-williams

🔮 The Cosmos

The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings

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