HxA Event: "Testing the Claims of Coddling of the American Mind"

Event Title:
“Testing The Claims of Coddling of the American Mind"

How to Watch:
This online event is FREE, and there's no need register - just click on the the Zoom link listed on the event page at the scheduled time to log in:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/events/testing-the-claims-of-coddling-of-the-american-mind/

Event Topic:
Join HxCanada for their next virtual symposia session featuring Anne Wilson discussing The Coddling of the American Mind.

Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt's book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) has become a touchstone in debates about young adult mental health, higher education, and campus political culture. However, despite the wide circulation of its core claims, many have not been empirically tested. A decade after the 2015 original essay in The Atlantic, we provide a systematic assessment of the proposed “Three Great Untruths”: fragility, emotional reasoning, and a dichotomous good-versus-evil worldview. We develop and validate a measure of these lay beliefs in Canadian and U.S. samples. We also test a range of antecedents (e.g., parenting styles, social media engagement) and outcomes (e.g., mental health, political intolerance, and support for trigger warnings and censorship) proposed by the authors.

Our findings reveal a mixed picture: some patterns are consistent with Lukianoff and Haidt’s claims, while other findings challenge or complicate their narrative. Taken together, this work aims to move the conversation from influential cultural diagnosis toward systematic empirical evaluation.

About the Speaker:
* Anne E Wilson is a professor of Social Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a member of HxA and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. Her research has focused on personal and social identity over time, motivated reasoning, political polarization, censorship and dissent.

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/