The Coddling of the American Mind

by Greg Lukianoff

Of course, if male and female students had equal levels of interest in participating in sports, then both versions of social justice would converge on the desired end-state of equal outcomes. Give everyone the same access to sports, and your teams will mirror the overall population. Note that “equal outcomes” in these cases doesn’t necessarily mean fifty-fifty; it means representative of the overall student body, which is usually mostly female. “Equal outcomes” means that of all the students who participate in sports, the ratio of men to women will be the same as the ratio of men to women in the student body as a whole. More generally, equal-outcomes social justice activists seem to believe that all institutions and occupations should mirror the overall U.S. population: 50% female, roughly 15% African American, 15% Latino, and so on. Any departure from those numbers means that a group is “underrepresented,” and underrepresentation is often taken to be direct evidence of systemic bias or injustice.

  Yet men and women differ in their interests on many things, including sports. A review of the literature led by psychologist Robert Deaner, of Grand Valley State University (Michigan), finds that boys and men show greater interest in playing sports and watching sports than do girls and women, and this is true across cultures, eras, and age groups, whether one uses interview methods or observations of play behavior.33 Of course, those differences could just reflect a pervasive cross-cultural tendency to steer girls away from sports and deprive them of opportunities, but if that were true—if girls were being discouraged from doing what they wanted to do—then sex differences would be smaller in informal settings, such as when kids are playing in a park, compared with school settings. But in fact, the opposite is true. The gender difference is relatively small in school—girls constitute about 42% of the athletes on high school teams—but it is much larger when adolescents are observed in public parks or when they are surveyed about how they use their leisure time.34 The available research suggests that girls and women are often as interested as boys and men in getting physical exercise, but not in playing team sports.35

  If this is true—if boys and men are more interested, on average, in playing team sports—then universities cannot achieve the equal-outcome target just by offering equal opportunity. They must work harder to recruit women and, perhaps, discourage men. In fact, in order to meet their equal-outcomes targets, many universities are resorting to ethically questionable techniques, known collectively as “roster management,” which sometimes border on fraud. As reported in a 2011 New York Times exposé,36 it is very common for schools to pad the rosters of their women’s teams with women who never come to practice and sometimes don’t even know they are signed up. Some schools invite men to practice with the women and then count the men on the women’s team roster. The exposé gives the impression that U.S. universities are sneaky and dishonest institutions, but this is the predictable response of a bureaucracy, as we described in the previous chapter. When the federal government pressures universities to achieve equal outcomes in the face of unequal inputs, administrators do what they can to protect the institution. That might require them to violate procedural justice, distributive justice, and honesty along the way.

  You can see the basic problem if you plug the terms into equity theory, as we do in Figure 11.2. At the University of Virginia, men who want to row must contribute much more than women ($1,000 or more per year, plus renting themselves out for labor). Yet their outcomes are less than those received by women (who have a much larger budget). The ratios are far from equal.

  FIGURE 11.2. When male rowers must raise their own money, their ratio of outcomes to inputs is much lower than the ratio for female rowers, who are supported by the university.

  Of course, if we look at UVA sports as a whole, the picture looks different. The men’s football program is gigantic and costly, and there is no women’s football team. The university as a whole is still spending far more money on men’s sports than on women’s sports, and if you endorse equal-outcomes social justice, you’ll say that the unequal treatment of rowers is necessary in order to compensate for the money spent on male athletes elsewhere.

  But when you leave campus, that argument is not going to convince many people; it’s very hard to make it intuitively compelling by linking it to equity theory or procedural fairness. Most people want individuals to be treated well, and they recoil from cases where individuals are treated unfairly in order to bring about some kind of group-level equality. This is why quotas generally produce such strong backlash: they mandate a violation of procedural justice (people are treated differently based on their race, sex, or some other factor) and distributive justice (rewards are not proportional to inputs) to achieve a specific end-state of equal outcomes.

  To be clear: Departures from equality sometimes do indicate that some kind of bias or injustice is operating. Some institutions or companies make it harder for members of one group to succeed, as can be seen in recent books and articles about the toxic “bro culture” of Silicon Valley,37 which violates the dignity and rights of women (procedural injustice) while denying them the status, promotions, and pay that they deserve based on the quality of their work (distributive injustice). When you see a situation in which some groups are underrepresented, it is an invitation to investigate and find out whether there are obstacles, a hostile climate, or systemic factors that have a disparate impact on members of those groups. But how can you know whether unequal outcomes truly reveal a violation of justice?

  Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

  All social scientists know that correlation does not imply causation. If A and B seem to be linked—that is, they change together over time or are found together in a population at levels higher than chance would predict—then it is certainly possible that A caused B. But it’s also possible that B caused A (reverse causation) or that a third variable, C, caused both A and B and there is no direct relationship between A and B. (It’s also possible, as we described in chapter 7, that it’s a “spurious correlation”—that there is no link between A and B and the correlation is a coincidence.)

  For example, a study of 7,500 German households found that people who had sex more than four times a week earned 3.2% more than people who had sex only once a week. Sexual frequency and paycheck are correlated (slightly), but why? What’s the causal path? An article about the study that was published at Gawker.com featured this headline: MORE BUCK FOR YOUR BANG: PEOPLE WHO HAVE MORE SEX MAKE THE MOST MONEY.38 The headline suggested that A (sex) causes B (money), which is surely the best causal path to choose if your goal is to entice people to click on your article. But any social scientist presented with that correlation would instantly wonder about reverse causation (does having more money cause people to have more sex?) and would then move on to a third-variable explanation, which in this case seems to be the correct one.39 The Gawker story itself noted that people who are more extraverted have more sex and also make more money. In this case, a third variable, C (extraversion, or high sociability) may cause both A (more sex) and B (more money).

  Social scientists analyze correlations like this constantly (to the great annoyance of friends and family). They are self-appointed conversation referees, throwing a yellow penalty flag when anyone tries to interpret a correlation as evidence of causation. But a funny thing has been happening in recent years on campus. Nowadays, when someone points to an outcome gap and makes the claim (implicitly or explicitly) that the gap itself is evidence of systemic injustice, social scientists often just nod along with everyone else in the room.

  An outcome gap is a kind of correlation. But if someone quotes from a study or otherwise asserts that one group is overrepresented in a job category or that there is a gap in pay, often the implication is that being a member of one group caused members of that group to be preferentially hired or to be paid more. It would indeed be evidence of improper or illegal discrimination if there were no other reason for the outcome gap aside from group membership. For example, if someone
notes that computer programmers at elite tech firms are mostly male, often the implication is that being male caused those employees to be more likely to be hired or promoted, which is obviously unjust if there are no other differences between male and female computer programmers.

  But are there other differences? Are there other causal pathways? If you suggest an alternative explanation for the gap, others may take you to be saying that the problem is not as severe as the speaker believes it is—and if anyone in the room is displeased by that suggestion, then you may be accused of committing a microaggression (specifically a “micro-invalidation”40). If your alternative hypothesis includes the speculation that there could be differences in some underlying factor, some input that is relevant to the outcome (for example, a sex difference in how much men or women enjoy sports or computer programming),41 then you may be violating a serious taboo.

  In an article titled “The Psychology of the Unthinkable,” social psychologist Philip Tetlock calls this the use of “forbidden base rates.”42 But if this kind of thinking is forbidden and social scientists don’t work as hard to challenge the theories that are politically favored, then “institutionalized disconfirmation,” the process of challenging and testing ideas, breaks down. If professors and students are hesitant to raise alternative explanations for outcome gaps, then theories about those gaps may harden into orthodoxy. Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to promote its preferred narrative and preferred set of remedies.43 At that point, backed by the passion and certainty of activists, flawed academic theories may get carried out of the academy and be applied in high schools, corporations, and other organizations. Unfortunately, when reformers try to intervene in complex institutions using theories that are based on a flawed or incomplete understanding of the causal forces at work, their reform efforts are unlikely to do any good—and might even make things worse.

  * * *

  • • • • •

  College students today are living in an extraordinary time, and many have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. They are identifying and challenging injustices that have been well documented and unsuccessfully addressed for too long. In the 1960s, students fought for many causes that, from the vantage point of today, were clearly noble causes, including ending the Vietnam War, extending full civil rights to African Americans and others, and protecting the natural environment. Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustices in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal educational and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals. But if activists embrace the equal-outcomes form of social justice—if they interpret all deviations from population norms as evidence of systemic bias—then they will get drawn into endless and counterproductive campaigns, even against people who share their goals. Along the way, they will reinforce the bad mental habits that we have described throughout the book.

  Instead, we urge students to treat deviations from population norms as invitations to investigate further. Is the deviation present in the pipeline or applicant pool for the job? If so, then look at the beginning of the pipeline more than at the end of it, and be willing to entertain the possibility that people of different genders and people from different cultures may have different preferences. Focus as much on procedural justice as on distributive: Are people in all identity groups treated with equal dignity? The answer to that question might be no in an organization that has achieved statistical equality, and it might be yes in an organization in which some groups are underrepresented. Be clear about what end states matter and why. As long as activists keep their eyes on the two components of intuitive justice that all of us carry in our minds—distributive and procedural—they will apply their efforts where they are likely to do the most good, and they will win more widespread support along the way.

  In Sum

  Political events in the years from 2012 to 2018 have been as emotionally powerful as any since the late 1960s. Today’s college students and student protesters are responding to these events with a powerful commitment to social justice activism. This is our sixth and final explanatory thread.

  People’s ordinary, everyday, intuitive notions of justice include two major types: distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy).

  The most common way that people think about distributive justice is captured by equity theory, which states that things are perceived to be fair when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants.

  Procedural justice is about how decisions are being made, and is also about how people are treated along the way, as procedures unfold.

  Social justice is a central concept in campus life today, and it takes a variety of forms. When social justice efforts are fully consistent with both distributive and procedural justice, we call it proportional-procedural social justice. Such efforts generally aim to remove barriers to equality of opportunity and also to ensure that everyone is treated with dignity. But when social justice efforts aim to achieve equality of outcomes by group, and when social justice activists are willing to violate distributive or procedural fairness for some individuals along the way, these efforts violate many people’s sense of intuitive justice. We call this equal-outcomes social justice.

  Correlation does not imply causation. Yet in many discussions in universities these days, the correlation of a demographic trait or identity group membership with an outcome gap is taken as evidence that discrimination (structural or individual) caused the outcome gap. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, but if people can’t raise alternative possible causal explanations without eliciting negative consequences, then the community is unlikely to arrive at an accurate understanding of the problem. And without understanding the true nature of a problem, there is little chance of solving it.

  This concludes Part III of this book. In these six chapters, we showed how the new culture of safetyism that we described in Part I and the dramatic events that we described in Part II are the result of many intersecting trends and explanatory threads that all came together in recent years. These threads reach back into history, down into childhood, and out into national politics. Having offered this explanation of how we got here, we now turn to the question of where to go next.

  PART IV

  Wising Up

  CHAPTER 12

  Wiser Kids

  Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the growth of call-out culture, in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech,1 including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and bad for universities. What can we do to change course?

  In the next chapter, we’ll offer suggestions for improving universities, but first we must look at childhood. In chapters 8 and 9, we showed that there has been a shift, particularly in middle-class and wealthier families, to more intensive and overprotective parenting, and that this is, in part, a response to unrealistic fears of abduction, and to somewhat more realistic fears about admission to prestigious universities. We showed that the decline of free play may be part of the reason for children’s increased fragility. In this chapter, we draw on earlier chapters to offer advice for raising children who are wiser, stronger, and antif
ragile; children who will thrive as they become more independent in college and beyond.

  We are mindful that pathways through childhood vary by nation, decade, social class, and other factors. The suggestions we make here are tailored for American parents who use the “concerted cultivation” style of parenting that we described in chapter 8. That’s the style that sociologist Annette Lareau found being used by middle-class parents of all races, and that political scientist Robert Putnam said had become the norm by the 1990s for families in the middle class and above. This time-intensive, labor-intensive strategy involves overprotecting, overscheduling, and overparenting children in hopes of giving them an edge in a competitive society that has forgotten the importance of play and the value of unsupervised experience.

  But even though our advice grows out of our analysis of current trends in the United States, we expect that much of it will be relevant to parents and educators in other countries. South Korean parents, for example, are second to none in their fears about college admissions and their willingness to replace nearly all of their children’s free play time with expensive and exhausting test preparation classes.2 To take another example, British schools can hold their own in any competition with Americans to put safety ahead of common sense. Just as we were finishing this book, the head teacher of an elementary school in East London issued a rule that children must not even touch recently fallen snow, because touching could lead to snowballs. “The problem is it only takes one student, one piece of grit, one stone in a snowball in an eye with an injury and we change our view,” he explained.3 That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.