the atlantic coddling of the american mind

Harvard psychology professor and PTSD expert, Dr. Among those practices: training students to identify microaggressions (things people say or do, often unintentionally, that are interpreted as expressions of bigotry), turning classrooms and lecture halls into intellectual safe spaces (where students are protected from words and ideas they might find upsetting), and the issuing of trigger warnings: alerts about the potentially “triggering” content of written work, films, lectures, and other presentations. The pair argued that some campus practices-presumably intended to protect students from being harmed by words and ideas deemed offensive or distressing-seemed to be interfering with students' ability to get along with each other, and could even be having a deleterious effect on their mental health. 2 In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral therapists teach their clients to recognize and overcome. In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic.

A new study out of Harvard-the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience-may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.

The atlantic coddling of the american mind