The Perilous State of the University: Jonathan Haidt & Jordan B Peterson

Who's a professor at NYU, and I have him here for a bunch of reasons. Jonathan is an extremely interesting researcher. I've been following his work on disgust and political belief literally for decades. He was one of the first people who started to do serious research on disgust, which is its own emotional system and therefore very much worth attending to.

But we also have some other interests in common. Jonathan also started this institute called the Heterodox Academy, which is attempting to bring back a reasonable diversity of views or what he regards as a reasonable diversity of views to university faculty and campuses and discussions. So I first met Jonathan, it's gonna be just about 30 years ago, 25 years ago in 2014. Yeah, I'm sorry, it was in 1994. Was it in 1994? Yeah, yeah, right, right. So, yeah, you came to do a job talk at Harvard for an assistant professorship position, and I had been aware of your work on disgust then and agitated hard for them to hire you because I thought it was of great significance, which turned out to be exactly the case.

So what do you remember about that?

Jonathan: I remember I was so excited to have an interview at Harvard. It was my only interview. If I didn't get that job, I had no job for the following year, and it was a very strange day in which I didn't feel particularly welcomed or wanted. And then I had my session with you in which it was this guy who was, he had it. He actually got a job at Harvard, and he was studying Jung, which is like almost taboo, and he was talking about dreams and creativity. And so I just... that was the really bright, that was the bright memory of the day, was our hour-long conversation.

Yeah, well I was also really interested at the time, and now in the biological basis of behavior, right? And so, and in the relationship between fundamental motivational systems and thought because obviously our thought is grounded in fundamental motivational systems. And your work on disgust, which maybe you can tell the viewers a little bit about, was really interesting to me because it was an emotional system that hadn't been studied much. I mean you were really one of the pioneers in the psychological study of disgust.

Well, the way to explain it is that Paul Rozin, my advisor at Penn, is the pioneer in the study of disgust, and he'd studied it as a food-related emotion. He'd written a bit about it being a moral emotion, and I was a graduate student at Penn, and I was interested in morality, and I was reading the Bible and I was reading anthropological accounts of different countries and different cultures. And at the time, morality was all about reasoning, about harm, rights, and justice. So Lawrence Kohlberg was the leading figure in the field.

And because I was looking at morality across cultures, and when you look across cultures, it's not just about fairness and harm and rights. It's about menstruation and food taboos and skin lesions, and it's very physical. And I was, you know, why? Why do so many societies, why is it like the normal default way of being is to somehow bring the body into morality? Why is that? And so I just happened to be at Penn where the world's expert in disgust was. I went to talk to him, and that started one of the best collaborations of my life.

And what it led to is a broadening of the moral domain. Basically, there's a sort of Western secular approach that you see in Western philosophers. Either morality is about harm and utilitarianism; it's minimize harm, or it's about rights and principles -- Immanuel Kant and a much better way psychologically, I think, about morality is virtue ethics. It's just a lot of stuff. It's just we have just a lot of stuff that we judge on.

And this led me eventually to realize that people on the left and people on the right care about different stuff. Everybody cares about harm and fairness, but the stuff about keeping, you know, boundaries around the group, build a wall, protect the group, hold the group together, hate traitors-- you know, everybody can do that. But right-wing morality builds on these additional foundations of these additional emotions and foundations. So that work on disgust that I was just beginning to talk about then when we first met in 1994 led eventually to what we now call moral foundations theory. And with about five or six colleagues, if you go to yourmorals.org, you can take our test, you can learn all about it.

But it led to the perspective that ultimately was I think the right perspective as the culture war was heating up and as left and right were essentially becoming like different countries, different cultures. So it's not obvious on first consideration why disgust would be a moral emotion. So you know most of the work that's done outside of the disgust realm, I would say, is predicated on the assumption that the reason that conservatives in particular, but perhaps people who are more authoritarian in general, draw boundaries around their territories because they're afraid of the other. But that isn't really how it plays out as far as I can tell.

Because conservatives, for example, are less neurotic than trait in the big five traits sense than liberals, although it's a minor difference. But the disgust issue seems to be particularly relevant. So can you tell us a little bit about why disgust per se?

Well first, conservatives are a little less neurotic, but they also, if you do very low-level perceptual experiments, just like a puff of white noise in the ear, people who react more strongly to that to any sort of very low-level threat are more likely to vote Republican in this country. So there are all these interesting personality differences that lead to different politics.

But as for why disgust? So, I'm a Durkheimian. I would say I love the sociologist Émile Durkheim, and I'm also a social psychologist. So I'm always thinking not about people as individual utility maximizers but people as members of social groups. People who are totally focused on belonging in their social groups and people who have some pro-social motives about keeping the group together, about doing things that are good for the group. So as I try to argue in my book, "The Righteous Mind," yes, we're selfish, there's no doubt that we often will do things to advance our own self-interest at the expense of others. But we're also really group-ish, which means we'll do all sorts of things to advance our group at the expense of others. Basically, we're tribal. We evolved as a tribal species, and we have all this software, I would say. Oh, there's all these predispositions for life in tribes that are battling other tribes.

And that's why it comes out so easily if you look at the way boys organize themselves when they get a fraternity, the hazing rituals. When you look at the way-- it's especially clear in boys-- the way street gangs organize themselves. Girls’ tribalism is a little different, but I would say this is... and that's why, again, I love the Jungian approach of archetypes. There's something, there's just this weird stuff that is pan-human. Even if it comes out slightly differently around the world, there really is a human nature, and it comes complete with a whole bunch of like pre-designed ideas.

So there was a new article, I think it was published in Nature, I'll try to find a link for it. It's about high-resolution imaging of neuronal connections, and it's actually reviewed in Kurzweil’s book "How to Create a Mind," I think that's the name of it. And so it turns out that the cortex is made out of these columnar structures that are pre-organized units of neurons, and they're replicated across the entire cortex. It's basically the same structure.

And like the older, let's say connectionist idea was that neurons that fire together wire together, right? That's happening of course-- that's pretty standard neurology. But the columns are already pre-wired, so it's actually columns that fire together that wire together. But there's even more with the high-resolution scanning. So it turns out that underneath the columnar structure there are these pre-built highways that are connected connective tissue that are pre-prepared. So the columns have the option to connect to the underlying highway, and then that highway can connect to other columns.

So it's as if implicit in the brain organization, and this is at the cortical level, say nothing of subcortical organization. There’s already preexistent likelihoods that certain neurons will fire, will wire together. Yeah, so, and what else is cool is that this is actually architecturally quite regular. So they found that these superhighways are arranged in lines, and at right angles to one another, so it's almost like a three-dimensional structure of wired cubes that underlies the neuronal structure. So that's some neurological evidence for the archetypal idea.

So let me just explain to the viewers here why this isn't just some like psychological geek conversation. This is actually really relevant to a lot of the things that we'll be talking about and that your audience probably cares about because one of the most contested ideas in the social sciences is the idea of innateness. And, yeah, the idea is well, if something is innate then it can't vary across societies, and if it varies across societies, then it's not innate. And if gender varies, if masculinity or femininity vary across societies, then it's not innate, it's socially constructed.

But that's the wrong understanding of innateness. The definition that I use comes from Gary Marcus, who was actually a neuroscientist here at NYU. He says innate doesn’t mean hardwired is almost nothing interesting that’s hardwired. Innate means structured in advance of experience, but then experience can still revise it, and boy does that work for gender for almost everything.

Yeah, that’s right. Almost everything that we're not a blank slate about anything. And something I used to tell my students at UVA, I taught at UVA for 16 years, is you know, everything’s a social construction: masculinity, femininity, cancer, the sun, death, everything. There’s a social construction for you won’t find a society that doesn't have thoughts about these things.

But the fact that societies have social constructions tells us nothing about whether there's not also an underlying biological reality, and in almost all cases there is. Well, otherwise we wouldn't be able to communicate, which is one of E.O. Wilson's comments, right? I mean Wilson is the entomologist who studied ants at Harvard and also wrote a number of books about sociobiology that got him in trouble with the radical leftists.

And he said even if we could communicate with ants there would be nothing to say to each other because their fundamental mode of being in the world is based on motivations and interests that are so different from ours that there wouldn't be any structure for communication. And you can kind of tell that with regards to the animals that we make friends with, right? We’re much more likely to make friends with animals who have a fundamental biological and social nature that’s very close to ours, like dogs, because we can basically speak their language, even though not completely. A mammal language of love and, you know, I miss you, and I want to play.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And that bonding. Yeah, okay, so back to disgust, back to disgust. So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rozin is to see us as these amazing omnivores. This is part of our survival strategy, even more than other apes. We are just brilliant omnivores, and we have the omnivores' dilemma, which is we've got to be interested in all kinds of new stuff. We're not tied to any place; we can roam onto a whole new continent, so we're interested in stuff. But stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes, so we have to be careful about that stuff.

And so these motives have to be in tension, and this is actually an interesting way to understand the left-right difference. You have to have both motives. But if, so imagine two siblings, one of whom is set more towards trying new stuff, seeking out new stuff, and the other is a little more fearful, then we're like, whoa, no, let's, you know, let's not try that; let's stay with what's tried-and-true. I mean that's progressivism and conservatives, and that's the origins of it.

And if you look at kids' behavior at the age of two or three, it does predict how they'll vote much later-- not hugely, but there is a clear prediction there. So disgust is part of a regulatory system about our engagement with the world and whether we are just sort of out there and, you know, we seek out variety and diversity. We think diversity is just a great thing or whether we want a little more order, structure, predictability. Conservatives are neater than progressives. If you take photos of their rooms, you know, you can... you know cleanliness and organization; you can predict how they vote.

Disgust it turns out, what's really cool about disgust in modern politics, is if you look at all the different things that we're fighting over, especially in this country, our culture wars over, you know, going back a few decades, you know, sex, drugs, the flag, immigration, all of these things. I have a study with my colleagues, which was led by Sena Koleva, in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people, and we also had their scores on the disgust scale. But one of the foundations of morality is sanctity and purity, and it relates to disgust. What we found is that if you know, if you know what people's left-right how they place themselves on a left-right scale, you can pretty much predict where they fall out on most culture war attitudes, except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity.

So what I mean is flag-burning. Okay, do you think, you know, do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag or the country’s flag as an expression as a political action? What do you think people, just give some answer on a one to seven scale. And people on the right think, you know, more like, they say no; people on the left would say yes. People who score high on loyalty are more likely to say no; people who are lower on it say yes, and that’s even taking account of where they’re on the left-right dimension.

But here’s the cool thing: it’s only if you add in the purity or sanctity thing that you can really understand what people are doing because some people see the flag not as just a piece of cloth. They see it as having some innate essence, something sacred about it, which must be protected. And so this is... they think of it as a unifying center.

Exactly, that’s right. So if there’s something sacred—and this is that this is the central piece of my work around politics and morality—is the psychology of sanctity. If you hold something sacred, then your team circles around it, and it’s only those who circle around with you—and sometimes literally circle around, like Muslims at prayer in Mecca; they literally circle the Kaaba—circling is a very primitive, ancient... it feels right to circle something. But even if you do it symbolically or you all bow at the same time, that binds you together.

Children do that with their mothers when they engage in exploratory behavior, right? Well, they use their mother as a center of the world, and children differ in the degree to which they’ll move outward from their mothers. So they move out until they trip over their uncertainty threshold. Is it a distance like... it’s a distance. And so the more exploratory kids who are lower in negative emotion will go out farther before they come back to their mother. So the mother’s a center, and you know that would be associated symbolically with the idea of the center as a motherland or potentially as a fatherland.

That’s right, that makes sense. So this way that we are incredibly symbolic creatures, we’re not just out to make as much money as we can; we’re symbolic and social creatures. And this psychology of sanctity or purity has become really— not just on the right; it’s always been important for especially religious conservatives. We’re beginning to see it even on the campus left. And this is why I think we see some of the odd things we see on campus: that the campus must be kept as a sacred and pure space.

One of the things that really alarms me about what’s happened on campus the last couple of years is that the older idea we had that it’s a place for contesting ideas; it’s a zone of enormous choice. People can take what courses they want to say what they want; it’s kind of a wonderful free-for-all with norms of respect. It’s now becoming much more of a religious zone where the perimeter of the campus is the boundaries, and within it, there are almost—they're blasphemy laws, basically.

And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury protests when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury. And as everybody knows, he was shouted down. So the students are chanting, and they’re chanting in unison, and it seems like a religious revival meeting. And they’re swaying, and they’re saying their sacred, you know, racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away. It’s like a ritual incantation.

So that all—to define the space as safe, and it’s safe, and look, I’m the maternal warden. So far, all this happening is they’re binding together. They’re moving at, you know, synchronous movement and call and response. So it’s using a lot of tropes from religion and religious worship. But here’s the cool thing: when the administrator, I forget who it is, comes on to say, okay, we have moved— we’re moving the talk, and then you hear a couple of people screaming out, “off campus, off campus.” And he says to another location on campus, and there’s like, “Oh no, no.”

Because, you know, look, no one had to go to this talk. So everyone could have just stayed home, and the students did succeed in shutting down the venue. So they could have declared a victory, but it’s not a full victory unless he is physically off the campus. We can’t have him speaking on campus because that defiles us, that pollutes us. We must shut that down. And that’s where I started saying, wow, this is like full-blown psychology of religion, Durkheim, sanctity, purity, blasphemy.

And that, I think, you know, that doesn’t describe most students; that describes a sort of the core, those who really have their identities wrapped up in this movement. Okay, so with disgust, I wanted to ask you a couple things about that. You know, the Big Five research into political differences basically shows that the liberals are high in trait openness and low on trait conscientiousness, and the conservatives are the reverse.

But we’ve fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with a Big Five aspect scale, and orderliness is strongly associated with disgust.

So, right, right, right. Exactly. It does sound a lot like Freud, but it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces, for example. So now, and their meetings start on time.

Yes, and yeah, exactly, right. Right. So then the nucleus for political beliefs seems to be openness. So that’s that exploratory tendency that you talked about, exploration of ideas and creativity, and low orderliness. And so then I thought, well, why in the world would... why would the political nexus go across those dimensions which are somewhat relatively uncorrelated?

Then I thought, and this is in keeping with your work on disgust, is that it’s an issue of borders, which of course seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump’s election when he talked about borders.

But you might say, and I think this is reasonable, that the conservative is someone who wants the borders between categories to remain intact no matter what level of analysis. So it’s borders from the highest resolution level of cognition all the way up to the actual physical borders of rooms, towns, states, countries, all of that should be thicker. And the reason they want that...

Now, there was a paper published in PLOS ONE. I don’t know if you saw it; it was a couple of years ago. It was a mind-boggling paper. It should have been like front-page news as far as I was concerned. And what the researchers did was between countries and then within provinces or states within countries, they correlated the level of frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs and found a walloping correlation—it was like 0.6. It was one of the highest— for those of you who don’t know: social scientists never discover anything that’s associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6, other than heritability.

Right, other than heritability, yes. And so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes—and then they controlled for governance because one of the questions was, was this top-down authoritarianism or bottom-up authoritarianism? And the answer was that it was bottom-up.

Okay, so I thought about that in... from two perspectives simultaneously at the time. Okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness, so it's a fundamental sub-trait. And I was reading this book that was called "Hitler’s Table Talk." And it was the, it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942—yeah, so it’s a spontaneous utterance assay.

And it’s full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented, but what’s really interesting is all the language is disgust. It’s not fear. So Hitler's basic metaphor was that the Aryan race and country was a pure body and that it was assaulted by parasites. Right? And then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up and shook hands. What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years, right? Because of smallpox and measles.

And so that border issue that separates conservatives from liberals, let’s say, as the conservatives say, the novel is potentially contaminated. It’s not so much that it’s dangerous; that’s different. That’s fear. It’s contaminating.

And the liberals say, hold on a minute, if you make the borders too thick, then information can’t pass through.

Exactly! So that’s the omnivores’ dilemma right there. Right, right. And since we have a biological architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected, we have the same attitude towards abstract information, which would be ideas, that we do to things like food or illness.

This right, right. And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea.

That’s right. Now, I’m a big fan of George Lakoff, "Metaphors We Live By."

That we, yeah, we use our bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics and like what our policies should be about borders and immigration. There’s a Canadian psychologist, Mark Schaller, he and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of these behavioral immune systems.

Yeah, right? That we don’t just try to, you know, microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears. And so whoever can keep themselves and their children from being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game. And so a lot of that is judging carefully about people: is he dangerous? Is she dangerous? And that’s both for sexuality, for contact, for all kinds of associations.

So yeah, in a lot of ways our emotions and our bodily interactions structure how we think and feel about social interactions.

Well, even with the Black Death in Europe, I mean, so the Black Death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world, and they brought back rats that were infected.

Exactly! So what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time. So the European expansion produced a tremendous interchange of ideas from all around the world, that’s globalization. But it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time.

So wouldn't it be good if in every society or every organization we had some people who specialized in saying, “hey, what are the opportunities?” and then we had other people who specialized in saying, “well, but what are the risks?” And it just so happens that a lot of people have trouble doing all that in themselves. When we have systems that are well constituted with people who have different personalities and different motives and goals, we actually can get better outcomes. We can have a discussion between them.

Yeah, well, that’s exactly why it’s for that precise reason that I’ve been so interested in free speech as a value. Because, well, even on the economic front, it’s pretty obvious if you look at things economically that the entrepreneur types who start businesses are lumped in with the liberal creative types. We’ve done a lot of work on the prediction of entrepreneurial behavior and ability, and it’s openness that’s the big predictor. It’s not the only one; it’s openness and IQ fundamentally.

But for managerial and administrative expertise, it’s IQ and conscientiousness. So the liberals start businesses, and they can’t run them because their interests flipped, and they don’t have the organizational ability. And the conservatives can run them, but they can’t continue to transform and expand them. It’s yin and yang, yin and yang.

Yeah, so, one more thing about what happened in Nazi Germany that’s very relevant and interesting because it’s useful to get these motives right. You know, first of all, if something disgusts you, if something—if you're afraid of something, then you run away from it or you freeze. But if something disgusts you, you try to burn it or kill it, right? You try to get rid of it or expel it.

That’s right, though. You want to get it away and destroy it. So when Hitler first came to power, he put in a bunch of public health schemes. Like he had vans that went around and screened people for tuberculosis. Then he went on a factory cleanliness campaign. So the factories were supposed to be tidied up. And he bathed about four times a day, by the way. He was also a great worshipper of willpower, which is associated with orderliness and seems maybe to be associated with disgust sensitivity in some way that isn't yet understood.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t—I don’t understand that connection either. So they, he convinced factory owners in Germany to get rid of the rats and the mice and the insects in the factories and also to clean them up and beautify them. But the gas they used to clean up the factories was Zyklon-A, and it was the variation of that gas, Zyklon-B, that was then used in... yeah, so you could see this ramping up, eh? So it was, yeah, absolutely. So it was public health, then it was social cleanliness, then he went into the asylums and cleaned them up.

And so it was just this expansion of who was contaminated and who was impure, and I think also his fascination with fire and his use of fire symbolism was also associated with that, with that appeal to purification because the whole idea of purification by fire is a very ancient idea.

So, okay, so how did your work on disgust change the way that you looked at things fundamentally? I mean, you gave some indication of that already, but what else has it changed?

So, since I was coming out of a psychological literature that was very focused on sort of secular ethics about justice and fairness, and then I began studying disgust and looking at the broader moral domain that almost all societies have, that then also led me to think about, well, okay, if disgust is a reaction to things that seem to be degrading, so an interesting element of disgust is this notion of degradation.

There are always these vertical metaphors in which disgust brings us down. And disgust, it's so a lot of some religious practice and Judaism and Islam and Hinduism is about preparing your body to approach God and purification. And so that led me to think, well, if there’s an emotion which is about seeing our lower, base or animal biological nature, is there an opposite emotion? Is there an emotion that we feel when we see some manifestation of our higher, nobler nature? And I was just beginning to think this when I moved to UVA. I got my first job at the University of Virginia in 1995, and I read the set of Thomas Jefferson's letters, and in one letter he describes... he describes the feelings you get from reading great fiction. He advises a cousin of his that he should buy fiction for his library, not just, you know, serious works of law and philosophy.

And he describes, he says, doesn't he describe the feeling of having your sentiments be elevated? Does it not dilate your breast, give you an open feeling in your chest when you see these acts of beauty and kindness and gratitude? I thought, wow, that's exactly it. And so because I've been studying disgust, I then started studying its opposite, which I and some others call moral elevations. So, there’s kind of vertical metaphor of elevation and degradation—maps onto the body too with regards to high, low, clean, dirty. Yeah, it’s a beautiful pairing.

And so having this language of elevation and disgust just really has helped me see a lot of things. I just, I could just see a lot of things happening. It allows me to, like even, you know, manipulate. Like if I’m applying for a grant proposal, like I get very good at like having an elevating ending, you know, to end with a notable uplift. And so it just broadened. It just broadened my thinking about morality, and this was around 1995. And so again, it just prepared me so that— and I’d already been to India by that point. I spent three months doing research in Orissa in eastern India, so it just broadened my thinking, and that’s what allowed me finally to understand conservatives because I had always been on the left. I hated Ronald Reagan. I thought Republicans were stupid and evil.

And it was only when I’d gone to India and really tried to understand a traditional, religious, hierarchical, gender-stratified society, tried to understand it in their terms. I didn’t try to just bring in my own, my own Western left— you know, left-leaning perspectives. That I was— and this was all under the guidance of Richard Shweder, my postdoc supervisor at the University of Chicago, where I did a postdoc. It was only then that I was able to sort of get inside their minds and their moral system and see that there were alternative moral worlds; they each had their own logic.

And that was the metaphor I came to. You know, the time, you know, "The Matrix" movies were very popular. So the metaphor, "The Matrix," as a consensual hallucination, made a lot of sense. It’s waking up with the idea of just speaking with moral matrices, which every different moral matrices that are grounded in biology. They’re biology in the sense that gives us the potential. It’s like the building blocks of this matrix can’t be just anything that comes; it comes from our experiences, our embodied experiences. And again, George Lakoff is the master of that thinking.

So it was only then that I was able to now listen to conservative talk radio and Christian religious radio and see rather than just saying, “Oh, those stupid terrible people,” say like, “Oh, wow, yeah. You know, I can see that they’re striving for a certain virtue.”

Right, right.

So you started to understand their metaphorical language, essentially.

That’s right, and that was like kind of like my, you know, great awakening or scales falling from my eyes. But, you know, since— well, it took a few more, it took a number of a lot more years, but eventually I kind of just pulled out the implants from my eyes, and I stopped seeing everything so through a partisan lens. And I’m not on any side now, and just trying to understand what the hell is.

Well, it’s really useful to understand that there are actual reasons why people see the world differently and that you can’t just easily say that one is right and the other is wrong because the liberals are correct when it comes to borders that if you thicken them too much and diminish the information flow, you risk making the society so static that any radical environmental transformation will sink it; it’s the case.

But the conservatives are right in that you pay a big price with regards to newcomers and new information with regards to risk, to exposure to contaminating... well, to contamination, period, but also to contaminating ideas. And so then I’ve always thought, you know, the environment itself moves back and forth like a snake in some sense, and what we’re trying to do is stay on the center of its back.

And the only way we can do that is by having people pull to the right and say, “be careful,” and people pull to the left and say, “well, yeah, but be open.” With that dialogue and the exchange of information that that dialogue allows, we can maybe specify the center of that moving target and stay... well, and stay on the back.

Yeah, okay, so that’s a really complicated metaphor with the snake. But I think it’s a perfect way in to what’s going on on campus and to why viewpoint diversity is so important because that’s— I agree exactly with what you just said.

And so what I, the view that I’ve come to in studying moral psychology, is that humans are ultra-social apes. We evolved to live in these small groups that are fighting with each other. We evolved to have these low-level animistic religions. That’s our steady state. That’s the way we were for at least 100,000 years or much more, probably closer to a million, in some form.

So that’s sort of our design. That’s what we were designed for in a sense. And in that sense, whereas individuals, we’re really kind of stupid tribal creatures designed to do post hoc reasoning. But if you put us together in the right way with the right checks, with the right systems, the whole can be vastly smarter than the components that go into it, which is true of the brain. The brain is composed of neurons; each neuron is really kind of a stupid little switch. But you put them together in the right way, and you get something really brilliant.

And in the same way, I don’t know all the history here, but my understanding is that science begins, or the culture of science, the scientific revolution begins in Europe in the 17th century as you begin getting—you get the printing press so people can share their ideas—but you get communities of people who are challenging each other’s ideas, and that’s what makes it so brilliant. Is that people have to do their best.

We’re really bad at disconfirming our own ideas. It’s very hard to make, it’s very hard to do that, but you put your ideas out there, and then everyone else is motivated to challenge them.

And so if you put us together in the right way, the truth comes out. And so adversarial systems of law, journalists know this; they have to listen to both sides. Scientists know this; social scientists should know this.

Okay, what happened? Well, the Academy has always leaned left in the 20th century, but leaning isn't the problem. So people think, oh, viewpoint diversity. We need everybody; we need Nazis; we need every view. No, we don’t need everybody. What we need is no orthodoxy. That's what's fatal—orthodoxy! So if you have a field like sociology or social psychology in which it's two or three to one left to right, that's totally fine with me. That's totally fine.

Because if someone makes some claim that's just like ideologically blind, someone will say, you know, common sense, other evidence that you've missed, and then the system works.

But what I learned when I started down this road in 2011, I gave a talk at a big conference of social psychologists. I gave a talk about this problem that we're losing our diversity, that I could only find one conservative in the entire field. I gave a talk on this.

And so what I’ve learned since then is that the ratio in psychology was between two to one and four to one left-right all the way up to the early 90s. We’ve gathered together all the studies we could find. So all the way up to the early 90s, it’s only three or four to one left or right, which would be okay.

But then between 1995 or ’94 and 2010, it goes to 14 to one. Do you have any idea why and why that time?

Yes, so you get the same story whether you look at Republican-Democrat ratios or liberal-conservative. They tell the same story. So the two big things going on there are one is that the Greatest Generation, which had a lot of Republicans, so a lot of men went off to World War II. They’re on the GI Bill; they enter the Academy in the 1950s. A lot of them are conservative or republican.

So you have a lot of them, but in the 60s and 70s, one of the main reasons to go to grad school in the social sciences is either a) to stay in school to escape the Vietnam War draft or b) to fight for social justice and against racism. So in sociology and psychology in particular, in political science—maybe I’m not sure—you get a huge influx of left-leaning people who are there to pursue social justice.

So, you know, the motives are fine, and if it was balanced, it’d be totally fine. But as you get these young junior people on the left come in in the 70s and 80s, and then you get the older people that are more politically balanced retiring in the 80s and 90s, by the time you get to the late 90s, it’s all Baby Boomers.

And so do you get a—do you get a positive feedback loop developing in there? Like you said, it’s like three to one; it’s okay. But maybe when it hits four to one, it goes to like twenty to one?

Then you said exactly! So you start getting a hostile climate. So I wrote a review paper on this with Joe Duarte and Phil Tetlock and Lee Jussim, Jarret Crawford. We so—we reviewed everything that we could find. We concluded that most of what’s going on is self-selection. That is people on the left, and we’re open to experience; they’re always gonna get self-selection.

But then there’s really good evidence that there’s also a hostile climate. I mean, it’s undeniable now that if you are not on the left in a grad program, there’s just constant little subtle or not so subtle reminders that you don’t belong. And look, in the Academy, we’re all about saying, hey, if there are subtle hints here and there, you can’t succeed, right?

I mean, that’s what we do for a living; we say that little things will stop people. Well, little things are put in the way of anyone who doesn’t fit politically. And so you do get hostile climate; you do get overt discrimination. There’s evidence of that.

And then there is also, it is part of the story here that what it means to be a conservative in the 90s and especially 2000s has changed. So it is true that, you know, that conservatives were not in any way anti-science until much more recent times. Now, actually, all sides are anti-science about different sciences, but in America the right wing, the Republican Party, had— it’s controversial—but I do believe that the polarization starts with the right moving further out.

So what it means to be concerned to be anti-evolutionary, which is actually what’s happening on the left now—exactly, that’s, yeah, so, well—postmodern left—I talked to Bret Weinstein the other day, and you know, one of his claims is that evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone. So it’s a science that’s very likely to be targeted by extremists.

You also brought up something that actually touches on the difficult problem of how it is that you might define someone who’s ideologically possessed, let’s say, or ideologically rigid. Because the idea was that you can make a valid case for the utility of free information flow and the free flow of people that would go along with that, and you can make a good case for the danger of that.

And so the idea might be that if you’re only making a case for the danger of that, then you’re tilted too far to the right. And if you’re only making a case for the utility of that, then you’re tilted too far to the left.

Exactly, that’s right. And so we can look at immigration as a nice example. There was a recent essay in The Atlantic, I think it was by Peter Beinart, where he reviews, it starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about immigration from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, and a bunch of other people on the left who used to be able to say on the one hand, you know, compassion, economic, on the other hand, you know, we have to have a legal process, and there’s a threat to low-wage workers.

So people on the left used to be able to talk about immigration and talk about the pros and cons, the pluses and minuses. But Beinart shows how in the last four or five years you can’t—if you so much as suggest that, well, maybe immigration is a net good, but it might have some deleterious effects on certain classes of low-wage American workers, you could get in big trouble, right?

Because that’s instantly prejudicial. You know, because immigration has become a sacred topic. So this is the key thing that I want everyone to keep in mind: We are fundamentally religious creatures—we’re built for religion—and it’s a great achievement to create a scientific establishment and an academic establishment that keeps that way of thinking out. Scientific thinking is not natural thinking; religious thinking is natural thinking.

And what’s happening to us in the last few years especially is a flooding in of religious thinking. And so let’s get a bunch of social scientists to talk about immigration. What are they going to do? Look at the data, weigh up the pluses and minuses? No, they’re going to—many of them feel they’re on a team and that team is fighting the right; the right is anti-immigrant, it includes racist elements, therefore that justifies us in being pro-immigration.

And social sciences are always—there’s always ambiguity. There are always conflicting studies. Yes, there are multiple causal factors, and there are always in a social science study.

That’s right. So Beinart’s point was that the left used to be able to think straight about immigration. Clearly, it had a, you know, it’s generally pro-immigration, but it used to be able to think straight. But in the last few years, a religious orthodox mindset has overtaken it.

Okay, so we might as well also point out that it’s a primordial religious mindset, right? Because, I mean there are—I don’t mean Christian or Jewish; I mean ancient, tribal, small-scale, lots of gods.

Right, right, well so then one of the things that you might suggest is that when you throw out a sophisticated religious structure, an unsophisticated religious structure comes in to fill the gap. I do—so that’s true.

Okay, definitely worth thinking about. So, that’s right. So the thing with religions, we have to clarify, fundamentalism is the problem, not religion. And so, it’s close to tribalism.

That’s right. If you get a fundamentalist—you know, I’m happy to say, and if you have people applying to a grad program in psychology and I find out that they’re Christian, that’s fine. There’s no problem. But if they’re fundamentalist Christian, I would think, well, let’s say it’s not psychology; suppose it’s, you know, geology.

So someone applies to a geology program; they are a fundamentalist young earth creationist. Are you going to admit them? No, I don’t think you should. They’re not able to do the right kind of thinking based on what we know to be the case. They’re not in the scientific paradigm.

Not the scientific, that’s right. So if we wouldn’t admit a fundamentalist Christian to a geology program, why would we admit someone who is just as fundamentalist about certain moral and political issues into a sociology program or into a psychology program if they come in knowing what the right answer is, committed to that right answer, likely to get angry at anyone who contravenes that right answer, and showing signs of closed-mindedness? I don’t think they belong in a grad program.

Yeah, I guess the question is how in the world do you set up mechanisms to ensure that you’re not swamped by fundamentalists of any sort? So those are people who are reducing everything to a single cause or something like that.

How can you implement a structure that protects the organization against that without the structure itself becoming totalitarian? You know, because these things spin out of control so fast.

Yeah, but you know, I think what we have to realize in the Academy is that we face, I think we face an existential crisis. We rely an enormous amount on public goodwill. We get enormous tax subsidies, direct research support, and recent polling shows that while Democrats have always had a higher opinion of universities than Republicans, until two years ago everybody thought universities were a good thing. They make life better.

So Americans have been very supportive of higher education. There have been rising gripes on the right, but it’s only between 2015 and 2017 that now Republicans go from saying mostly universities are good things to saying universities are bad things. They’re making things worse now. How is this news greeted? Pundits on the left are just like, oh, those Republicans are so anti-science. Look how ignorant they are; they now hate universities.

Come on! Anyone who’s been watching the news, anybody who’s seen the mobs, the shout-downs, the illiberal behavior. You know the metaphor I use is like, you know, Americans on the right and left are really supportive of the military. It’s one of the few institutions that we still hold in high esteem on both sides.

And so the Republicans more than Democrats, so suppose you had Gallup poll and I showing Republicans like the military more than Democrats, but both really liked it. Then suddenly in 2015, we started seeing video from all over military bases and military academies in which the military leaders are overtly right-wing. They’re there; they’re saying terrible things about leftists and progressives and the midshipmen and the cadets and everybody is mobbing the occasional liberal, and they’re behaving in a really despicable, scary, and intimidating way.

What do you think the left would now think about the military? Obviously, support for the military would plummet. That’s what’s happening in America with universities. We are losing the support of half the country. This is unsustainable, especially in red states where, you know, they control the purse strings.

So I think we have a major crisis. I think we’ve got to go into crisis mode, and we’ve got to clean up our act. So just as we’re doing in psychology with the replication project, we recognize that our methods weren’t good enough, and we’re doing a crash course thanks to Brian Nosek and others, the Open Science Project. We’re really trying to improve our game.

Thank God, we need to—I think we have to do the exact same thing about partisanship and our [???]. Okay, so let’s talk about Heterodox Academy because you set that up this organization that you should tell everybody about in precisely to deal with this issue. And so I’d like to know about it, how it’s growing, what it’s doing, what your aims are, all of that.

So I gave this talk in 2011 laying out the fact that we have no more conservatives in social psychology, and why this makes it hard for us to find truth. And in the months after that, a few social psychologists resonated with the message. They said, wow, I think that—I think you’re right. I have some data on this.

So the five of us, or six of us, wrote this paper. It came out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Oh, Charlotta Stern, I’m sorry, was the sixth one that I forgot to add in before. We got this paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It came out— it was sort of online in 2014, but it came out for good in the summer 2015, which coincidentally was the same summer that my article came out with Greg Lukianoff called "The Coddling of the American Mind" that was about things going on with undergrads.

But our concern was entirely faculty; it was just the nature of the academic community, the research community. So we got these two things going on in the summer of 2015. And then that summer I hear from Nick Rosenkrantz, a law professor, who says, “We have the same problem in law. It’s worse in law.”

Well, it’s really bad in Canada, in law. Okay, because, and as he points out, we’re training all these students. They never meet a conservative, then they have to go argue cases in front of judges, half of whom were appointed by Republicans. They have no idea what a conservative thinks. This is malpractice.

We’ve got to train. So say—and I hear from a sociologist Chris Martin, same thing in sociology. So the three of us said, hey, you know, this is a big problem for the whole academy.

Have you looked at faculties of education? Oh my God, those are the worst! By worst, I don’t know the numbers, but in terms of the vindictiveness, the incredible pressure put on any nonconforming opinion, my impression, I don’t have data, but my impression from the letters I get is that education schools and social work schools are the worst.

That’s exactly in keeping with my understanding as well. It’s hard to tell which of those two are worst. I would say it’s the faculties of education because they have a direct pipeline to kids.
Oh, in terms of their effects? Yes, far more pernicious.

Yes, yeah, but equally warped, let’s say, but more pernicious. And the things that are happening in the Canadian education system as a consequence of that are so reprehensible.

We should get to that because it’s happening here too with these ideas filtering down to high school. I’ve been so focused on college, now we’re discovering the problem is actually baked in. The illiberal attitudes are often baked in. Yes, and purposefully, like in Canada increasingly, the radical leftists have control over curriculum development and they’re starting to develop social justice curriculums, which is what they call them for kindergarten kids.

So it’s really—it’s been another get back through the earlier grades. So originally three of us decided to put up a website. I invited all the other authors from the BBS paper. We invited a few other people working on this, and for the first year we had this project; it was called heterodoxacademy.org.

We put the site up on about September 10th, I think it was 2015, and it was just a community of researchers who are studying the problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity. Well, five days later, the protests start at Missouri, so these are racially motivated protests about racial insensitivity and racial problems at Missouri.

And at first, it seemed like this is just a Missouri problem, but coming in the wake, of course, of Ferguson and all the videos we saw of unarmed black men being killed by police. A lot of his concerns spread to other universities; the protests aren’t just about race. But it was that fall of 2015, especially the Yale protest, when the president of Yale validated their narrative that Yale's a racist place; we have to reform Yale.

Then it spreads nationally, and now suddenly this is not just a faculty issue anymore. So even though at Heterodox Academy we mostly focus on the faculty, we’re now seeing it’s a complex ecosystem with all kinds of forces acting on universities.

So that between 2015 and 2017, the danger of speaking honestly about what you think about an academic or intellectual proposition has skyrocketed—the risk of being mobbed, ostracized—formally investigated, by Title IX people for example.

Here we’re sitting here at NYU; go to any bathroom. I’ll show you on this floor; go to any bathroom. There’s a sign telling students exactly what number to call to report you or me if we say something that is—that someone takes to be a biased act.

Oh, so you have bias investigation teams here?

That’s right. See, we haven’t got to that point, that particular point in Canada yet, so I think we’re farther ahead down that path in some ways, but not quite as far in others.

Yeah, that’s really unbelievable. So things are changing very, very fast. It’s not at all schools, but then again things are changing so fast we don’t really know. We don't have good data on what's going on. What I can tell you, though, is that at Heterodox Academy, when we started out in 2015, there was a lot of suspicion; a lot of people on the left were afraid, like, “Oh, is this some right-wing group?” Now, very few of us are actually on the right, but because we end up mostly speaking up for libertarians and conservatives who are attacked or silenced, you know, people will think, “Oh, we must be right-wing,” but we’re not.

I mean, I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. I’ve never given money to a Republican campaign. I’m now increasingly calling myself a liberal now that we see a illiberalism flourishing. But so when we started out, there was a lot of suspicion of us from many professors, but now that it’s clear that the problems—these are not just a few anecdotes; this is the new normal.

And it’s not just in the universities, as you pointed out. That’s right. It’s already... it’s like mad. And it’s not just in the U.S.; it’s spread. When in 2015, I thought it was a uniquely American problem.

Yeah, boy, it’s in Canada and the UK, and it is really what? New Zealand? That's right. It is a uniquely Anglosphere problem. This is really interesting. It’s not on the continent very much at all. What about in the Nordic countries?

No, I mean they have so political correctness. You have lots of places, the unique thing that identifies this new culture is linking the political correctness with the sense of fragility. And this is something America’s pioneered—the idea that, so in Britain, they’ve always had no-platforming, they call it. So if there’s a British National Party, an actual fascist party, you know, so if a BNP member is gonna speak on campus, you mob him and shut it down; no platform!

So, you know, you’ve had passionate politics certainly since the 60s; so that’s not new, and that’s everywhere. What’s new is the American idea that if someone says something and it could be a sincerely expressed idea—not a racist rant, just like, “Well, I don’t know; I think that maybe hormones do affect gendered behavior”—can you say that?

Well, what if someone takes that as somehow essentializing gender and then saying that women are inferior or whatever if they... Yes, well, that happened to James Damore, for exact—exactly, exactly.

So, that’s what’s new—is the idea that if someone says something that someone, a member of a protected or marginalized group is offended by, that person is harmed. If that person is harmed, we must protect that person, and more ominously, just in the last year or two, it’s not just that they’re harming their suffering; it’s that this was violent.

Yes, right. That’s part of the postmodern narratives that attribute everything to power.

This is so dangerous, the crossing the line into violence. It just occurred to me, just like yesterday, I was thinking about this—wait! The state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, right?

But if speech, especially his speech and her speech and the people, the speech of those people in that academic movement, or on the – and if their speech is violence, well the state is supposed to have a monopoly on their speech then...

And if it’s violence, well then we have a right to use violence back!

The state doesn’t have a monopoly on our violence because our violence is, you know, it’s morally motivated! So just the Orwellian and authoritarian implications of this move—once you say that speech is violence, you’re unlocking, you know, you’re opening Pandora’s box.

I mean, you’re five steps down the road to hell, and I’d say we’re about seven steps down the road.

Okay, so you’re—or you’re that concerned about it.

Okay, so now tell me, how many members—if you don’t have to discuss any of this obviously—but how many members of Heterodox Academy are there now?

We have 1,300 members. So once we opened up, it’s originally—it was just four researchers who were studying this problem, but we had lots of people wanting to join. And so we said, well, okay, why not? And so we just said, alright, as long as you’re a professor—that is, you have a PhD; you’re living more or less the life of a professor; you have a university affiliation. So we now take adjuncts if they have a PhD; we take postdocs. Basically, if you’re in the guild, if you’re living the life of a professor, and you’re concerned about the rise of intimidation, frankly, if you’re concerned that our wonderful institution—I love being a professor—I love, and I feel like it’s not just losing public respect; it’s losing its ability to function. It’s losing its ability to teach and do research on politicized topics.

There are more politicized topics all the time. That’s right, and there are a few in the natural sciences—not many—but there are some in the natural sciences as well. Anyway, my point is we’re now growing very rapidly, and something I’m very excited by is since we started having more violence on campus with beginning with Berkeley and Middlebury, we’re seeing a pervasive sense among people on the left that there really is this problem here—that something has to be done.

And so we are finding much more acceptance now from professors on the left. So I like to think about there’s the liberal left and there’s the illiberal left. We did a factor analysis of politically correct beliefs and found exactly that and that the illiberal left was also high in orderliness.

That’s interesting! That’s the authoritarian!

Exactly! And also kind of markedly decline—was also characterized by a marked lack of verbal intelligence.

That’s yeah. The correlation was about 0.4!

Well that’s beautiful! That’s beautiful because one of the simplest formulations I’ve heard were the great formulation from Mark Lilla. So Mark Lilla wrote this fantastic op-ed in the New York Times a week after Trump was elected, saying identity politics is a really foolish thing to do. It pushes lots of people over to Trump’s side. The identity politics is part of the problem.

Well, he writes this op-ed, and one of his fellow professors at Columbia—I forget how she does it, but she basically says something about that, you know, the mask with eye holes falls from his face like, you know, he’s a Ku Klux Klan member, something like that.

And so Lilla, Lilla who is in the humanities, he’s an intellectual historian, Lilla has this simple formulation. He says, "That’s a slur, not an argument."

And once I had that simple formulation, I realized, wow, that’s almost all the pushback I’ve ever gotten. It’s somehow, you know, "Oh, you know, you’re winking at Nazis," or you are—

Yeah, that’s happened to me over and over. I was just... my neighborhood was just posters with...

I saw that get the intimidation. So, this is really key. We’re supposed to be all about you can say anything you want. You can make any argument you want if you can support it, if you can back it with reasons. This is critical thinking; this is what we’re supposed to train our students to do.

Well, and it’s not only that you can say anything, but you can say it—there’s a boundary on that, especially if you’re a scientist; less so in the humanities. But if you’re a scientist, the things you say have to be vetted by people who are going to be critical of them, right?

So not only is it a new facility that works as accountability that’s built into it, that’s right. So I didn’t mean to say you can say, you know, a racist rant. I mean you can put forth any idea you want if you can back it up.

What we’re seeing with anything politicized is it’s not about backing it up. Students are learning rhetorical techniques to link their enemies to something racist as...

Well, something contemptible, something contaminated.

Something disgusting! You bet! And that’s and those are the things that are not only worthy of being destroyed but that you have a moral duty to destroy.

That’s...

Oh, that’s right. So, it’s almost like the immune system.

Yeah, I don’t know exactly how it works, but there’s some cell that tags a cell as, you know, enemy, enemy; and once that tag is put on the cell, that attracts other— I don’t know what kind of cell to it.

Yeah, mob it! So we should look into this metaphor of the immune system because once they—once you’re labeled as a racist, students don’t have to read you; it doesn’t matter what you actually say; you will now be attacked.

Well, it’s also too that once you’re labeled that way, if someone defends you, the label is contagious, right?

In exactly the same manner...

That’s how we know we’re in this super-religious territory of witch hunts, that if you stand up for someone, you are tagged, and then you will be mobbed. Right?

And that’s an infectious disease!

Exactly! That’s why there’s so much cowardice on campus among both students and faculty. People are afraid to stand up, even if the majority think that what’s going on is nuts or is unfair. They’re afraid to stand up, and that’s in part due to social media because it’s just... I mean, students today have been raised with various platforms that make it easy for people to join in attacking someone.

They look at who liked what. So if in that article we just saw on Reed, there was a bit of a counter-revolution at Reed, the students had to get together somehow and decide, should I like that post? How about we all like it at the same time? Then we’ll get in less trouble, okay? Like, “Okay.”

So to what degree—so let’s talk about the aims of the Heterodox Academy. So you’ve brought people together who are, in principle, interested in a diversity of opinions, but in what manner is that going to be utilized to—I don’t want to use the word combat—but to deal with this emergent problem of ideological rigidity in the universities?

Yeah, so two useful concepts here: one is The Emperor’s New Clothes. We all know that story. Even if most people—even if everybody sees this as nuts, the Emperor’s walking around with no clothes; they’re afraid to say it until one person says it.

So—and this is also the Asch experiment. Everybody says that that line is the same as that line. It’s obviously not true. If one person says the truth, then nobody conforms after that.

So the mere presence of a group of people who say, you know, we actually need a diversity of opinions and the fact that on our site we’ll publish things. So sometimes when professors are mobbed, like when Bret Weinstein was mobbed, I wrote an essay that stood up for him. We’ve done it for some of them.

It’s happening so fast; I can’t keep up. I can’t—I’ve got books to write. Like, you know, every week there’s some new member getting mobbed. And so we’re gonna develop a team of people who will write.

But just knowing that there are people who will stand up for you, knowing that there are people who will say, wait a second, you know, this is not what we do in the Academy.

So that’s one thing: we just stand up for each other. Two is we develop products that we think can basically fix the situation.

So one of our products is called the campus expression survey. It’s a survey designed to actually measure who was afraid of speaking up about what topics and why. What are they afraid of? And it turns out everyone’s afraid of the students more than the faculty. They’re afraid to mostly to talk about race—

What about the administrators?

Everyone’s afraid of the students.

Oh, really?

That’s also appalling in its own manner, but that’s what I mean. That’s what I’m most alarmed by, is the rise of intimidation. Intimidation is now a—in many aspects of academic life, and that’s just terrible; that’s completely incompatible with what we do and who we are.

What’s especially it’s especially appalling, given that, whatever happens in the university campuses, you know, like one of the questions I’ve faced in Canada is, well, why should we care about what’s happening in the ivory tower?

If you’re gonna hire these people next year, you are!

Well, yeah—well, they’re—it’s the heart. Like what’s happening in the campuses is going to happen in society in five years.

That goes, it’s already happened. This is actually an important point. I just gave a talk at a big law firm here in New York where they’re very devoted to diversity, but they’re doing it right.

They’re really thinking about diverse, like why is diversity good? And spent a whole month on viewpoint diversity, which is just fantastic.

And what I’m learning from talking to a number of people in the business world is that in the last year, there are now all these pressures on leaders to endorse this, condemn that, sign this open letter.

That’s right, that’s right. But it’s the same dynamic we have on campus, and the answer to it—so if anybody watching here if you run a business—if you have friends who are in business, I think the only... there are only two stable equilibria. One is that every organization is just either all right wing, we’re all left-wing, but that would be disastrous!

So either you just say, okay, we’re on one side, but that would be terrible. The other is what we call the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. The University of Chicago has the best statement out there on how the university provides a platform on which multiple views can contest. The university does not take any one side.

That's the only other stable alternative. And I think leaders need to do this in business, certainly in universities. So we’re encouraging every university to adopt the Chicago principles because a lot of what mass action is, is an attempt to compel the authority to come in on your side and punish your enemies.

Yeah, and so that has to stop. So how effectively is the Chicago Statement on...

How effectively is the Chicago Statement being disseminated? How rapidly are universities signing up, or...

There are a few who signed on early in this whole crisis: Purdue. There are about 10 or 15 that have endorsed it or something like it. It’s not enough to just endorse something, but if you have leadership that’s committed to creating an open platform in which people can disagree.

And one thing that’s very encouraging: I’ve been invited by a number of university presidents to come speak. We have all kinds of innovations at Heterodox Academy to foster a more inclusive climate in which people can actually engage with difference. There’s a lot of interest.

So I think the university leaders were very slow to react. They didn’t want to alienate certain factions of students, but they’re almost all reasonable people. They’re almost all liberal left—not illiberal—they’re horrified by what’s going on.

They know they’re sitting atop a powder keg; they don’t want things to blow up in their face as happened at Evergreen.

So this brings us to our... another product, the one that we’re most excited by. So it just went online, actually today. It’s called the OpenMind Platform. If you go to openmindplatform.org, you can find—we’ve developed an app; we have a whole library of readings and videos. We developed an app that guides you through.

We don’t just say here’s how to engage with different viewpoints. We start by saying why is it good? And we make the case that you need this; everybody needs this.

And two, we remind people that we’re all basically self-righteous hypocrite, so we have quotes from wisdom traditions around the world. And we’ve all heard this, so just a little bit of, you know, you can call it emotional manipulation if you like, but just get people into a mindset in which they’re willing to say, “Oh, yeah, whoa.” You know, calm down. We’re all too self-righteous here.

And then we then we teach them some psychology about motivated reasoning, and only then do we teach them to engage with views that are not their own.

So we’ve already run this in about 15 or 20 classes. The results so far look promising in that, at the end of it, the measures show that students are more open to other ideas.

So the OpenMind Platform, we think, is a tool that we think a lot of universities are going to adopt. There’s a lot of interest in it.

And if there’s leadership, if the professors generally do support viewpoint diversity and open inquiry, if we change freshman orientation so that students are trained first and foremost in how to step back, give people that benefit of the doubt—the open-minded—if we do that first, you know, that’s like behavioral exposure to some degree, right?

The idea would be that if you’re afraid or disgusted by something that you don’t understand, the appropriate first treatment, first of all, the treatment is necessary because otherwise you’ll isolate yourself in the ways that you already described.

And second, that brief exposure—voluntary exposure—is going to be the best curative. That’s the opposite of the safe space idea.

Exactly! The safe space idea is the worst thing you could possibly do for the very people...

Yeah, exactly! Exactly! I mean, the psychology—what you know, the psychology behind safe spaces and microaggressions is just the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we want to create kids, especially black kids, gay kids, women, whatever.

If you think that they are vulnerable to more stigma, more conflict, if you think that they are vulnerable, that’s especially when a safe space will be temporarily pleasant but in the long run bad.

Right! And that’s the critical issue too, with regards to safe spaces, is that they’re sacrificing the medium and long term of the students’ well-being, let’s say, to the short term lack of fear and conflict.

They’re infantilizing them essentially.

So, yeah, okay. So, alright, so I was thinking about the discussion idea. I’ve got a personality test online now that’s based on this Big Five aspect scale, but it might be interesting as something for us to think about to find people who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness or orderliness and offer them the opportunity to engage in dialogue with people who have the opposite personality traits.

You know, because, well, first of all, because they’re gonna run into people like that always, right? And maybe even establish a relationship with them inadvertently.

And so being able to tolerate that might give them the kind of insight that you said you developed when you realized that the conservative ethos was based on a reasonable but not complete set of beneficial axiomatic presuppositions.

So, alright, so this is pretty much taken over your life, this Heterodox Academy, as well as the writing. Now you’re writing a couple of new books I understand?

Yeah, so since—I was in the psychology department at the University of Virginia for 17 years, and when my book "The Righteous Mind" was coming out, I wanted to move to New York City for a year so I could, you know, do promotional work for it. And I just had my second child, who was just born.

I knew it would be hard to fly from Charlottesville, so I just happened to get a position—a temporary position here at Stern at the business school, and when I first arrived, I wasn’t that interested in business. But as soon as I got here, Occupy Wall Street happened, and suddenly it was like everyone’s talking about morality and politics and capitalism and business.

And then I started learning about the history of capitalism. And I knew nothing about it. It was fascinating, and I started seeing how free enterprise and free markets have helped raise living standards around the world.

Yes, radical decline in poverty.

In a staggeringly rapid fashion, that’s completely unprecedented, especially since the year 2000.

That’s right! So since—so you know, here I was, 48 years old, discovering I had nothing about it. It was like when I first learned about evolution, like wow, this explains like everything in the natural world. And learning about capitalism, business explained everything about the built world and the world that we actually live in.

And there were also all these business scandals. This was 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis, and I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology to help corporations have better ethics.

So I then... everything I do involves applying moral psychology to help complex systems work better. So I’ve been focused on political polarization and governance for years before then, and that led to "The Righteous Mind." And then I got here to Stern, they offered me a job during that first year, and I took it, and it’s been fantastic.

It’s been really exciting. It’s like a whole new—you know, almost like being back in grad school—a whole bunch of new things to learn.

It must be a kind of a shock and existential shock to be in a business school in some sense.

It’s not a shock; I mean it’s a different culture. It’s much more open in the sense that it’s so diverse, like the things people are doing. There’s not like a way that we do things. And it’s much more open to applied projects to actually—

Yeah! To applied projects.

Yeah, and so it’s a perfect time for me. Like I just, you know, "The Righteous Mind" thing that wraps up like the first half of my career; like everything I did is in that book. And now it’s time for something new, and that new thing was going to be looking at how morality or moral psychology both underlines or is the foundation for our ability to do capitalism—like contracts, reciprocity, all sorts of things—and how our left-right divide from "The Righteous Mind" makes it hard for us to figure out what’s true.

Like if you raise the minimum wage, does that help or hurt the working poor? Right? If you’re an economist on the left, obviously it helps them; they’re economists on the right, it obviously hurts them because fewer of them have jobs.

And you can gerrymander the measurement devices to produce the conclusions that you want, which is a big problem.

That’s right. So I’m supposed to be writing a book called "