HxA Event: "Trust Your Mind" with Jenara Nerenberg

Event Title:
"Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing"

How to Watch:
This online event is FREE but you'll need to register to get the Zoom link in your email (check your Junk folder if you don't see it):
https://heterodoxacademy.org/events/trust-your-mind-embracing-nuance-in-a-world-of-self-silencing/

Event Topic:
Why has trusting our own mind become so challenging in the world today? In her groundbreaking new book, Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing (HarperOne), Jenara Nerenberg unravels this complex issue and exposes that self-silencing is rooted in a detrimental culture that stifles individual thought and diversity.

Her book examines viewpoint diversity and encourages us not to shy away from the deepest forms of connection and insight that can come from uncomfortable conversations, independent thinking, and sometimes even loud, productive and healthy arguing. While "conflict" feels like a scary word to some, Nerenberg dives deep into her own life experiences as well as the social science research on the psychology of groupthink to understand why our world is in peril in the face of people feeling too terrified to speak their minds. This challenge is not just limited to politics—the power of critical thinking and exiting groupthink has far-reaching impact on how we communicate with spouses, classmates, colleagues, family members and beyond. By understanding how group identity forms and the dangers of self-silencing, we allow our politics and our reasoning abilities to evolve, which leads to healthier societies.

About the Speakers:
* Jenara Nerenberg lectures widely on rhetoric, psychology, and diversity of thought. She is the bestselling author of Divergent Mind, and her work explores self-censorship, free speech, and viewpoint diversity. She is an Aspen Ideas Brave New Idea speaker and a celebrated writer covering the intersection of psychology and society. Her work has been featured in the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center magazine, Fast Company magazine, CNN, NPR, BBC and elsewhere. Nerenberg speaks widely on social science topics, including at universities, libraries, companies and organizations around the world. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Harvard School of Public Health.

* Nerenberg will be joined in conversation by Smriti Mehta, a postdoctoral scholar at the Berkeley School of Education at UC Berkeley, executive director of the Berkeley Liberty Initiative, and the co-chair of Berkeley's HxA Campus Community. Her research interests include social-psychological factors in education, psychometrics, measurement, open science practices, and meta-science. She also co-hosts a science-related podcast, "Nullius in Verba".

About the Event Host:
The Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. It was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, and Chris Martin, an Emory University sociologist.
To learn more about their mission, go to https://heterodoxacademy.org/our-mission/