COWEN: Let me try another analogy on you. You mentioned the army, but take private corporations, and Brown and Yale are in a sense private corporations. Harvard was originally. I wouldn’t call them restrictions on free speech, I think that’s the wrong phrase, but if one’s going to use the phrase that way, there are numerous restrictions on free speech within companies, at the work place.
If you went to the water cooler and said a number of offensive things, you would be asked to stop and eventually fired, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. So if we think of Brown, Yale, or Harvard as like a normal company, isn’t there still even with all the nonsense, a lot more free speech on campus than in actual companies?
HAIDT: Yes, and there should be. Again, a company is organized to be effective in the world. Just like the army where their priority is unit cohesion, in a company your goal isn’t to encourage everyone to express their values and criticize each other, your goal is to get them to work together.
COWEN: But you need a lot of that in a university though, right?
HAIDT: No, you need basic civility. You need people to be able to live with each other, to critique each other’s ideas, and to not then file charges because they were critiqued. Companies live in fear of lawsuits, and labor law is encouraging this more than ever before. Universities are very, very different. Actually, let me suggest something in terms of where to draw a line. We’re seeing now: should the Woodrow Wilson School be renamed? Should Calhoun College be renamed?
I have some maybe funny thoughts on this, but here are couple of principles. One is that the name of your school, or — I went to Yale as an undergrad — your residential college is kind of part of your identity. And so students at Calhoun College, if they want to change that name because it’s offensive to African-Americans and to many people, if they want to change that name I think that they should have that right. I think that’s a good thing.
We just should have a process so that it’s not just the loudest group in the space of one year that gets to do it. There should be a process that says if three-quarters of the people vote to do it, and you take that vote two years apart, then it should be done.
Now, if it’s a question of there’s a statue on campus, there’s a painting on campus — of Cecil Rhodes, I think it’s at Oxford. Rhodes was a big donor, Rhodes was a racist, according to his writings a colonialist, if it’s that there’s a statue on campus, that’s a very, very different matter.
Once they start saying we’re going to put to a vote everything. Everyone gets to opine on whether we take down this, take down this. Before you know it, you’re taking down everything because presumably religious students are offended by certain things, conservative students are offended by certain things, everyone’s offended by something.
You have to have limits, you have to have a process. At present we don’t have a process, we just have outrage stoked by social media and then we have craven university presidents who can’t stand up to the protesters and say, “OK, we’ll do it.”
COWEN: Let’s say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and you could more or less do what you thought was best without constraint, what would you change?
HAIDT: Oh gosh, I’d change a lot of things. One thing that I would do is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment. That means that I would look for people who — so Yale in particular, but all of the top schools have a huge problem, that they have basically social justice warriors who are so empowered, so angry, that they dominate discourse and you basically have the small illiberal left has completely terrorized the larger liberal left.
Yale right now is quite dysfunctional. Students there say they can’t speak up, they can’t speak up in class, they feel pressure on Facebook, if somebody sends around a petition for some left-wing cause they have to endorse it, even if they don’t want to. Yale’s a mess right now, as a lot of schools are. That should be the top diversity issue, is intellectual diversity. I would stop admitting for social justice cred, in other words, if you say, “Oh, I started this protest group, and we got this overturned.”
Basically I think a lot of students know is the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activism. Well, top schools are now full of social justice activists, and they’re no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activists. What’s that old joke? “Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Well, stop doing this.” They should stop admitting social justice warriors and start admitting people they’ve got the guts to disagree.
On things under- and overrated
COWEN: We now move to a segment of the conversation called underrated versus overrated. I threw out a bunch of names or concepts, you tell me if you think they’re underrated or overrated and why. Number one, Sigmund Freud.
HAIDT: Well, he certainly was overrated for a long time. In academic psychology his value is essentially zero, so that might be underrated, in that Freud’s ideas about development were completely worthless. But he was a very interesting and provocative writer, and he ought to be read a little bit more in psychology, overrated in humanities. They still rely on him as a psychologist in humanities. Depends where you are in the humanities overrated, in social psychology, underrated.
COWEN: LSD, overrated or underrated?
HAIDT: I would say underrated in that there are — I did a lot of reading about drugs in my late 20s. I was interested to find that there are only a few drugs that people make religions around. I forget the name of the chemical class, but it’s whatever the common compound is in LSD, psilocybin, yagé, those things.
Those drugs all have religions built around them, whereas heroin, morphine, alcohol — I mean alcohol plays a role in religion. So there are some drugs that ruin people’s lives, and there are other drugs that enrich people’s lives.
Psychedelics have an incredibly positive track record in terms of enriching people’s lives versus damaging them. So to the extent that they are rarely used, and widely feared, I would say that they are underrated and I’m basing this on the research that was done in the ’60s and just starting now that when you give people psychedelic drugs in controlled settings, be they cancer patients, or criminals in jail, the therapeutic effects tend to be quite positive.
The moral panic against drugs in the ’60s through the ’80s was too much, and therefore psychedelic drugs in particular are now underrated.
Psychedelics have an incredibly positive track record in terms of enriching people’s lives versus damaging them. So to the extent that they are rarely used, and widely feared, I would say that they are underrated and I’m basing this on the research that was done in the ’60s and just starting now that when you give people psychedelic drugs in controlled settings, be they cancer patients, or criminals in jail, the therapeutic effects tend to be quite positive.
COWEN: I’ve done one of these dialogs with Peter Thiel, and he’s a big fan of René Girard, and his theory of sacrificial violence. Do you have an opinion?
HAIDT: No, many people have emailed me about him, and I know I need to read him, I think he’s vaguely Durkheimian.
COWEN: Yes.
HAIDT: So if he’s Durkheimian, then I’m in favor of him. By that I just mean — I don’t want to sound too academic and obscure here — just that if you look at what humans are doing, so much of what we do is weird and inexplicable. But after you read Durkheim, you see, oh, we’re trying to form communities.
We’re trying to form moral communities that will give order, punish deviants, allow us to work together. So if that’s what’s Girard’s about, then I would agree with it.
COWEN: Leo Strauss.
HAIDT: I don’t know enough about him, also on my to‑read list.
COWEN: Reading through a lot of your past work, which I did to prepare for this conversation. This struck me, and I didn’t expect it to be the case, but at times I was thinking more of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, than I thought I was going to. Underrated or overrated?
HAIDT: Again, well I can’t say, because again it depends where you are. In symbolic anthropology I think he is still quite highly rated, outside of that I think very few people know about him. I read a little bit about, a little bit of his work when I was a postdoc in Chicago with Richard Shweder.
What I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as people are making symbols, we live in a rich symbolic world, a world of narrative, we need to interpret those, that I think is quite right, and that’s again what I love about cultural anthropology is it gives you a way of interpreting cultures.
Where it then leads you to deny that there’s also human nature that is based in our evolution, then it becomes a problem. But I just can’t remember which part of those is attributable to Lévi-Strauss.
COWEN: You’re a trained psychologist, in addition to your most famous work, you have a lot of other papers which are very well cited, but less famous for other public intellectuals doing what you’d call traditional psychological research. Here we have these economists, they do what they call behavioral economics, and they tread into the field of psychology, do they know what they’re doing? Behavioral economics, underrated or overrated?
HAIDT: Properly rated right now, with one caveat. We psychologists have long felt, “Oh those economists they’re the only ones that are ever consulted in Congress, and they have all these high‑prestige jobs, they have a Nobel Prize, nobody listens to us.”
Some economists beginning with Robert Frank, and Dan Kahneman, Dick Thaler, the fact that economists have been listening to psychologists, and making our work more well‑known, of course Kahneman did a lot of that work, and he is a psychologist.
That’s all good, I’m thrilled with the way that’s going. The only caveat that I would put which I would say if they don’t do this soon, then they would be overrated, is the behavioral economics work is an example of this wonderful dictum from Robert Zajonc, the famous social psychologist, which is that cognitive psychology is social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero.
To the extent that behavioral economists are saying, “Look at a person shopping, what influences their decision? If the apple is at eye‑level — .” They’re looking at lone consumers who are trying to make choices to optimize their outcomes. That’s great work, but that’s setting all the interesting variables to zero. The interesting stuff is all social. It’s what does this say about me? Will I be ostracized from my group?
If behavioral economics becomes more social, which I think will be the next phase, then I would say it would deserve ever‑rising market value.
COWEN: Thorstein Veblen, that was his initial vision for it actually, was that it be quite social and that the idea of a social reference class was central to people’s behavioral biases.
HAIDT: Interesting. Again, this is a critique from outside, but what a lot of people say which sounds right to me is that the early economists were great social theorists. My God, you read Adam Smith, what a brilliant world philosopher, historian, they thought so broadly and you tell me, but it seems there was a weird turn in the mid‑20th century towards mathematics.
COWEN: Yes.
HAIDT: I think it made economists set all the interesting variables to zero.
…[E]arly economists were great social theorists. My God, you read Adam Smith, what a brilliant world philosopher, historian, they thought so broadly and you tell me, but it seems there was a weird turn in the mid‑20th century towards mathematics. I think it made economists set all the interesting variables to zero.
COWEN: Antiparsimonialism , underrated or overrated?
HAIDT: Antiparsimonialism, have you any heard anyone say that other than me, is that my term?
COWEN: No, that’s why I asked.
HAIDT: Oh good, then of course I think it’s underrated, because I think — so parsimony is overrated.
Rather here’s what I should say. The pursuit of parsimony is a bad idea. It becomes almost a religious quest, people think, “Oh, if I can explain this phenomenon with one principle, I have won, I have produced a better explanation.” That’s a disaster for the social sciences, maybe it works in physics, but again, people are really complicated, much more so than matter.
People who pursue parsimony, scientists who pursue it and think that the simplest explanation is better than one that’s a little more complicated, that’s a problem. I’m trying to advocate for what I’m calling antiparsimony, or antiparsimonialism.
COWEN: Normatively you’re a pluralist then, and not like a utilitarian, or — ?
HAIDT: Normatively I’m a pluralist, yes. That means that there are many human values, and this is straight from Isaiah Berlin. There are many human values, and if you take one, let’s take liberty. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Wrong.
Extremism in defense of any virtue becomes a vice, it becomes sick, it becomes something that leads to horrible inhumanity and brutality. Many people try to say well all that really matters is care and compassion.
But if you take that to its absurd extreme you get kind of close to what we have on campus, which is we will destroy anybody’s rights in order to protect these seven victim classes.
COWEN: Some of your core ideas in psychology and also I would say anthropology, if you had to pick a famous movie, or famous novel, or play, that illustrated those, that you would use to teach some of your ideas, what would you point to, and what would your account be?
HAIDT: Oh my God. I should have a great answer to this question. I am so poorly read, my wife makes fun of me that I haven’t read a novel since I met her in the year 2000, I’ve just been so busy reading non‑fiction. Let’s see. Gosh, almost any of these BBC epics, anything that illustrates, I think English aristocratic life in the 19th century illustrates a rich, morally rich society with hierarchy and all those things that have disappeared from modern morality.
I should have a much better answer for you, but I think just reading novels from non‑Western cultures, and I would consider 19th century British aristocracy to be sort of a foreign culture now, just can give you an idea of cultures other than our own.
On Haidt’s earlier research (and what disgusts him)
COWEN: Final segment, let me ask you some questions about your earlier psychological research, because a lot of people aren’t familiar about that. Let me just start with a very direct, personal question. What is it that you find disgusting?
HAIDT: What do I find disgusting? These days I find illiberalism disgusting. The idea that one person takes it upon himself to shout down or shut down someone else, to decide I or my group, we get to tell you whether you can speak or not. I find this really disgusting.
This is I think one of the reasons I’m so upset by what’s going on on campus, is that the certain group of activists decides that somebody’s going to come speak on campus, fine, if you want to stand up and protest outside and hold up signs, that’s fine. But how dare you go in and shout them down so that people who have come to listen can’t hear. I find that really revolting.
COWEN: If I cook some insects and serve them to you with jelly and lime on top, you’d be fine with that, it may not be your favorite, but you wouldn’t say “Oh this is disgusting.” It might just be, “Oh, I don’t like turkey sandwiches.” Which is true, I don’t like turkey sandwiches.
HAIDT: One of my little small moments of insight and I sat in disgust, was when Paul Rozin and I were working with a Japanese colleague, Sumio Imada, and he brought in a can of honey‑covered grasshoppers from Japan, into Paul’s office, in about the year 1990. I was a disgust researcher, and I thought, “OK, good, I’ve never eaten an insect before, I’m going to try it.” I took one, I brought up to my mouth intending to eat it, and my throat just gagged.
I’ve never had such a clear gag response, my throat said no way, you’re not putting that in. I just forced my hand into my mouth, once beyond the lips, interestingly, once it’s beyond the lips then disgust, it’s sort of too late, and then I was able to eat it. But no, I still find eating insects disgusting.
COWEN: Are all kinds of morality compromised in psychopathy?
HAIDT: Are all kinds? We actually have some data on this. The answer is generally yes, because they have no moral emotions. I think there are certain kinds that they can understand a little better, but it hasn’t really been studied well enough because everybody’s been focused on care and fairness as morality. Psychopaths have no sense of care, or compassion, or sympathy.
They’re happy to cheat, they don’t care about fairness, but I think people haven’t really studied group loyalty, tribalism, hierarchy. My prediction is that all forms are compromised. I know there’s a paper, I think I know I’m on a paper that basically has that as the title. But I’m trying to remember how clear the data was on all those, whether it goes beyond just the moral foundations questionnaire.
Yes, as far as I can tell psychopaths have no real morality. They do get angry if they feel disrespected sometimes, but that’s about it.
COWEN: You have some very interesting papers on moral elevation, the idea that you can elevate people and this is an important sympathetic relation, actually Adam Smith wrote about this. You can induce them to be more caring, caring in the good way. You can induce nursing behavior. You can induce all kinds of positive responses.
If a student at, say, Yale, comes up to you and says, “Jonathan, I would like to engage in some moral elevation on campus.” What would you tell them to do?
HAIDT: Moral elevation happens when you display virtues in a way that’s really powerful. Virtues of caring, and compassion, and loyalty tend to be the ones that get written about. Courage, also, can be quite moving. Gosh, in a really politicized climate, what would be elevating? Standing up for principles, standing up for people’s rights to speak.
You’d probably get your head cut off if you tried it. Let’s see, what would be morally elevating on a campus? Usually, people would go for social justice kinds of elevations, showing their devotion to oppressed groups. But that’s kind of a moral signaling.
I don’t know what I would advise that person. I guess I would advise them — the research on the effects of elevation is complicated. I had originally hoped that if I simply showed someone an elevating video, they’d be more likely to help others right afterwards. I didn’t find that.
A few other researchers found it, but it’s a small effect. Because when you’re touched, moved, inspired, it doesn’t make you go out and take action. It’s calming you. I think you have parasympathetic activation. You’re not prepared for vigorous action, but I think you learn more. You take in more, and it can change your values.
COWEN: There is a big debate lately about a replication crisis or supposed replication crisis in many fields, but a lot of it’s been social psychology. What’s your view on that debate?
HAIDT: I have good friends on both sides. They all make incredibly good points. I think Brian Nosek, who’s been leading the charge on the problems in psychology, is largely right. That our methods have been sloppy, which has allowed us to engage in practices where we’re just more likely than we should be to get a significant result. And then of course, that’s more likely to get published.
Given that we find the same problem in cancer research and biomedical research — in almost every field where it’s been looked at — I think that the replication crisis is very real. It should be a top priority for science.
A lot of my work is on how we are not fully rational creatures. We are deeply emotional and tribal creatures. If you have this idealized view of researchers and our null hypothesis significant testing is based on idealized view of researchers who are basically testing samples honestly.
“Well, this could only happen 1 in 20 times by chance,” but we’re not those creatures. We want certain outcomes to happen. We make certain choices unconsciously. We all have to up our game. I don’t think there’s anything special about social psychology. It’s no worse than other fields. But we have been the leaders at actually addressing it, and saying, “Why are we not able to replicate each other’s work so much?”
I actually am impressed that the young generation has really embraced this and simply committing to making your data available — if you know that other people are going to get access to your SPSS file, or whatever, your data file, and they’re going to be looking it over, boy, you’re going to be a lot more careful.
I think just by raising the crisis, raising the alarm last year, the quality of our work is going to go substantially up. I’m really excited by this.
COWEN: What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?
HAIDT: Oh boy, the best replacement.
COWEN: Good question. Durkheimian question.
HAIDT: Yeah. A few years ago I would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it, but given what’s happened in the last year on campuses, I’m really afraid of it, because you might think, “Humanitarianism should replace it. We should all have a religion of helping the poor, helping each other.” Now, of course, it’s really important to help the poor. It’s really important to help people who are oppressed.
But once you make it a religion, that means you are impervious to evidence. You are committed to certain religious rituals even if those rituals make things worse. For example, I’ve been studying the research on affirmative action and diversity training. As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that they make things better and there is some evidence that it makes things worse.
Now, it’s messy. I can’t say for sure that they do, but the point is, we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse. The activists are largely asking for things that will make things worse. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom. Which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it.
Once you make something a religion, you’re not open to evidence. You do really crazy, stupid things. What I would say is, let’s not have a replacement for religion. Let’s set things up so that there isn’t a big religion that unites us all to take on our enemies. Let’s try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations, but we don’t have a big sense of national purpose.
COWEN: Last question to finish up. Who is your best and most important critic in any of these areas and why?
HAIDT: Let’s see, my best and most important critic. In moral psychology — boy, it’s hard to think because when you engage in debates with people you tend to see what’s wrong with them. [laughs] My colleague at NYU, John Jost, we’ve had a lot of good discussions together. He critiqued me early on in ways that in fact that led me to formulate the liberty and oppression hypothesis foundation.
Ronnie Janoff‑Bulman at University of Massachusetts, has pointed out that there are some gaps in moral foundations theory that we haven’t taken account, sort of the motivations behind social justice and social change movements.
There have been some people who have critiqued moral foundations theory as it is — .
COWEN: Tell us again what you think the best criticism is, even if you don’t agree with it?
HAIDT: The best criticism is just that we have left some things out, which is surely true. What’s been exciting is to see that there haven’t — there’s one critic, Kurt Gray, who has said that, basically, morality is just one thing, harm.
COWEN: That has to be wrong.
HAIDT: Yeah, I just can’t see — .
He hasn’t really put forth an argument as to why we would even try to fit everything into the procrustean bed. I don’t really see the advantage of that, other than parsimony, he’s a parsimonist. Other critics have simply said, “OK, sure. There must be something innate, and OK, there are probably multiple things.”
If you agree with those two things, then that’s most of the moralist foundations theory, and then, of course, that morality develops on top of those. It’s mostly critics who said, “You left out this,” or, “These two things should be combined.”
That’s the kind of really constructive criticism that we need, because when we started the theory, we put forth these five foundations, and we didn’t say, “This is it. We know these are the five.” We said, “This is our first pass from doing a lot of reading. This our first guess, but let’s see. Let’s see how it evolves.”
COWEN: And, campus life, your best critic.
HAIDT: That’s the funny thing, is that there really haven’t been any. When Greg Lukianoff and I wrote this Atlantic article, it was talked about all over the place. A lot of people told us privately that they loved it, they were often afraid to say so publicly. Almost nothing was written against it, it’s the weirdest thing.
My wife was actually kind of concerned that there would be this avalanche of criticism, and there would be a lot of anger directed towards us, but really, the only things that were written said, “You guys are white males. You’re just defending your privilege.” That’s most of the argument. Other people said, “Trigger warnings actually are kind of useful, even if they can also be harmful.”
That’s about it. It’s been the most amazing thing. There’s been, really, no coherent criticism of what Lukianoff and I have said.
COWEN: Jonathan, thank you for your time. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.
HAIDT: It was a pleasure to talk with you.