Antifragile systems and cognitive therapies: from resentment to self-improvement

In “The coddling of the American mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain how the U.S. education system is condemning an entire generation to failure, and propose an alternative to prevent it. Your proposals should interest us because this, which accelerated significantly in the US since 2015 to date, is similar to what has been happening in Latin America for decades.

Centennials had to live with a disproportionate use of social networks during their formative period, facing comparison with a fictitious reality and the possibility of cyberbullying. Thus, anxiety, cases of childhood depression and the suicide rate increased, especially among girls. Greg and John explain that the reaction of the schools was the overprotection of the students, which arises from falling into three errors. The first is to believe that students are fragile and must be protected from harmful ideas. The second mistake lies in preaching emotional reasoning — “trust your feelings.” And the third is to see the world as a struggle between good and bad.

Pedagogy ends up being guided by a “cognitive distortion” that creates a culture of overprotection of students by distorting reality. “The road is prepared so that the child does not hit himself instead of preparing the child for the road.”

When they arrive at university, they encounter baby boomer teachers who have racial, gender and cultural differences, but few ideological differences (the same happens in Argentina). Although there was always some bias towards the left, traditionally the ratio was between two and three teachers from the left to each one on the right, but there was enough diversity and there was frank debate in an atmosphere of freedom of thought. This is indispensable because every teacher has a natural “confirmation bias”: when he investigates he tends to collect evidence that confirms his theories, and without realizing it he dismisses or does not see those that are contradictory. This bias is neutralized thanks to the debate with other teachers and students who have different visions, where the possibility of “disconfirmation” arises. The word “University” comes from “Universitas” which means the whole of all things. It is the place where students must weigh all thoughts and ideas, however egregious they seem to some, and analyze the arguments looking for the true ones and rejecting the false ones.

Currently, the proportion of teachers on the left became 5 to 1 tilting and the confirmation bias was definitely shifted to the left. In the case of the humanities, the imbalance became overwhelming: 10 to 1 and 17 to 1 in psychology. In economics it is somewhat less: 4 to 1. With this disproportion, critical thinking is lost and debate is replaced by the “culture of cancellation”. John and Greg detail how students organize themselves to prevent speakers with “disturbing” ideas from speaking at their university. Many times when the university authorities tried to maintain order, they ended up being silent and sometimes expelled.

In the end, those affected are young people who do not have the right tools when it comes to entering the adult world to earn a living and develop autonomously.

John and Greg propose to break the three mistakes to reverse this situation. Students aren't fragile. Fragility is the quality of a thing that tends to break easily. If we believe that a teenager's mind or body is fragile, we tend to treat it with extreme care to protect it, but psychologists know that overprotection ends up being more harmful than initial fragility. The reality is that minds and bodies, like the immune system, are anti-fragile. That is, they need to be exposed to problems, rudeness and viruses, to strengthen themselves.

There is a real case that confirms this: in 1990 it was detected that 0.4% of American children suffered from peanut allergies. Immediately many schools began to protect children by banning peanut-based products. Eighteen years later, children with allergies had multiplied more than 3 times, reaching 0.14%. In 2015, George Du Toit, Graham Roberts and others (Randomized trial of peanut consumption in infants at risk for peanut allergy. Du Toit et al, 2015), demonstrated that overprotection had indeed been the cause of this epidemic. In a controlled study of 640 babies considered to be at high risk, half were exposed to peanuts and half were protected. By 5 years of age, 17% of protected children had developed a peanut allergy, while among those who had been regularly exposed only 3% suffered from the condition. The immune system was shown to be an Anti-Fragile system. If we completely isolate a person in a disinfected bubble, he will end up having an impaired and weak immune system.

Greg and John are confident that cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT) are very useful in disarming the three errors. Recognizing the human mind as an “anti-fragile” system, it is subjected to training and confrontation of ideas. CBT teaches not to trust your emotions, but to understand them and disarm wrong thoughts. The world is not divided into good and bad groups, but each person individually contains the good and the bad that must be learned to distinguish. The battle is within oneself. That is why we must cultivate critical thinking, debate, effective learning with curiosity, openness of mind and intellectual humility. They also propose that young people should start working or perform paid services early as part of their education, in order to strengthen their self-esteem and enter the adult world more easily.

These ideas can be useful for those who wish to transform the Argentine education system, which for decades has been dominated by leftist ideas that describe young people as fragile people oppressed by the capitalist system and who can only survive under the protection of the State.

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