Interview, Fireside Chat, Other
Talks at GS –Jonathan Haidt: The Psychology of Partisanship & Ethical Leadership
- The historical balance of centripetal forces and American hegemony from the 1940s to 1980 has shifted, with political parties since the 1990s undergoing a purification that aligns all left-leaning and right-leaning individuals into opposing camps.
- This party purification is driving societal polarization, causing individuals to view opposing party members as fundamentally different people, a trend evidenced by a shift from concerns about inter-racial or inter-faith marriage in the 1960s to concerns about inter-party marriage today.
- Mutual hatred is predicted to increase with little national cohesion remaining, driven by high connectivity that has risen from an arbitrary unit of 10-20 to 500 over the last five to 10 years, convincing people that the opposing side is evil rather than merely wrong.
- Foreign actors such as Russia are gaining inroads into elections due to extreme connectivity, while overprotective environments and social media have created an "iGen" generation (emerging circa 2007-2009) that is fragile due to a lack of exposure to stress, failure, and teasing.
- Universities and private schools currently function as mechanisms that hyper-activate tribal minds, evidenced by a psychology faculty ratio shift from 3-4 to 1 (left to right) to 17 to 1, which encourages students to fear speaking on sensitive topics and has led to frequent "unsafe space" protests since 2013.
- While Steven Pinker's data suggests decreasing violence and increasing connection generally, specific new variables regarding human connection pose disruptive risks to this positive trend, causing the speaker to be extremely alarmed about the country's future.
- Solving current problems is theoretically possible but probable to fail without structural alignment; specifically, individual ethics classes do not improve behavior, whereas organizations that align compensation, promotion, and culture achieve higher trust, lower risk, and better financial performance.
- Solutions may involve focusing on unifying factors to reduce tribalism, using social psychology for "ethical systems design," and applying specific tools to fix Congress and universities to address polarization.
- Long-term historical perspective suggests that while current conditions appear alarming and trends were not visible three or four years ago, the country is likely to resolve these issues eventually, and views from 100 years in the future may show significant improvement.