Homeroom with Sal & Jonathan Haidt - Wednesday, July 1

Hi everyone! Welcome to our daily homeroom livestream. For those of you who are wondering what this is, this is something we started a few months ago. It's really just a way to stay connected, have interesting conversations about education and other topics, and I'm super excited about today's conversation.

I just had two macadamia nuts so I may get a drink of water before I go. Sorry about that, there was a lot of water in there; that's why I had to kind of lift it up. But before I jump into our conversation with Jonathan Haidt, I'll get my standard announcement reminder that, Kind of Kind of me is a not-for-profit. We can only exist because of philanthropic donations. If you're in a position to do so, please think about it.

A special thanks to several corporations who stepped up in the last couple of months to allow us to accelerate our response to COVID. We were running at a deficit even before COVID, and that deficit has only grown. Special thanks to Bank of America, google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis. We're still running at a deficit so any help, either as an individual or corporation or our foundation, is much appreciated.

So with that, I'm excited to introduce Jonathan. Jonathan, we've seen each other at several conferences; we even have some funders in common. Thanks for joining us.

"My pleasure, Sal, and let me also just say thank you for all you're doing for us parents during quarantine. My wife and I were pressuring my son to pick something to learn, so he went to Khan Academy and he's taking your JavaScript course."

"Thank you! We are honored to be of service. For everyone listening, we're going to be taking questions for Jonathan and myself if you're interested. So please put the comments on YouTube or Facebook, wherever you're watching, and we have team members who will surface it. But Jonathan, you have a fascinating job area of research. You are a social psychologist focused on the psychology of morality. What is that? That’ll help people start thinking of questions to ask."

"Sure, okay. Well, so morality refers to the fact that we're always judging each other. We don't just live in a physical world; we live in a world made of norms and expectations, and those keep us in line. They give us endless things to talk about, gossip about; they lead to conflict, endless conflict. But morality also makes possible cooperation. We're an amazingly cooperative species—the bees are more cooperative than us, but, you know, not a lot of other creatures. So cooperation and conflict; that's a lot of what I study and that has brought me into the study of politics in particular. I used to look at how morality varied across cultures, and beginning as the culture war began to heat up in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s, I began to look at how left and right are like different countries."

"Yeah, I definitely want to talk about that. I'm sure there's going to be questions about it. You know, when you look at your three publications, you know, kind of common everyday reader publications outside of academics, you have three books: one is 'The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truths in Ancient Wisdom.' I'd love, you know, your big takeaways there, and I'm curious how it's affected your life. Your other one is 'The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,' and then, most recently, 'The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.' So that will also help prompt people to think about what questions to ask, but I mean, let's just go in order. You know, from 'The Happiness Hypothesis,' this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about—about how to optimize not only my own life, but how to optimize generally society so that we can be happier. What are kind of your takeaways? I mean, how has it affected your personal life when you did this research?"

"Sure, so, yeah. The book grows out of my course at the University of Virginia. I taught there for 17 years and I would try to present psychological insights to students, and I would often use quotes from the ancients, east and west. I found that there's a small number of ideas that have been discovered in almost every society, you know, like 'there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so'; that Shakespeare said, you know, that's the basis of cognitive therapy. So I wrote a book, one truth in each chapter, and I reviewed what's the modern research on it.

The book wasn't supposed to be about happiness, but it turns out that if you take a lot of ancient wisdom, there are a lot of connecting threads on how to live a good life, how to flourish. And I'll save you all the trouble of buying the book; I'll summarize thousands of years in a couple of sentences. When it comes down to it, happiness doesn't come from getting what you want; okay? That's very short-lived. Happiness comes from within, or so that's better. But really the best way to summarize the human condition is that happiness comes from between—that is, friendships. It comes from getting the right kinds of relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, some sort of productive work, and yourself in something larger than yourself—having a sense that your life matters, you're a part of something bigger. And if you get those three conditions right, you're gonna be about as happy as you can be. So we all have a kind of a setpoint, a general level of happiness that we return to, but if you get those three conditions right, you'll sort of be, you know, generally above that—you know, at the high end of that range. So there you go, the secret to happiness—trust me, it's a lot more interesting when you go through it slowly."

"I shouldn't just cut to the chase and give you the answer. No, I think I have the book and then I encourage everyone to go through it. But there's a lot that, you know, I talk a lot about on this about my own journeys, you know, and meditation. But I do, and we also talk about how important it is to have a purpose and feel like you're, you know, contributing to something larger, and so that definitely reinforces my existing beliefs, and as you also write about confirmation bias—it’s a very nice connection."

"That's right! It always feels good to be proven right. It's—and then, related to that, I think that gets into, you know, a lot of what you've been focused on lately, including with your not-for-profit, which is, you know, it's clear that there's significant polarization. Politics is by definition always somewhat polarizing, but there is a sense, and you probably have evidence that it is unusually polarized right now. I'd love your—well, if you have any evidence that it is truly—it's not just an intuitive sense, but it is, you know, measurably unusually polarized right now. And also, what do you think are the sociological causes? Then maybe we could go into how do we depolarize, or if we should."

"Sure, okay. So, you know, so as you said, politics is by nature polarizing. You have parties that represent groups of interests or identities or whatever, and then they compete. Elections are zero-sum, so there's nothing wrong with that. And even some degree of polarization, like people are far apart on views, is not necessarily bad. But think of it this way: suppose you have a sports league in which, you know, the Yankees and the Red Sox hate each other. Just, you know, theoretically, that could actually make the game more fun. But suppose they hate each other so much that they start hiring hitmen to kill members of the other team, and they do things to sabotage the field. Okay, now you're like, you're totally out of bounds—like this is not what the game is.

Okay, now let's turn to American politics. So there's some debate among political scientists about what polarization means. And if you think about, like, views on policy issues like abortion, by some measures, we're not more polarized than we were. As a psychologist, I focus on one thing and one thing alone: that is effective polarization, which means emotional—how much do you feel negative emotion or hate for the other side? That's what's crucial.

And the data shows very clearly that in the '70s and '80s and even into the '90s, Republicans and Democrats rated the people on the other side or the parties on the other side so a little, you know, a little negative but not at the bottom. And it began—the ratings began to get extremely negative in the late '90s is when it begins, and then it goes down and down and down. There is such hatred now that this has a lot of ramifications: one of which is we are now really willing to believe almost anything. If you hate the other side, you're much more willing to believe crazy stuff about them. So that's one whole piece: the rising polarization. And then let's add in the change in social media and cable TV.

So we now have a media ecosystem that is really well designed to find the most anger-provoking, outrageous stuff. It can be totalized, but it's gonna funnel it in. And so for a lot of reasons, we're now, you know, we're in a democracy which has to have a public square in which ideas are hashed out, and we generally make progress; we improve ideas when sometimes there's compromise. I mean, that's what we need to do to live in a democracy, and I think it's much harder to do that now than it was even ten years ago, to say nothing of 20 or 30 years ago."

"What do you think it was in the '90s, and then it sounds like it accelerated in the last 20 years that caused this, I guess you could say, the amplification of polarization or judgment?"

"Yes, yeah, so, you know, our minds like to look for a thing that happens—like if you know, because you see the curves, they really do begin to dip in the '90s, and you might say, oh, well, you know, it must have been, you know, Newt Gingrich or Fox News, as if that's what you would say if you're on the left. If you're on the right, I imagine you'd point to Bill Clinton. But what I like to do is these are complex systems that have a lot of parameters to them. And I like to think what are the forces that were pulling any complex system together? What are the forces that are blowing it apart?

And a lot of them began to change in and around this time. So what, for one thing, we have to see the late 20th century as a historical anomaly, when democracy—our democracy had lots of problems, but we thought democracy was ultimately the way that everyone was gonna live. Once the Soviet Union imploded, we thought, wow, you know, liberal democracy with free-market capitalism; like this is, you know, at the end of history, everyone's gonna go this way. But we didn't realize is that democracy is actually really, really hard. And the Founding Fathers in the Federalist Papers really worried about our tendency to faction—to split up, split apart, and hate the other side.

So I just went to a couple of factors. One is the loss of a common enemy. So, you know, from Pearl Harbor in World War II through the Cold War, having a common enemy really binds a group together. So that's a big one. Another really big one is the media environment. After World War II, we had three television networks that had a Fairness Doctrine, so they couldn't be very political. So for a while, we had a media system in which we kind of all got the same sort of news. And then once you get cable TV and then the internet and social media, now you go from broadcasting to everyone, so that we all hear the same stuff, to narrowcasting. And of course, people using Facebook data and advertising data that, you know, really micro-target. So we are not on the same page; we don't believe the same things. We're in a state of moral and factual incoherence, and we may be that way for the rest of our lives.

So those are a couple of big ones, but there are many others that began changing, and the result is hatred, distrust—distrust of each other and distrust of institutions has been rising steadily to the point where I think it's extremely dangerous. It's really not clear what's going to happen to our country."

"I know you're out in the big business of predicting, but what do you think is—what do you think is a natural extrapolation from where we are right now if you go out five or ten years?"

"No boy! Well, put it this way: if current trends continue, then our country would probably fall apart in a catastrophic way. But please don't quote me—I know people are watching live. Because if current trends continue, then I think we'll be in big trouble. But the thing is, current trends never continue. This really will continue forever. And if you zoom out, if you take the big picture, and you look at both human history in which life is getting better; you know, rights are being extended, science advances—knowledge at you. The big picture, life is getting better and better, and there are, you know, there are dips, but then it keeps rising. Steve Pinker has books like 'The Better Angels of Our Nature.' There are a variety of books that have really tried to encourage us to realize in every age, people think things are terrible when they're going to hell. But actually, things are generally getting better.

So it's always been wrong to bet against America, and you know, I think in China and a few other countries, they are enjoying our mess for geostrategic reasons. Odds are, we'll figure a way out of this. So my short answer is I can't predict. I think there are a variety of scenarios in which things look even scarier and weirder, you know, in the next year and next year or two. But we're likely to find ways out of this. We have to solve a lot of problems. We've got to improve so many things about our democracy—the way we vote, the sense that people have a voice, you know, gerrymandering. There are all these problems with our democracy, and I do hope that, you know, things change politically next year—that democracy reform and improvement will be very high on the agenda."

"Yeah, and you know, you talk about the importance, I guess, of a common enemy to hold people a little bit closer together. And obviously, we are facing something of a common enemy and the pandemic. From YouTube, Shauni Tarkir asked, 'Do you think—well, there's more of an epidemiological question. Do you think it'll have a second wave?' And it sounds like it already is. But if we do, how do you think it'll affect society? Will it cause Democrats and Republicans to have a greater divide or will they finally come together?"

"Yes, so let's back up and go back to those halcyon early days of the pandemic when we were all trying to come to grips with it. It was inconceivable that we'd have to shut everything down and stay home for months—inconceivable. And as we came to grips with it and as that happened, it was like, oh my god, everyone is doing this! You know, this is a global thing, and in those first weeks, that was the big question people were asking: 'Is this gonna bring us together?'

But let's step back here and understand what happens to societies when you have a foreign attack that brings people together. When you have a pandemic in history, that divides people apart. If we have a disease coming in, people are afraid of each other. There are shortages, so pandemics traditionally have actually split people apart. Now, this pandemic is different because we didn't have food shortages; it wasn't that deadly—like the plague! I mean, it wasn't, like, you know, half the people were going to die. And it was an amazing shared experience. So in the early days, the polling showed many more people were saying we're all in this together.

But here's the amazing and messed-up and tragic thing about our country: our culture war is so severe that within it took about four or five weeks—by mid-April, the pandemic itself had divided the country. Now, I think a lot of that can be laid directly at the foot of the president, who was tweeting, you know, 'Liberate Virginia' and things like that. So the—both of the—the president, the media environment, within a few weeks, we had a left-right divide over wearing masks, over the speed of opening up, over so many other things.

So I don't think that the pandemic will help or bring us together at a national level. Now, locally, lots of great stuff happens. So, you know, you got to look at multiple levels. But overall, America has handled this pandemic horrifically, incompetently, and of course, you can blame many actors and agencies. But a portion of the story is our polarization—we don't trust each other or the authorities."

"Yeah, and it related to this, or maybe not—I mean, you tell me: you know, your most recent book, 'The Coddling of the American Mind.' Has this played into this polarization? Has polarization played into that, or is that just another, you know, orthogonal dimension to what's going on inside?"

"Yeah, well, so briefly, the—the 'Coddling of the American Mind' is about the big changes that we began to see on campus and in high schools as Gen Z came in. Gen Z—people born 1996 or 1997 depending on how you count it, but around then—mid-90s—their childhoods are different from the Millennials, and their mental health profiles are different. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression—nothing else really, just anxiety and depression."

"Oh yes, very well documented."

"Yes, if you go to thecoddling.com, on the front page I have a link to a giant Google Doc where I've collected all the studies showing, you know, on any side, as to ‘Is it rising?’ and then a second document is 'Is social media a part of the cause?' You know, we started this where this is originally the insight, was from Greg Lukianoff. When we started this with an Atlanta Carl in 2015, everyone on campuses across the country were talking about the rise of mental health needs, but we didn't have any hard data on it. And by 2016, 2017, now all the survey data was showing this is real, and it's not just self-report. It's not just that Gen Z is comfortable talking about it because you find the same increase for self-harm and you find a similar increase in suicide.

So this is behavior. It's not just changes in diagnostic criteria, so we're trying to understand why that is. And a portion of it, especially the sex difference, may seem to be due in part to the effect of social media, especially on middle school kids. Social media really changes around 2011-2012 in that—in those years, it’s from 2009 to 2012—but the other piece is the vast overprotection that Americans put on kids; it happened in Canada, Britain too. We stopped letting them out to play as much; we got really scared about them. Education, and we overprotected kids. And what kids most need to grow socially is free play—unsupervised free play—where they get in conflicts; they work things out themselves. So that's what that book is about."

"And no, I don't think it doesn't tell us much about the pandemic, but it did—but yes, we should definitely talk about it. For as an educational nonprofit, I don't know if you saw—are you seeing any signs of this? I mean, your audience is almost mostly, I would guess, Gen Z. Are you seeing signs that Gen Z is different from Millennials or old previous generations?"

"Well, you know, the very nature of Khan Academy—we are, you know, removed physically so we are only engaging in, you know, kind of through the exercises or the videos that they might watch. So we don't see it as directly. There's other, you know, kind of non-Khan Academy outlets where, at least as a…I know I hate to admit it, but that was a middle-aged person, I'm like, 'Oh, these young and foul!' Yeah, you know, and I wonder whether this is just something that every, you know generation goes through. You know, once all of a sudden you turn 40 and all of a sudden you think you're not that different than a 25-year-old, but you realize that cultural difference—or maybe they’re just like I was when I was 25. I'm different now and I'm 40."

"You know, it's true that each generation thinks the one behind it is, you know, lazy. You know, every generation criticizes the one behind it, and often the criticisms are the same across thousands of years, so you're right to wonder that. But if you look at the mental health data, something really happened around 2012, is when the lines began going way, way up for girls, and not as much, but up still also for boys.

So these are objective measures of mental health in terms of those that are behavioral. So the other thing I can say is you have spoken about the book at many high schools and universities to Gen Z audiences, and it was a tie, you know? I lay out the case 'here's what we think is happening,' and I always ask them, 'Do you think this is right?' Or, you know, I just said something, you know, painted your generation in a certain way, and overwhelmingly they say it's a correct portrait because they recognize—their conditions of what's happening."

"They recognize the effects of overprotection and of being on social media so heavily. Gen Z is not in denial."

"They know what I've seen is they generally want a broader range of experience; they want to be exposed to ideas; they want to grow up to be stronger and successful. And so you have these two factors: you know, this notion of social media finish I understand that these would have been kids who are essentially entering adolescence around 2012-2013—races right when, obviously, I mean social media had already started to gain momentum, but around 2012-2013 it became huge: you know, your Facebooks, your Instagrams, Snapchats of the world. And what do you think is this? You know, how does social media connect? And there's a question, if I can still find it, or where someone was asking on YouTube, you know, do you think that there’s—is it a net negative, that social media? Or are there kind of bouncing influences?"

"Sure. So, yeah, the important thing that people need to understand about social media is that it really changed in two years. So it comes out— you get, you know, MySpace, and Friends, and in 2004 it’s Facebook, and it’s, you know, 'Here I am! Here's my picture! Here are the bands I like! Here, you know, my links to my various friends.' That's not toxic. That's not bad for anyone's mental health.

In 2009, Facebook adds the like button, and Twitter adds the retweet button. And now, there's a huge amount of information on engagements, and everybody is reinforcing everybody else. It's almost like an operant experiment, you know, with, you know, uh, James, uh, whatever. Anyway, the behaviorist conditioning experiments. So you have so much engagement data; now the platforms use that to algorithmize what they feed.

And so now, social media becomes much more addictive; it lures many more people in, and it creates an outrage machine that is now—it's very easy to drop something in. It spreads, and so by 2012, the media environment is different. Now the newspapers, the old-line media has to play the game. Advertising shifts onto Facebook by 2014. This thing is so powerful that the Russians, who've been messing with our democracy since the mid-20th century, the Russians activate all their networks to make us even more angry at each other and put in a lot of lies and a lot of manipulation, a lot of fake sites.

So 2014, now it’s like we've got this, you know, we're large, we're public squares at this outrage machine being directly manipulated by other countries and by bad actors within this country. And so I think that's when 2014-2015 is when our politics really felt like it was going haywire. And this, I believe, is made possible as an opening for Donald Trump, who I don't think could have been elected in a normal election year.

But he was very skilled at using this free media, so it's when I make the point people have to understand it's not just like, you know, being on social media—it's being enmeshed in this stream of constant judgment and outrage, and it's exhausting. And it's especially bad for, I believe, for middle school kids. So I'm not taking the position on whether adults should use it, but I think 11, 12, 13-year-olds really should not be on it. They certainly should not be on it without the permission of their parents. But at present, anyone can sign up for an account; there's no verification, and you see that you see kids get sucked into this, and there it, you know, the chronic anxiety of being judged about kahan flicks—high cortisol levels extended over, you know, days, weeks, months—is bad for development."

"And this is really interesting because, you know, just as an observer, I think a lot of people will say, 'Oh yes, social media, it makes you insecure, maybe anxious, because you see other people's best lives, they're going on the case, perfect—they look perfect in the morning as 10!' etcetera. And then you feel insecure about your very real life. You're saying maybe that's part of it but you're saying it's something a little bit different; is that it's reinforcing views in a bubble and allowing you to feel kind of moral outrage about another and the other is not even in your bubble, so they're not even in a position to defend themselves. And so that causes the anxiety because you're just looking at it, you're like, I can't believe there's half the country or half the world that is that crazy—that they're after me, they're after people I care about."

"Yeah, well, not exactly. Let me separate two different things. There’s the mental health effects, which seem to be especially prominent in early adolescence and especially in girls. So when social life went from lots of face-to-face getting together with your friends to doing it online, where there's constant judgment, and anything can explode, I think is particularly bad for teen mental health. That's one piece of it. Then there's the democracy piece, which is not about kids and it's not about anxiety; it's about anger and the ability to find truth.

And so that is a part of the reason I think that our democracy is going haywire and why we're seeing some similar movements in many western countries. There's all kinds of economic causes—I don't oversimplify—but, you know, I'm a—I was born in 1963; I'm a product of the 20th century, you know? My generation, we were raised to believe democracy is the greatest thing—it conquered. It was better than all other systems. If you're born in 1996, and all you've seen is the 21st century, you know, it's not so clear that democracy is this great thing. I'm not saying it's not; I'm just saying it's not working that well these days. And it's not just in America, then it's happening. And I think social media is a part of it; it's not most of it, but it is an accelerant—it just makes it—it’s exactly what the Founding Fathers feared: that faction and conflict will spread like wildfire."

"And these are two fascinating threads that are probably related to it as a mental health read what's healthy for young kids and then what that may be doing, you know, broadly to a generation. Maybe if that's playing a role in our polarization. You know, there's several questions here, I just thought I'd—there's so many questions. I'm having scrolling, but there's a question about, you know, what recommendation would you have for a parent of an adolescent? You take them off social media? You—?"

"Yeah, so they don't care! Yeah, so you know the easy thing would be to say, 'Don't let your kid have social media until they're 16 or 18!' That would be an easy thing to say but it wouldn't work. So the first thing is to differentiate between screen time and social media. So it's not screens per se that are bad. So spending time on Khan Academy—but of course, you should get some exercise during the day—but, you know, spending hours learning coding is not bad for you in any way. That's, you know, so it's not screens; it's specifically social media where you're making content, and then you're looking who said what about it, you know, what are people thinking? So it's specifically social media, and the effects seem biggest on younger adolescents.

So my advice—okay, and then the third thing to add in here is we're all trapped in a game. We're all trapped in a situation in which, you know, when I told my son when he started sixth grade that he couldn't have Instagram, he said, 'But almost everyone else in my class has it!' So it was harder for my son—very few people wanted their kids on—but we're all trapped! Every parent says, 'Well, okay, if everybody else is on it, I'll let you on it!' So I think we have to have leadership from middle school principals. We have to have leadership; parents have to get together. We have to have a common agreement to keep kids off of social media at least until high school. I think that that's the clearest thing: it should not be in middle schools. Kids should have a—it's hard enough to be in middle school with all the gossip and all the changes, and all the growth, and all the embarrassment—get it out of middle school! I think we would then see these rates of anxiety and depression; I think they would come down somewhat."

"Yeah, I would just say also not for parents; I think it's also important to talk with your kids about what kind of childhood they want. Because as far as I found, Gen Z is actually pretty reasonable and they, you know, they don't want to spend their whole lives online. And so helping them set limits, because you've got all these psychologists in Silicon Valley working so that if you give your kid a device, they'll stay on it. So this makes no sense to give your child's time over to this psychologist in Silicon Valley. You and your child should decide and then use the Apple screen time controls or whatever. I think those work very well. And also agree a time that devices come out of the bedroom; that I think is very, very important. Otherwise, kids get sucked in at night; they're doing it in a jiffy—it’ll just go on forever."

"Do you really hire psychologists at social media companies to come? I just drive the addiction factor?"

"Oh, absolutely! Yes, let me—the psychology of slot machines, the psychology of engagement. Oh yes, they hire a lot of psychologists. There’s a lab at Stanford that trained a lot of designers in how do you hook people; how do you keep them on your product? Yes, yeah, we do a little bit of work. Obviously, we think we're doing it for a good purpose, but, you know, how do you hook someone on to learning or engagement? But that's, you know, we don't have a team of cognitive scientists, but—well, it’s so—if your goal is to help them finish a lesson and reach a goal that they themselves endorse, then that’s just good psychology. There are, you know, I’m sure you have all kinds of points and rewards built in—that’s good psychology. It’s when you're trying to undercut their own resolutions and try to keep them on even longer than they’d like to be on.

So if you look at the regret factor—how much are you—how happy are you at the time that you spend on Khan Academy? I would guess—excuse me, hello? Say hello to the live audience!"

"Okay, so you know, I would guess that if you ask kids how happy are you with the time—you know, 'Do you wish you spend too much time on Khan Academy?' Well, okay, if the parents are forcing them, maybe they'll say it's too much, but if it’s self-driven, they’d be happy with it!"

"Yeah, no, I mean, these conversations, I—we could talk for several hours. And hopefully, we can—we can have you back on, because each of these threads I think we can double, and triple, and quadruple-click on. Maybe just to kind of finish up, maybe on a positive note, you know, I know you're above and beyond your academic research and your writing, you're involved in, you know, trying to change—maybe at least not only observe but maybe depolarize society. We had the question from Facebook: Kathy Gifford asked, 'What positive actions can individuals take to mitigate some of the negative impact of increasing polarization?'"

"Well, yeah, well, what should we do collectively or not, Julie?"

"Oh, good! Thank you! Thank you, Kathy, for that question. So a lot of the big changes are going to be systemic changes in, you know, elections and media and all sorts of things. But all of us as individuals—all of us are caught up in a system that makes us hyper-moralize. And so to go back to the Happiness Hypothesis, one of the—you know, one of the great truths is that we’re too judgmental; here, let me see—actually, I actually have some quotes here. Let's see.

So this is something you hear from all over: 'Judge not, lest ye be judged.' Buddha says, 'Hatred never ends through hatred, by love alone does it end.' Seneca says, 'When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised.' Make the smallest distinction in heaven and earth and you’re so infinitely far apart. We are so judgmental, and we also have the capacity to understand people, and when we do that we lose some of our anger, and we can talk to them. So what I would recommend is everybody realize we're caught up in endless streams of outrage, and you as an individual can step out of it, can reach out to people, can try to understand them.

I recommend especially the book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' by Dale Carnegie; it'll give you almost a social superpower. You have the capacity to actually persuade people, to actually connect with people, and social media pulls us into this conflict mindset. But you'll be much more successful in life if you try to understand people, persuade them and learn to work with them. At the very least, it'll help you in your own marriage and with your own children."

"And really that, I—I know we're already over time; there's another really good question. It also will help, type of on this. You know, there's a question from Facebook: John Hepworth asks, 'Is there a way to detoxify social media?' You know, you're having these debates, I know Facebook is struggling to take off certain posts, and even if they're from the president or not, and there's really kind of a no-win situation. You're gonna make someone mad, you know, and then there's free speech rights, but then it's—you know, there's all these things. What would you do if you were Mark Zuckerberg? Would you edit speech? Would you change the platformers mostly to make it less beep toxic as a detoxifier?"

"Yes, I think it's essential that we make the platforms less toxic. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal about a month ago about how Facebook had—they had studied polarization; they had thought about ways to reduce the degree to which it is exposed, and they dropped it. So I think Facebook—there’s a lot of responsibility here. There’s a lot more that they could be doing. Twitter has hardly any social psychologists on its staff. I think Twitter needs to really start studying these issues. They've taken a couple of steps here and there. I have an article in the Atlantic but Tobias Rose Stockwell and I wrote within last November in which we laid out a few steps that could be takenthat could be done.

One is to add friction here and there. When you're about to post something that seems to be particularly aggressive or toxic, we need just a little bits of friction. But that's a small thing. More algorithm accountability—the algorithms pull people are pretty reasonable; most people are pretty reasonable. But the algorithms give much more voice to the people at the extremes—the people who are not reasonable because they generate engagement. We need to understand those algorithms, and there needs to be some public comment on them, some way to change the algorithms.

I think the biggest bang is gonna come when we find ways not to have to go after each individual post, but to reward users who are civil and show some nuance and some constructiveness. And so, you know, if I could, you know, if I could, you know, mark the people who I think are particularly great or no, not me marking—if there were ways to code for integrative complexity or civility or constructiveness, if the platforms could code for things. So that I could set, you know, what I don’t want anybody who scores zero. I don’t want trolls who just, you know, their content is very predictable—I want to cut them out so that they don’t see me, I don’t see them. We would all have a much, much better life on social media. So I think this is one of the trends—if this keeps going on—our public square, our ability to talk to each other is in big trouble. I think we're gonna have to have major reforms to social media that make it less nasty, less conspiracy-generating, less outrage-generating."

"And you know, one question—and I know I keep asking questions for over time—but I mean, it sounds like some of these reforms would just be bad business for these companies because, obviously, it's oftentimes the more extreme statement, the things that are generating outrage that get you sucked in, that make you want to comment, that make you click on something. And it's not that social media, as you mentioned, or mainstream media, or your TV media, or prep is—are pretty polarized. They've also discovered this business model."

"That's right! As many have commented—you know, the business model is such that we are not the customers. It’s the advertisers who are the customers, you know? We're the tuna fish that gets hooked on the other hook, and you know, delivered to the customers in a sense. So yes, the business model will have to change. Ultimately from—but I would put it this way—so I teach a course at NYU Stern on professional responsibilities—it’s our ethics course. And one of the things that becomes clear when you look at all these cases is that in the short run, cheating often pays. But in the long run, ethics generally does pay.

And so, you know, in the long run, if people really hate Facebook, and the more—you know, we're seeing that this month, boycotts can be extremely costly. And if there’s all kinds of people in a boycott, something—well, if someone comes up with a better product that is not as tough—that does not lead to such toxicity, people know them though Facebook would lose market share. So in the long run, I think ethics pays. And also, most of the, you know, the people I met in Silicon Valley, it's full of idealistic people who you know, who really think we’re want to believe that they’re making the world better. So I am hopeful that some big changes will happen, but big changes have to happen."

"Yeah, well Jonathan, you've given us so much to think about! I encourage everyone to take a look at all of Jonathan's writing; with it he said 'thecoddling.com.' Yeah, you can get to everywhere else from there to get some more data, but Jonathan, thank you so much! This was extremely insightful and it gave me a lot to think about."

"Great! My pleasure, Sal. Thanks for all that you and your team do to educate the world; appreciate it."

"So thanks everyone for joining! As always, these conversations—I don't know why, you know, I enter into them saying oh yeah, I got maybe 10 minutes worth of questions, then we realized 40 minutes go by. So thanks for joining. As you saw, Jonathan's fascinating! His research—I could spend several hours on every one of those topics we talked about! But thanks for joining this week, and I think we're off to—well, actually, I'm not going to say that. I think we're off tomorrow, but we will see! But I will see you at the next live stream! See you then!"