Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Haidt about his new book "The Coddling of the American Mind." They discuss the hostility to free speech that has grown more common among young adults, recent moral panics on campus, the role of intentions in ethical life, the economy of prestige in “call out” culture, how we should define bigotry, systemic racism, the paradox of progress, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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Today I'm speaking with Jonathan Haidt.
Jon is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.
He got his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.
And then he taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years, I believe in the psychology department.
He's the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis, and most recently, The Coddling of the American Mind, with his co-author Greg Lukianoff.
And this is John's second time on the podcast.
John and I have a somewhat colorful history.
We now play well together, but that was not always so.
I recently went back and looked at some of our skirmishes in print and was surprised to see how hard we rolled.
We really tried to take each other's head off.
But this is an example of a collision that ultimately worked out.
There are people who I've fought pretty hard with in the past, where our debate over ideas definitely slipped the bounds of collegiality.
This happened with my friend Dan Dennett about free will, and it happened with Sean Carroll, the physicist.
But then further conversation got us back on track.
Of course, there have been other skirmishes where the outcome seemed to cancel all possibility of future conversation.
Admittedly, it's hard to know when that point has been reached.
I'm hearing rumors, for instance, that Noam Chomsky may want to do a podcast.
And that's an experiment I'd be willing to run, actually, as bad as that email exchange was.
Probably have to do that in person.
And with a mediator?
And maybe with some MDMA and an arm guard?
But I'd be willing to try it, so... I'll let you know if that comes together.
Anyway, John is now very easy to talk to.
He is a collaborator, and he is doing very important work.
And here we speak about his new book and about the recent moral panics among young adults.
We discuss controversies over free speech on campus.
The role of intentions in morality, the economy of prestige in so-called call-out culture.
We talk about how we should define bigotry, systemic racism, the paradox of progress, how the world gets better and better and we coddle our kids more and more because we want life to be as safe and as easy as possible.
Understandably so, but there is a downside.
In any case, this is a timely conversation which should be relevant to people in every generation, really.
We're talking to the young, and we're talking to their parents, who have to live with them.
So, without further delay, I bring you Jonathan Haidt.
I am here with Jonathan Haidt.
Jon, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
My pleasure, Sam.
So you have a new book, which really the world has been waiting for for quite some time because you're addressing a problem that has been like this cresting wave of leftist intolerance that is breaking over us now for some years.
And the book is The Coddling of the American Mind, which you wrote with your co-author Greg Lukianoff.
This book is long overdue.
It's based on an Atlantic article that you guys wrote a few years ago.
So let's just talk about the genesis of this.
Yeah, but you were on my podcast a while back.
I don't know if that was six months or a year ago.
Yeah, sometime last year, yeah.
And we got somewhat into this, but the problem has kind of crystallized since then and there are more elaborations of this.
So take me back to the writing of the Atlantic article and just state the nature of the problem for us.
So Greg Lukianoff is a friend of mine.
We just knew each other casually through a mutual friend, and he came to talk to me in the summer of 2014 and said, John, all this weird stuff has been happening on campus.
Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and he's been fighting for free speech rights for students since around 2000.
And usually that means fighting campus administrators who are always imposing speech codes and designating little areas as free speech zones.
And suddenly in 2013-2014, students started asking for safe spaces, trigger warnings.
They started saying that certain things need to be removed from the curriculum because they were dangerous or threatening or traumatizing.
And in a variety of ways, the students were showing the very thought patterns that Greg had learned not to do in cognitive behavioral therapy.
Greg is prone to depression.
He's had some very serious suicidal depression episodes.
We talk about one in the book that led him to learn CBT.
And in CBT, you learn to do things like recognize catastrophizing.
You know, if someone comes to speak, it'll, you know, it'll destroy people.
Black and white thinking.
You know, somebody is all good or all bad.
Discounting the positive.
The Western tradition or whatever you want to say, you know, you focus on just the negatives, not the positives.
So Greg saw like, wow, this is really weird.
Are we teaching students to think in ways that will make them depressed and anxious?
So he came to talk to me in the summer of 2014, and I had just begun to see some of that same stuff in my classes.
And you and I talked about that in our last discussion, just students acting in a really, you know, very sensitive, Getting angry easily and then filing charges, that sort of thing.
So that stuff was, I was puzzled by that.
And when Greg said, told me his theory, I said, wow, that is such a cool idea.
And if you, I'd actually kind of like to write this up with you, if you'll have me as a coauthor.
And so he took me on, we wrote the article and it came out in August of 2015, before all the protests and all the, you know, the changes that happened around Halloween, especially Halloween of 2015.
So we were, you know, people thought that we were cherry picking in 2015, but then all this stuff happened from 2015 through 2017 and violence at a few schools.
So we ended up, Greg decided we actually had a lot more to say and the problem was a lot worse.
And he wanted to write it up as a book.
And I said, I'm too busy.
I've got to write this other book on capitalism and morality.
But as I thought about it, I thought, no, wait a second.
You know, I can write about capitalism and morality and try to help people think about economic systems, which I'm just learning about myself.
Or I can focus on the universities, which is where I live and what I know about, and we can actually try to do something together.
So I decided to write the book with him, and here we are.
Now, in recent months, some people have argued that this problem is vastly overblown, that it's a minority of campuses and even a minority of people on those minority of campuses.
I think it was a Vox article not long ago that argued that this was just a pseudo-problem.
Yes, I think their headline was, everything we think about the political correctness crisis on campus is wrong.
And, you know, in that kind of language, everything, yes, everything, right.
Who could imagine that Vox would get anything wrong here?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
They're careless.
So what has happened to increase your confidence that you're not imagining this problem?
Yeah.
So, you know, what I'm all about is that we are all imperfect.
We are all biased.
We all look for confirmation of what we want, and that's why we need viewpoint diversity.
And so I co-founded Heterodox Academy.
Precisely because we need viewpoint diversity, we need to be challenged.
And so when a political scientist from Canada, Jeff Sachs, not the economist at Columbia, different Jeff Sachs, when he wrote an essay, originally it was a set of tweets, but then an essay, arguing that actually the data show that there's no change, there's no problem.
It was actually wonderful.
It was really, it was a really great demonstration of the value of viewpoint diversity and challenge.
Because it forced us to go to look at his data and say, wait, really, you see no change?
And then to refine our position.
And so what Sachs showed is that if you look at data in the GSS, the General Social Survey, and you look at millennials, they're no different on attitudes towards free speech.
And he's right.
And that really helped us refine our argument that, all along, we weren't talking about millennials.
We were talking about the kids who started showing up on campus in 2013.
Because you don't see any of this stuff before 2013.
It all comes in between 2013 and 2015.
So, right there, that helped us see that the issue is not millennials.
And our book is not about millennials at all.
It's about iGen, or Gen Z.
That's the first clarification that was very helpful.
Second clarification is that there are about 4,500 institutions of higher education in the United States.
Most of them are two-year schools or vocational schools.
Most of them are not selective.
If students go attend one of those schools and they go home to a family or off to a job, there's no way they're going to buy into this very arcane worldview in which words are violence and they need safety from books.
That kind of morality can only flourish if there's very little diversity.
There's no other political diversity.
if students are kept together for four years, under certain circumstances, this arcane, moralistic worldview can flourish.
And that seems to happen, especially at liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and the West Coast.
That's where the problem seems to be strongest.
So when Sachs said it's not happening at most schools, we had to realize, you know what?
He's probably right.
We don't know.
We don't have data from most schools, but it's probably not happening at most schools.
But if you just look at, say, the top hundred, from what we hear from people there, students and faculty, it is happening.
People are more afraid to speak up.
Bad things can happen if you challenge the prevailing view.
And it's not because most students have suddenly gone off the deep end.
They haven't.
This is another good thing from SAC's challenge, is we had to refine our argument and say it's not due to a big change in the average student.
It's due to a big change in the dynamics So that now the sort of a subset of students who are very angry and who buy into some views that we can debate, but you know, I think are bad ideas.
A subset of students who buy into certain ideas now is allowed to ride roughshod over everyone else and people are afraid to stand up to them.
So it's a change in the dynamics.
Yeah, the dynamics are interesting because I think our intuitions about just how many people in a group are required to kind of nullify the intentions and the aspirations of the whole group are pretty bad.
I mean, it doesn't take 50% of a group to turn the tide against the rest.
That's right.
And with social media, so a lot of our conversation, like a lot of many conversations, will probably be about social media and what happens.
How does the system change when you have various things and forces in balance, and then you suddenly increase connectivity by a factor of a hundred?
How do things change?
And so an essential term here is call-out culture.
This is what the students themselves call it.
Anytime you're in a culture in which you can be You know, behaving as you've always behaved, and suddenly someone will pick on one word, one thing you said, and there could be no end of trouble for you.
There could be shame, humiliation, mobbing.
When you are in such an environment, even if it's only one or two percent of your fellow students who would do that to you, it'll likely have an effect on your behavior.
Just to be clear, this is not just a problem on college campuses.
We're seeing this because, first of all, people graduate from college and they enter the workforce from these colleges at a very high level.
So we see this sort of thing now at companies like Google, among software engineers.
We see it at the New York Times in what was happening to Barry Weiss.
I don't know if you recall when the Slack channel for the New York Times was published and Barry had said something about, she had made a joke about immigrants, that they get the job done, quoting Hamilton.
This was during the Olympics, and she named an Asian-American figure skater, I believe, who in fact was not an immigrant, but she was merely the daughter of immigrants.
Yes.
So it was marginalizing to say they get the job done.
That's right.
We got a glimpse of what the back-channel discussions were like at the New York Times, and they seemed very much to be of a piece with the kinds of triggering effects you describe in your book on college campuses.
That's right.
So when our article came out in 2015, a lot of people said, oh, come on, you know, students protest.
This is student culture.
As soon as they go out into the real world, they'll have to drop this stuff.
You know, once they are hired in a corporation, the corporation is not going to stand for, you know, for this way of behaving.
And this very confrontational way of addressing hurt feelings.
And we didn't know what would happen.
But it turns out, yes, as you say, it became especially clear in 2017 with the Google memo and with a variety of other ways that these norms have spread out into some parts of the corporate world, primarily those that hire, I think, creatives from the elite universities.
That's where this culture is most intense.
So, you know, if you were to look at a mining company based in Colorado, I bet you'd see no trace of it.
Right.
Yeah.
But yes, from what I hear at top media companies at the New York Times, at the Atlantic, there's a big generational divide.
And this is very important for people to understand.
Whether you're on the left or the right, if you're over 30 or 35, you believe in free speech.
And a lot of people on the left in journalism are looking at these new norms and saying, wait a sec, what is this?
So this is not, it's not, you know, while there is a left-right aspect to it, unfortunately, it's more of a generational divide.
There's a set of new understandings among young people.
And we should go into why that is, because whenever, you know, part of my whole approach to morality is, that we all live in a moral world.
We all live in a moral world, a moral matrix.
And it's not, things don't happen because there are evil people out there pushing the evil ideas.
They happen because there are good people pushing their ideas about virtue or goodness that end up producing some bad effects.
And I think that's what's happening here.
So we should just be very clear.
This isn't about bashing young people or Gen X or iGen.
This is about understanding how a new morality emerged, which prioritizes inclusion and diversity, which are good things, of course.
But it prioritizes them in a way that I think sets us up for unending conflict in all of our institutions.
Well, I want to get into the root cause of this problem and talk about your three great untruths, which I think was a great way to structure your analysis here.
But before we broaden the focus, I just want to give an example of the kind of thing that has happened on some of these college campuses that has motivated you to pay attention to this problem, because I've paid a lot of attention to it, but the details of some of these cases were still blurry to me.
It is just amazing to consider what has been happening.
So I think let's just talk about the Dean Spellman case at Claremont McKenna College.
Yeah, that's a really, really clear one.
Yeah.
Sure.
Let me see if I can tell the story very briefly.
So Claremont McKenna College out in Los Angeles, there was a student whose parents had emigrated from Mexico.
And she, so she was born in California.
She's a student at CMC and she writes an essay in some, I think it's a campus publication, she writes an essay talking about how marginalized she feels.
And, you know, she makes some points about what it's like to be seen as an affirmative action, admit, to be on a campus where all the people like you, or most of the people like you, are the gardeners rather than the professional staff.
So, you know, it's a perfectly reasonable essay for a student to write.
And then in response to that, the Dean of Students, Mary Spellman, sends her a private email, just a person-to-person private email, and I'll read you the whole email.
Olivia, we changed your name here.
Olivia, thank you for writing and sharing this article with me.
We have a lot to do as a college and community.
Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues?
They're important to me and the Dean of Students staff, and we're working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mold.
I'd love to talk with you more.
So, Olivia posted this email on her webpage, and it's not quite that a riot ensued, but she invited people to comment on it to share her outrage.
Now, I leave it to the listeners to find the outrage.
What was she outraged about?
I guess you read the book, Sam, so you know.
Yeah, it was the use of the word mold.
Yeah, the amazing thing is it hinges on a single word, and this is way beyond a campus problem, but the dynamics of this is that it is to seize upon the worst possible interpretation of, in this case, a single word I think with the understanding that the author of, in this case, Dean Spellman, couldn't have possibly intended those worst possible associations with that word.
Oh, but intent doesn't matter, Sam.
Intent doesn't matter.
Now, you and I will talk about that basic moral psychology is not, you know, if somebody bumps into you, we don't say they've done something immoral unless they meant to.
If they intended to push you, it's immoral.
But if they tripped or if it's an accident, then we say, no, you know, you didn't mean it.
OK, you apologize.
We're done.
But that's the old fashioned, otherwise known as the universal view of morality, which is that intent matters primarily for judgment, not not outcome or not impact, as they say.
But the new doctrine is intent doesn't matter, it's impact.
And so if something makes someone feel marginalized or victimized, then they have been marginalized or victimized.
And this is a really, really good way to set students up to be really hurt and angry often.
And that's why the subtitle of our book is How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
So yeah, in any normal world, even if she felt a flash of like this mold, what is this word?
Well, it turns out it's actually a word that they use on campus a lot to talk about how there is a standard prototype, you know, waspy, jockey sort of white person.
So fine, that's the prototype.
And Dean Spellman is trying to help people who don't fit it.
So, but yes, as you say, you The goal of discourse is to find the worst possible reading so that you can call them out and then you get the prestige for identifying a racist or something like that.
So I think we should linger on why intentions should matter, but let's just close Dean Spellman's case.
So what happened in the aftermath?
All right, so Olivia posts the email on her Facebook page and she says, her comment is, I just don't fit that wonderful CMC mold.
Feel free to share.
So her friends took that invitation and they did share it and added their outrage about the event.
And that sparked a wave of giant protests.
There were marches, demonstrations.
As usually happens, there's usually a list of demands given to the president and it almost always includes mandatory diversity training for everyone.
And, this is key, demands that Spellman resign.
So in the new call-out culture, it's not enough to shame someone, you have to appeal to an authority to get them fired or punished or renounced.
And the leadership there did what leadership at almost all universities does, which is they don't stand up for the person being attacked, they don't stand up for their faculty, they try to placate the angriest students, they do what they can to basically by peace.
And in so doing, they validate the narrative that CMC, like all schools in America, is so deeply institutionally racist that it needs radical reform.
Why do you think the administrations are so craven in the face of these?
What clearly I think would take 15 minutes to assess are moral panics.
Yes, that's right.
It is a moral panic.
And we should return to that.
And we should note that there are moral panics on both sides.
The right-wing media is in a moral panic about this, just as the students are.
So there's enough craziness to go around.
But yeah, I've wondered about that, too.
Why do the universities almost always, why do the leaders almost always show no backbone?
And I think it's in part because they could not understand this.
So in the first year, nobody stood up.
There wasn't a single college president except for the president at Ohio State when he said, when they occupied his office, and he said, "Okay, you've made everyone here in this building feel unsafe.
I'm going home now.
The police will come at 7:00 AM and anyone here will be arrested." So then the protestors left.
When presidents, and also at Oberlin, when they gave the president there the list of demand, they gave him the ultimatum and he said, "I don't do ultimatums.
If you want to come talk to me, my door is open, but I don't do ultimatums.
And then they, you know, retracted it and met with him.
So the point is that the students are, in part, they're behaving that way because there's been a vacuum of leadership.
There's not any clear moral order.
And so things just sort of drift to more radical, more confrontational approaches.
And then we should say that Spellman did wind up resigning, correct?
Yes, that's right.
She did resign.
The university leadership never stood up for her, never said a word publicly to defend her.
They didn't fire her, of course.
I mean, they couldn't possibly fire her.
But, you know, you can imagine what it would be like to be a dean of students.
I mean, she seems like a student.
You can watch the videos if you Google CMC student protests.
You can find them.
You know, she seems like a very sweet woman who is the dean of students, and to have students, you know, swarming around, you can watch, I mean, it looks kind of like one of those shame circles from the Cultural Revolution, you know, in a circle berating her through a megaphone.
I'm sure she was quite, well, I hate to say traumatized, but I mean, this really would be traumatizing to have everyone calling you a racist and demanding that you be fired.
And I think she was castigated for falling asleep in one of these meetings, but really she was just trying to hold back tears.
I mean, it was just like this.
That's right.
You watch the video.
And again, it's so, you know, at one point she closes her eyes and she's squeezing her eyes shut.
I mean, you can't see very clearly, but it's, you know, she, a woman berates her says, and she's even falling asleep while we're talking to her.
No, she's crying.
Um, anyway, so the whole thing is really horrible to watch.
And there are, there are a number of these stories, a number of these situations.
And most Americans don't know about them.
So let's just pause for a second to talk about the underlying ethics of intentions and I guess apologies.
It's pretty interesting to me to see, and this goes far wider than the kinds of cases we're talking about, but just what are the criteria for an apology being accepted?
We're witnessing now on social media the casual and in many cases warranted destruction of people's reputations.
And I mean, this goes out to, you know, the Me Too phenomenon.
And I mean, just this is now ubiquitous in our lives.
We're seeing people Who just issue a stream of or a single unfortunate tweet and this comes back to haunt them and you know they're either destroyed or not depending on kind of the luck of the draw in many cases.
And often there's an attempt to apologize and sort of the degrees of sincerity here But all of this runs to the significance of what a person actually intends by his or her actions, and how those actions are perceived by others, and the mismatch there.
And then what is subsequently said to clarify intention, or even when intentions were in fact bad or less than perfect, how is it that an apology can thereafter matter and redeem a person.
So how do you think about this?
So I think you're focusing a little bit too much on the dynamics of the interaction between the people calling for the person's head and the person who's being accused.
I think that's not the right place to focus.
The right place to focus is on the dynamics between the person calling for the person's head and all the other members of that person's team or side.
So the way I like to think about things is, I'm a social psychologist, So, you know, you often hear it said in journalism, follow the money.
And if you know who's paying off who, you understand what the motives are.
You can unravel the mystery.
Well, for a social psychologist, I would say follow the prestige.
What is it that one gets prestige for doing?
Now, everybody of all ages is interested in prestige, but especially for young adults who are working it out, it's really, really important.
And especially in a new environment like college.
So what do you do to gain prestige?
Is it being a great athlete?
Is it being beautiful?
Is it being smart?
And it varies.
Depends on your subculture.
Depends on the school.
But you have to understand the economy of prestige.
What is it that earns you prestige?
And I think what has changed since 2013 or 2014 is that we've seen the growth of a new economy of prestige in which you gain prestige by calling out others, by essentially accusing them of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, some other form of bigotry.
Now, if you think about this, imagine, you know, many of your listeners will know the term externalities from economics.
You know, if you if when I save money by buying a diesel car, But it imposes an externality on the world because my car pollutes.
Well, in the same way, if we have an economy of prestige in which I gain prestige by accusing others of racism or calling them out for various forms of bigotry, There's an externality.
Namely, all the people that I am accusing every day.
You know, it's like, imagine if we were all paid by the bullet.
You just, here's a gun, here's a thousand rounds of ammo, just shoot.
Shoot as much as you can, you get paid by the bullet.
Doesn't matter where it hits, just shoot.
And I think that's what we have unleashed on some campuses.
Again, not most campuses.
You know, if you go to schools in the South or the Lower Midwest or the mountain areas, I don't think it's as much.
But along the coastal strip of the West Coast, not inland, but the coastal strip of the West Coast, and New England at elite schools, and again, not so much in the business school, not in the engineering departments, but in some of the humanities departments and education schools, there are sub areas of universities where this new economy of prestige has taken root.
So that's the way I analyze it.
Well, so this reveals why it is totally divorced from any good faith interaction with the intentions of the person you're targeting.
It's true.
Exactly.
If your eyes are on your group and the stock price of your prestige in your group, you're not actually detecting the thought crime you're claiming to detect in other people because you don't actually care what their intentions were.
That's right.
And I think it causes so many problems for a closed system like a university where you could, you know, here we are, we're all trying to create diverse cohorts, diverse institutions.
We're pretty much all in favor of diversity in universities.
So we're trying to create this kind of a culture in which the potential for risk for offense taking is huge.
You know, if you have people from all over the world, you have people from all different ethnicities.
So we're putting people together in ways where it could be like a tinderbox.
And what we should be doing is teaching them skills of how do you get along and not give offense, how do you give less offense, and how do you take less offense?
But instead, again, not everywhere, but in some subcultures, we're teaching people to take maximum offense, be maximally flammable, as it were, and then, of course, we have all these fires breaking out.
So then, again, just to back up here, why should intentions matter?
Why is the status quo we're describing here such a moral error?
Because normal human morality, I think you and I both agree, normal human morality is an adaptation shaped by natural selection to facilitate cooperation.
Morality is about having the traits or virtue and character or about having traits that make you a good partner for cooperation.
And so if somebody harms you deliberately, you need to know that and write that person off.
If they harm you accidentally, it would be foolish to write them off.
You know, everybody harms people accidentally.
I mean, if you wrote off your family members, you know, when they offended you, you know, or hurt your feelings, especially if they didn't mean to, none of us would have any family.
So we have to pay attention to intent.
That's what matters to judge a person's character.
But as I said, this is not a game.
This is not really about what happens between the offender and the offended.
This is a game of what happens between the offended and all the other people that the offended person is signaling to.
So following from there on the kind of primacy of intention, how do you think we should define bigotry?
Well, so I think the central definition should focus on intent.
The central definition should focus on some element of hostility or negative evaluation.
And so the term microaggression could be a useful term if it was limited to small acts that convey hostility, dislike, contempt.
So I think that would do most of the work for us if we focused on intent.
Now, that would still leave something that would need to be addressed.
And again, my approach is to say, if there's a moral concept, there probably is something good, useful, or true behind it.
And so the people who promote the idea of microaggressions are saying, You know, even if people aren't hostile to me, if they keep asking me where I'm from because I have dark skin or I look Asian or I look like I'm from the Middle East, and they keep saying, where are you from?
And it's clear that my answer of New Jersey doesn't satisfy them because what they really want to know is where are my parents from?
So I can see that if you repeatedly are asked that, it could get tiresome.
And so I think it's good to have a term for that.
It's good to train students to not do things that might make students feel self-conscious or make them feel bad.
You know, Black students sometimes say people touch their hair.
Okay, now maybe the person who touches their hair might say, well, I'm just curious.
You know, I didn't mean anything by it.
And maybe they didn't, but like, that's really rude.
OK, so, you know, we need a term for that, but the term should not be aggression.
The term should be a faux pas or something like that.
It should be something foolish.
So I would be totally fine with training students if we're going to do this experiment of putting together a very diverse student body.
I think we should do some training in norms of how to get along and give less offense.
But if we teach students about microaggressions and we teach them to follow their feelings, So that if they feel offended, then they were attacked.
And if they were attacked, then they need to call this number.
Here's the number for the bias response team.
You can find it in the bathroom of every, on every bathroom at NYU.
When I go to the bathroom, there's a sign there telling students three ways they can report me if I say something that offends them.
So I think what we're doing here is when this is the second grade on truth in our book, is always trust your feelings.
Don't allow anybody to challenge them or to say, maybe you've interpreted this incorrectly.
Yeah, so we'll get to these untruths in a second.
Again, just to capture what we care about here that may be beyond intentions.
I certainly don't have an up-to-the-minute sense of, you know, what has been replicated.
Perhaps you do.
But some research suggests that there really is a problem here that is Very likely outside the conscious understanding of any person who may or may not have bad intentions.
And I think it's nowhere more clearly expressed than in these resume or CV tests that we have heard about where you send out identical resumes and you just change the name In one case, being a, you know, WASP-y name with white connotations, and in another, a name that has, you know, obvious black connotations.
And you see a very different pattern, or so it's reported, in callbacks for interviews.
I guess, one, I'm just asking you if you know what the status of that research is, and can we rely on it?
And two, that does seem like a problem worth worrying about that really does slip this net of any person's individual intentions.
Sure, so a couple things about this.
One is I don't doubt that there are many of those studies and many of them find that result.
An important thing to note is that in general, Changing the name of the person matters, but when you look at the race or sex of the person doing the judging, it tends not to matter that much.
In other words, it's not just that white men are bigots against everyone else.
It's that people in a, you know, is that professors, let's say, or wherever it's done, professors have different expectations about a person based on their race or gender.
So that's one thing.
And here we should bring up Lee Justin's work on stereotype accuracy.
If we live in a world in which there are, in fact, correlations between things, there's no way we can stop people from noticing those correlations.
So I don't doubt that people have stereotypes and that people do act on those stereotypes.
And those stereotypes tend to be shared across demographic groups.
That's one thing.
Second, I think that would certainly count as a kind of racism or prejudice.
It is a judgment of people based on their category membership.
That's not systemic racism.
Systemic racism and sexism is something different.
That means there's something about the structure of the institution that ends up disadvantaging members of certain groups, even if nobody, no individual in the institution holds prejudiced attitudes.
So that's a very important concept.
Now, I don't doubt that that is real and it matters, but what I think is really important for us to all understand is what does it take to show systemic prejudice?
And I heard your talk with Coleman Hughes, who's wonderful, and he put his finger on one of them.
You cannot just say, oh, look, you know, women are only 30% of the physicists, therefore it's systemically sexist against them.
You cannot just point to differences of outcome and say this proves systemic sexism or racism.
You have to look at the pipeline.
And only if the pipeline of very qualified people coming in is very different from the people getting hired, then now you're off and running.
Now you can start saying there might be some systemic problem in the institution.
So that's the first thing is when you when you when I asked students, OK, what?
Give me an example.
It's almost always two categories.
examples of systemic sexism, prejudices, et cetera, are almost always under-representation, which as I say is not sufficient.
It might be a reason to look into it, but it's not proof, it's not even necessarily evidence.
And the other thing that people point to is individual cases.
So like at Yale, there was a really ugly case where, you know, it was a few months ago, where a woman, a grad student, there was a black woman sleeping on a sofa in a common area and she called the police on this woman.
Now, this is obviously racism.
She obviously thought, oh, this is a fellow student.
So this is racism.
OK, but now does this mean that Yale is racist?
And if your goal is to prosecute to the maximum possible, if your goal is to show how everyone and everything is racist, Then you say, this shows that Yale is racist, Yale must do more, still more diversity training.
When in fact, I think the way to look at this is, yes, here was an act of racism and it's appropriate for that woman to feel very ashamed of herself.
And if Yale has, I don't know, 15, 20,000 people in it, and if this sort of thing is happening every day, and especially if it happens every day and people don't care, well, wow, that would be a systemically racist place.
But you cannot take zero as the only acceptable number of racial or sexist incidents.
In other words, if you have a group of 20,000 people and there are three cases like this per year, that would be amazingly good.
Like, I can't imagine any human institution that would get that close to zero.
And then of course if you factor in misunderstandings, now here there was not a misunderstanding, but often people mishear each other, someone says it was a joke, so no human institution will ever get down to zero per year.
That's just not possible.
And so you can't take instances as evidence of systemic racism or sexism.
It's interesting because the leading edge of this ethically and politically for me are those cases where You really just have the perfect instance of no bright lines.
As you say, there are cases where stereotypes are more or less accurate.
We have stereotypes very often for a reason.
And those are cases where otherwise well-intentioned people can be caught out as essentially spreading this impression of racism or bigotry where Probably doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist at the level of bad intentions.
I don't know the Yale case specifically, but let me just take, you know, violence in the black community among, you know, men age 18 to 24.
If you go to inner city Chicago and decide to be blind to the statistical reality that there is way more violence among young black men than in other populations, you're just being willfully blind to what is in fact a reality.
So, you could imagine someone in a coffee shop in Chicago, seeing a young black man in some situation that's analogous to the one you described at Yale, right?
Someone who seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, And having this, you know, reaction, you know, calling the police, and it turns out to be totally unwarranted, right?
Now, in that case, what's interesting for me is, does the person feel ashamed to have done that?
You know, ashamed at the misunderstanding?
The shame there is a measure of, I would argue, the person not being racist in the primary sense, which is this person doesn't want to live in If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
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