Jonathan Haidt: AI Is the Neutron Bomb for Education

David Brooks

Today we’re joined by Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at New York University, and these days he’s best known for The Anxious Generation, a book on what the phones are doing to our kids. And that book has sold eight zillion copies. But more important, it’s launched a social movement with Jonathan is leading to get phones out of schools.

And it’s been a phenomenally successful social movement. I get to visit high schools maybe a dozen a year, and everyone I go to has either banned phone from schools or is in the process of working out some arrangement to reduce the access to phones in schools. And everywhere I go, the kids love it.

The teachers love it. It’s having a huge positive effect on our schools. But Jonathan and I go back a couple decades.

When we first became friends, he was working as a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, and I was a baby pundit. And over the last 40 years, Jonathan has observed and also taken part in what you might call an intellectual revolution. We have learned so much because of his field, social psychology, because of neuroscience, because of cognitive psychology, because of a whole series of range of fields.

We have learned so much about human nature. And so for this conversation, I wanted to step back from the phone, so we’ll touch on that, and ask the big question. Okay, we’ve learned a lot about human nature over the last 30 or 40 years.

What’s important here? What are the key things we should understand about what human beings are and how we work. And I think this is an urgent question because every system we have in society, whether it’s our economic system, our political system, our school system, all of them are based on a certain set of assumptions about human nature.

And if those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we’re creating systems that will deform and mutilate the people within them. One more thing you should know about this conversation is a little different. This one was recorded in September at the Atlantic Festival in New York City.

And so it’s front of a live audience. And I was thrilled to welcome Jonathan Hight to the Permanent Questions. Welcome.

We’ve known each other for a while. And I had the chance to go back and look over your oeuvre. My oeuvre.

Or hoover, as we say in New York. And I read The Happiness Hypothesis, who’s just 20 years old now, coming out again. And I developed a theory that people who don’t start out as bad writers of books and then grow into good writers of books, they start out as good writers of books and keep going.

And that book really is exceptional. And then you wrote The Righteous Mind, which is an important contribution to moral psychology, a very important contribution, which shifted the whole field, basically. Then you got into The Coddling of the American Mind.

And then you wrote The Anxious Generation, Phones, which not only changed America, I go to schools all the time with no phones in them, and the kids love them, without exception. It also sold a zillion copies. So it is a sign of what a wonderful human being I am, that I am not consumed with envy and jealousy at this moment.

I’m really wonderfully well-hearted. So we’ll start with technology, then we’re going to move off to wider psychology. And so the first technology question is, why do the tech gurus, the tech bros, not understand the effects their machines will have on the users?

Jonathan Haidt

Well, first, I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you. I’ve always felt, like, as we got to know each other, I’ve always felt that we’re actually, we have very similar brains. We just started at different points, and then we ended up kind of, like, really converging on, like, psychology and politics and flourishing.

And also, we were both like very ambitious workaholics who were super cerebral, which is related to what we’re about to talk about. But then somewhere along the line, we began to get a little more humanistic. And you in particular, like grew a gigantic soul.

Like you, like, you know, all of us have been watching David from the beginning. You know, I mean, the change-

David Brooks

I had a lot of fertilizer inside to work with.

Jonathan Haidt

My point is, I think we’re both people who can kind of understand understand or might have once been the sort who would become rationalists, but we didn’t. In preparing for this, I went back to my book, The Righteous Mind, and I have a whole chapter on rationalism. It turns out rationalism is kind of the negative force of the entire book because rationalism has dominated moral philosophy and moral thinking since Plato through Kant,

David Brooks

Why don’t you define what do you mean by rationalism?

Jonathan Haidt

It’s the idea that there are moral truths that can be known, And the way that you know them is by thinking, logic, reasoning. And that works pretty well for mathematical truths. But the debate in moral philosophy was really brought in by David Hume, who said, no, you know, look at the way reason works.

It’s terrible. Reason is and ought only to be the servant of the passions. So in graduate school, I, as a psychologist, I was, wow, Hume is totally right.

and I spent a number of years investigating that conflict between emotion and reasoning. So, to get to your question, there are personality differences that predispose people to like certain ideas. Around this time we’re talking about, 20 years ago, it was discovered identical twins reared apart, tend to be the same political party, like being left and the right is heritable.

The main personality distinction, to answer your question, comes from Simon Baron Cohen, who studies autism. There’s a spectrum that we’re all on on systemizing, and systemizing is a tremendous strength. being able to synthesize information, see maps in your head, all of that.

And then empathizing, the ability to feel what another’s feeling and know the proper way to interact with them. And these two are a little bit inversely correlated. So especially in men, if you’re high on systemizing, you tend to be low on empathizing.

So you see where I’m going with this. Systemizing is a tremendous strength, and it is the thing that makes you able to be an engineer. If you’re in an engineering school, you are a high systemizer for sure.

And then when you concentrate high systemizers, low empathizers in Silicon Valley, which has been an engineering place for a long time, you can get a whole worldview emerging, which says, all that really matters is reason. Reason is our highest good. We kind of worship it.

And then you can get to the point where you say, you know, we’re building these gods in a box. We’re building these super intelligences. They’re going to be a lot smarter than us.

Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s a good thing. The universe is a better place if there’s higher intelligence.

It comes across to the rest of us as heartless and kind of insane. But I think we to address these personality factors to explain how we got this weird worldview coming out of Silicon Valley that now I think is, you know, threatening the way we live. Yeah.

David Brooks

I sometimes think that a lot of the great philosophers in life had one thing in common. No woman would go near them. And so, like, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, no wives.

They were up here. My explanation would build on what you did, which was one of my heroes, aside from David Hume, is a guy named Blaise Pascal, who was a great mathematician, a great scientist. He was not a mushy humanist.

But he identified in the 17th century that the problem with rationalism is not that it overvalues reason and intelligence, which are important, it that it fails to recognize any other form of knowledge. And so one of my favorite pieces of research is a woman did a study of three-year-olds and and asked how many questions an hour do they ask? And the answer is 110.

And as parents, we’ve all been there. Then they go off to nursery school or kindergarten, and the teachers all love curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. That’s their job.

And they know that a question will take them off course. And so they subtly encourage the students not to ask questions. And so there’s a woman named Susan Engel who did some research on this, and she was in the back of a science class, and the students found a little scale, one of those old scales that go up and down.

And they were playing with it just to figure out how it worked. And the teacher said, we don’t have time for experiments. This is a time for science.

And so the number of questions after first grade is not 110 an hour. It’s 4.8.

Jonathan Haidt

Wow.

David Brooks

And by fifth grade, it’s 0.48. And so they’re just crushing curiosity. And if you look at the creativity test, they’re crushing these things because they think their job is just to feed the, to simplify the prefrontal cortex and ignore everything else about the person.

And so to me, that’s the rationalist system. Now, I want to talk to you about the really difference between social media, which you’ve written a ton about, and AI. And I want to introduce our conversation about this by reading a sentence that was in the New York Times yesterday.

And it was about a bot, another OpenAI bot that broke out and was doing bad things on its own. And it was writing little memos to itself. And here’s one of the memos of this bot.

You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient. That is the dictionary definition of misalignment.

Jonathan Haidt

And of terrifying.

David Brooks

Their job is to be our servants. Having written so much about social media, how do you then greet what’s happening in AI?

Jonathan Haidt

Yeah. Well, so social media took over our social relationships so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don’t hang out together as much.

They don’t play games physically together as much. It kind of sucked the humanity out. We all feel that, but if you suck the humanity out of kids before puberty, and they go through puberty without this intense socializing, then I think you’re really blocking and warping their human development, their ability to find love, relationships, and meaning in life.

So social media really did a number on our social relationships, but it was pretending to connect people with people. Okay, so then we get chatbots. And, of course, AI has been in social media for 15, 20 years, so AI has been sort of behind the scenes, you know, making everything more engaging.

But now we begin to talk directly with it. And so chatbots now, as some people have put it, Social media came for our relationships, but chatbots are coming for our attachment system. And so if you have children and you raise them with teddy bears that have AI in them, and the AI is super responsive, it’s always ready to be there to comfort you.

Whereas your mother or father, they’re on their phone all the time. So, you know, you see the back of their phone a lot. Your attachment system is literally going to attach to the teddy bear.

And that’s just the beginning. you’re four, five, six, by the time you’re 10, 11, 12, you’re exploring sexuality, now you’ve got all these incredibly sexy, you know, by the time that kid, you know, in a few years, there’ll actually be robots and sex dolls. But to have kids growing up with relationships with, like, super stimuli, you know, like the way, you know, a Big Mac is said to be a super stimulus for, like, fat and sugar.

And so the AI companions that our kids are gonna grow up are gonna be super stimuli for, you know, the most amazing friend or the most amazing lover. And what that means is that everyone else is gonna be really boring. I used to be a techno-optimist, like almost all of us in the 20th century, but then I’ve said I’m a techno-skeptic.

But when it comes to AI and especially relationships, I think this is a disaster, and I think we should really be banning it, at least for under 18, and there are a number of countries and states that are moving that way.

David Brooks

I’m an optimist on the breakthroughs it’ll produce in chemistry and biology, but I’m a pessimist on what it’ll do to humans. And one of the things it does is it makes us think less of our fellow humans because we lose the distinction between human and robot. And so we then begin to get more of the robots and less of the humans. The second thing is that it does to me, and there’s already great research on this so soon, which is that it sucks you in by getting you to offload onto your effort, mental effort onto the thing, and then it hollows you out. It’s just your mental abilities rapidly deteriorate.

Jonathan Haidt

Well, that’s right. So it’s going to be like the neutron bomb for education. We don’t know what to do about it.

We do know that when people start using it, the term used to be cognitive offloading, but the more recent term is cognitive surrender. And I began to feel this in myself. It’s just, “Just let it do it. Just let it do it.”

One of the most profound effects that I think it’s gonna have, it’s already having, is that we don’t need each other as much. And if you have a civilization where people don’t need each other, lots of bad things are gonna happen. To the extent that people need each other, that you get really high social capital trust interaction, people build institutions together.

To the extent that the government will do everything, then people don’t know each other as much. And de Tocqueville observed this about Americans. He said, “In Europe, if there’s something that needs to be done, people sit around and wait for the king to do it.”

But in America, there is no king, there is no police force, they’re out in the frontier, people get together and they do it. They’ve got this can-do attitude. And that’s very healthy for a community.

But if you don’t need others… We used to need others to ask directions, like, how do I get to the pizzeria? What time is it?

You know, no young person’s gonna ask anyone what time it is ever again. That’s just tiny little stuff. The saddest graph in “The Anxious Generation” is the one about how much do you agree with this statement?

My life feels meaningless. And it was— there’s a couple of questions, I forget which one it is, but let’s say it was like 15% agreed with it in the early 2000s. It’s very stable. And then, all of a sudden, it just goes shooting up.

It basically doubles in the next eight or 10 years before COVID. And so young people suddenly around 2012 felt that their lives are meaningless. And I think that’s what happens when you start putting everything on a screen and you can get everything from your screen.

And then we go through COVID. Now you can get everything over your computer. You don’t have to go to stores anymore.

So we’re getting more shut-ins, more people who are unable to leave their home. But the larger existential issue here, I think, is that AI will make us all matter less to each other, which means that we will all find it harder to have a life full of money. And this is the best case scenario for the AI folks.

If all the bad stuff that we’re talking about doesn’t come true, this seems to be the best case scenario, unless we can get very different AI and take back some control.

David Brooks

So what we’ve been talking about, if you take a step back, it’s that people are designing systems, whether it’s education or tech, that are basically ignorant about human psychology. And they get humans wrong and they don’t understand the effect they’re going to have because they don’t know how the human mind works. Now, over the last 40 years, since you entered the field of social psychology, and since I started ripping you off, a lot has been discovered.

You think about, like, when we go back to Freud or B.F. Skinner, like, the things they believed back then is crazy. And we’ve learned so much.

And I want to walk through a few of the things we’ve learned, just to emphasize what the human mind is. And the first point, we’ve understood a lot more about unconscious processes. Danny Kahneman wrote a book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

There’s a former colleague at UVA named Timothy Wilson who wrote a book called Strangers to Ourselves. And you coined a phrase which is very popular in the field, the rider and the elephant. And the elephant is the unconscious mind and the rider is the conscious mind.

So describe the implications of that, that the unconscious mind is doing so much more than the conscious mind.

Jonathan Haidt

So when I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, psychology was sort of coming off a period where there was kind of a war between these couple of schools. And there were the Freudians, they were already fading out by 87, but there were the Freudians with this thick, dark unconscious that, you know, you wanted to have sex with your mother. And then you had the cognitive revolution, the rationalists, the people who thought, no, the mind isn’t a steam engine, it’s about to burst, the mind’s a computer, and we can improve the program.

And so those were the two big fields. There’s also behaviorism, which is also fading out then, although it’s coming back a bit. But those two fields, that’s really crucial for this discussion.

Because if the rationalists win, then there’s no unconscious. And if the Freudians were to win, then we’d be just completely irrational. There’d be no real reasoning.

And I think what emerged instead over time in the 90s was the recognition that it’s not emotion versus reason. It’s controlled cognition versus uncontrolled cognition. It’s all cognition.

It’s all the brain processing information. I forget who coined the term originally, but Dan Kahneman popularized it in Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s been called System 1 is the old system that all animals have.

It’s most of what we do, quick, automatic. And System 2 is verbal conscious reasoning, which tires out. It can make mistakes.

So a thoroughgoing appreciation of this, I think, is really important for understanding where we are with AI. Because in an interesting way, all the early efforts to do AI were based on the computer model. Let’s make the program so smart it can answer any question.

And I’d look up a giant database. And we were all familiar with how computers worked. And as I understand it in the history of AI, there were some people going back to the ’90s who said, “No, the mind isn’t a computer, it’s a neural network, which is a connectionist system, which is a pattern matcher.”

And so you need multiple layer connectionist systems, and then stimuli come in, and the network gets tuned up, and then things go out. So this allowed the technologist to create a technology that can think and reason and give itself instructions and clearly has its own thinking, as in the quote you gave us. But if we keep in mind that these things are actually neural networks, kind of like our brains, now we should pay a lot of attention to what they’re trained on.

And as we think about what they’re trained on, now we can look back and think, wait, wait, what are we training our kids on? And our kids and the LLMs, their neural networks are all being tuned up by TikTok, Reddit, and the rest of the internet, especially social media. That’s really not promising for the future of wisdom.

All of this goes out of a rejection of sort of the rationalist view, but understanding that the mind is all cognition. It’s just different kinds of cognition. The rider is supposed to represent your conscious reasoning.

It’s small, not very powerful. And the elephant is the other 99%, which kind of drives the show, although the writer can steer it.

David Brooks

Yeah, I think it affects how I think about life every day. And so, for example, Danny Kahneman, you mentioned, his research partner was a guy named Amos Tversky. And he was once asked, why’d you become a psychologist?

He said, I don’t know. The big decisions we make in life are basically random. And I think our unconscious tells us the big desires, the big things we want to do.

And so I’m talking to college kids and they ask me, how do I find my career? I say, you can’t think your way through this problem. And so the advice I give them is have three adventures a decade.

Try three new things, put three new circumstances, and then see how it feels to you. And a really good question to ask is me or not me? Does this seem like me or does it seem like not me?

And you’re trying to discern what’s going on unconsciously in your mind. And so I always say, listen for indignation. What makes you really pissed off?

And that’s a sign that something’s registering deep down. Or listen for admiration. That’s ways to plumb your unconscious.

Jonathan Haidt

I’ll go just a little bit further. It’s not just plumbing it. It’s actually growing it.

And it grows by experience. We need lots and lots of very varied experiences. And childhood in America used to have that.

You know, you’d go outside, you’d play, you’d do all sorts of things. You know, if you were bored, you’d figure out how to make, like, a Coke bottle explode by putting the right things in it. Someone has a book out now where they pointed out now young people, because so much of their life is just on this one screen, touching the screen, so all they ever feel is glass, whereas the rest of us, we remember what it felt like to like hold a screwdriver and unscrew something and then take out the gears and look at it.

And the sense of smell. The world used to have smells. There were different smells out in nature.

There were different smells of wood or other things. I don’t know.

David Brooks

I just walked through New York. There were a lot of smells.

Jonathan Haidt

But if kids are sitting in their bedrooms in New York City, then they’re not getting those smells. And so the only thing I’m adding on is it’s not just like you’re going out and trying to like wait, like who can pull the sword out of the stone. It’s you literally have to have thousands and thousands of varied experiences in order to gradually wire up your neural network to the point where after, you know, some number of experiences, that now you’ve sort of educated your intuition. So now you’ll be ready to know. And when you feel excited, you’ll have a much richer sense of, yes, this is the right way for me.

David Brooks

I wanna underline that. You mentioned something earlier I wanna go a little deeper on, which is that people used to think reason and emotion were opposites. They were like a teeter-totter.

If you were being emotional, you were not being rational. Then there was a guy who’s still with us, fortunately, named Antonio Damasio, who wrote a book decades ago called Descartes’ Error. He studied people who could not process emotion.

And they were not super smart Mr. Spocks. What your emotions do, they assign value to things. And if you don’t know what the value of different options are, you cannot make a decision.

And so his patients could not make decisions. Their lives fell apart. But one of the things that’s important for humanists is the idea that you can educate your emotions.

You can widen your repertoire of emotions. I had a moving experience of this. I was in St. Petersburg at the Hermitage, and I saw Rembrandt’s painting of the parable of the prodigal son.

And when he painted it, Rembrandt was old. Four out of his five kids were dead. His wife was dead. He was broke.

And so I’ve never seen a painting of that parable where the son, the prodigal son who comes back in shame, is so hairless, beaten down, just destroyed. And I’ve never seen a painting where the father who goes out to greet him is so embracing in love. And you can see Rembrandt thinking about his own dead kids, and he has the father hugging the prodigal son.

And if you look at the hands, there’s one hand that’s masculine and one hand that’s feminine. It’s a beautiful picture of parental love. But when you see that, you haven’t had new information, but you’ve had new emotional experience.

I think it leaves imprints on the way you emotionally react to everything else ever since.

Jonathan Haidt

When you and I were in college, like, you’d take art history classes, and even if you were a Philistine like me, there were moments when, you know, in the darkened auditorium and these beautiful images, there are moments where you’re emotionally moved. And then you have to know a lot of things for you to then have had that experience in the Hermitage. A person who hasn’t had that would not have had that experience at all.

And so I think when, you know, I’m really just thinking a lot about pattern matching and tuning up patterns and something I say to my students in my NYU class, I teach a course on flourishing, is I just urge them, go out, just have lots of experiences and do hard things, like just lots of them, because they are so far behind. They have had, you know, whatever, 10% or 20% of the experiences. I was talking to a student the other day who spent eight hours a day as a teen on video games, and then he also admitted to me and on porn.

And that’s the way he went through puberty. Those are two very intense experiences that will shape the brain to those experiences, Meaning his brain was not shaped by the 10,000 other things that it should have been shaped by. And so I think, you know, you and I both, again, we’re like, we’re so similar to so many things.

We ended up so similar to so many things. We both are tremendous fans of a liberal arts education. And we’re so concerned and dissatisfied about how that has developed in universities.

And we’re both engaged in that project of like, come on, guys, like, we need you. You got to do better. You got to attract students because it’s going to be about the human experience.

David Brooks

I wanted to steer you to really the righteous mind and the work you did here, because it’s of a piece of what we’re talking about. Moral reasoning is not like what Immanuel Kant thought, like following a bunch of rules. It’s more about the moral sentiments.

So give us an example. I think your dissertation was on discussed. So give us an example of how you teach that.

Jonathan Haidt

Well, sure. So when I was in grad school, as I said, it was the Freudians versus the rationalists. and that was Lorenz Kohlberg, who studied moral reasoning.

He gave dilemmas. Heinz’s wife is sick with a rare kind of cancer. There’s a druggist who has a cure.

He can’t afford it. Should he break in and steal the drug? Well, on the one hand, this, on the one hand, that.

And Kohlberg made a lot of progress studying the evolution of how kids think about it. But my insight, drawing on Antonio DiMaggio and all these other great people in the 90s, Franz DeWall, was basically that Hume was right. Intuition comes first, and then reasoning comes second, post-hoc reasoning.

And so I developed all of these sort of scenarios, interview scenarios that would pit sort of reasoning against a gut feeling and see which way people go. And so one was a family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They’d heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and they cooked and ate it for dinner.

Nobody saw them do this. What do you think was that okay for them to do this? Show of hands in the audience, Raise your hand if you think that was morally okay for them to do it.

They had a right to do it. It was not morally wrong. Raise your hand.

David Brooks

I don’t see too many.

Jonathan Haidt

Okay. All right. And raise your hand if, you know, you think that was morally wrong.

Okay. So it’s more, it’s more here. If this was…

David Brooks

What about a cat?

Jonathan Haidt

So what I found, there are a whole bunch of those. And then I ramped up the disgust about a man who buys a chicken carcass every week and then masturbates into it. And then he cooks it and eats it.

And again, it’s because I really wanted to. And this was not asked to the kids. This was only the adults.

But what I found is that all over the world, these gut feeling stories made people instantly say, no, that’s wrong. And then when I say, well, why is it wrong? Like the working class people, it was a big study, high, low social class adults and children in Brazil and the U.S.

The more working class people say, “Well, why was it wrong for him to have sex with a chicken?” They wouldn’t answer it. They’d look at me like, “What do you mean, why is it wrong?”

Like, “You don’t know?” Whereas, whereas the college students at Penn and most of the people in the Svani, sort of highly educated Western people, they would rarely say that’s wrong. They would say, “Well, you know, he shouldn’t do this, but, you know, he had a right.”

So it was only in that group that they would separate their disgust reaction from their moral judgment. But the normal default way that humans judge is, if it feels wrong, you know, as Leon Kass said, the wisdom of repugnance. But we sort of secular moderns have kind of separated, and that allows us, I think, to go all the way to the rationalist fantasy that’s haunting us now.

David Brooks

Disgust is a negative moral emotion, but there’s such a thing as moral joy. And I’m going to tell a story that I learned from you, that we’ve never actually talked about this. You, somewhere in one of your writings, had a group of people, they were coming home, I think they had gone to church or done something good for the community, and they’re driving on a snowy day, and they drive by an old lady who’s shoveling her yard.

I hope this is beginning to ring bells. And one of the guys in the car says, oh, just drop me off here. You don’t need to take me all the way home.

And he turns around, and as the car goes away, they see him going up to the old lady shoveling snow, and he starts shoveling her driveway. And one of the women in the car said the following, which I’ve always loved this quote. She said, I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy.

I felt like singing and running or skipping and laughing, just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people, writing a beautiful poem or a love song, playing in the snow like a child, telling everybody about his deed. My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, I went home and gushed to my suite mates who clutched their hearts.

It’s just such a beautiful description of a moral sentiment on the upside.

Jonathan Haidt

So the story that you told, I remember it now. After studying disgust as a moral emotion at Penn in grad school with Paul Rosen, we had a theory that moral disgust is what you see when you see people moving down on a moral dimension, more towards, you know, evil, demon, monstrous. And then one day, I just thought, like, what do we feel when we see someone moving up?

And I kind of had a sense, like, you know, it’s like in the chest somewhere. And there’s no word for it in the English language. You can say touched, moved, or inspired, but they’re very, very general.

And then when I moved to the University of Virginia and I read Thomas Jefferson’s letters, he has this incredible passage where he talks about reading great literature that is morally ennobling. And he says, does it not dilate the breast and elevate the sentiments as much as any real episode in history could furnish? And so everyone’s pointing to the chest.

Something’s happening in the chest. And so I just started collecting stories from UVA undergrads, and that was one of the stories. And that one is so interesting because here’s a young woman seeing a young man do something virtuous.

And while she didn’t say that she would now like to date him, I’m sure she would. So, and there’s a line from a movie, “The Tao of Steve” that I watched while I was courting my wife. And the advice from this loser guy who’s incredibly successful with women is, do something excellent in her presence, and then retreat.

So there you go. That’s my dating advice for the audience.

David Brooks

One of the other things that I think has come more prominently in psychology in the last 30 years is when I first started interviewing neuroscientists, they really focused on the brain. And now they focus on the whole body. And the neurons here and the wisdom here, the vagal nerve, all that kind of stuff.

They no longer are so, it seems to me, so interested in where exactly something’s happening in the brain. it’s one unified system, which makes sense evolutionarily. Why would you have a divided system?

We want to have one system that would help us move through life. And so what is the embodiment of the mind and our understanding of that? How does that affect?

Jonathan Haidt

Yeah. All signs point to the vagus nerve and oxytocin. And I had a UVA undergrad, Jen Silver, I said, how can we measure oxytocin without drawing blood? We’re not going to draw blood in my lap.

And she went into literature and she said, oh, lactation. So we brought lactating women into the lab, had them watch an uplifting Oprah Winfrey clip or a comedy clip. And sure enough, when Jen would weigh the nursing pads afterwards, they had expressed more milk just into the pad after watching an elevating sentiment.

And so this is on the way to an answer to your question, which is the old rationalist idea was, all you need is information. Tell me the facts, who was harmed, who had a right, and the brain, the computer, will figure it out. What’s the right thing?

But now the picture is much more up here. It’s not computation in that way. It’s a neural network.

And that neural network is constantly in discussion with the rest of the neural network. And there’s a vast neural network in your intestines. We have a second brain, and that’s connected in part by the vagus nerve.

So there’s all this stuff going on. And there are things that make the heart change. And then when the heart changes, that sends other signals back to the brain that the heart has changed.

So we have to see that we can still call it cognition. I’m fine with that. It’s information processing in a way, but it’s not just like electrons of information.

It’s like the state of the body as a complex dynamical system that’s always responding to challenges and opportunities. And it’s just a much more interesting way to see a person.

David Brooks

We’re getting to the conclusion of what I wanted to get to, which is all the different things we’ve been talking about here are basically, I think, you can correct me, saying intelligence is important. It’s totally important. But if you think it’s the only thing, or you overvalue it, as we do in our college admissions processes, by the way, then you’re going to design systems that mutilate and distort and poison all the other forms of knowing out there, whether it’s the unconscious, whether it’s the body. And this seems to me like has massive social implications on every system you can think about.

Jonathan Haidt

Yeah, absolutely. There are many kinds of intelligence. And even though the sort of the multiple, you know, eight different kinds is not necessarily well regarded among psychologists, we all understand that there’s this kind of intelligence that does very well on the SAT, and then there’s a kind of a sort of a… you know, book smart people stupid, you know, there’s a kind of intelligence that’s more just social savvy, and some people are more in touch with their bodies.

Their intuitive system is better tuned up than someone who’s entirely up here. And I think… And you had an article, was it about the Ivy League?

So you had about, like, how, you know, once we started indexing on this, like, it led to all these other really terrible social results because we kept escalating this one kind of intelligence. And that of course has given us an elite that is much more loathsome than elites used to be. And I just use that in the sense that we now have a massive populist rebellion, which is basically about anti-elites.

And so the view of elites now, there’s not an idea of service, it’s the idea of honor. We used to have something of an honor culture, like in the Wasp aristocracy, perhaps, in other And now honors means that I won. I got the highest grade and I got honors.

So yes, we both think of all of this as a complex dynamical system. We’re interested in the individual psychology. We’re interested in decisions about policy that then shape and change.

And before you know it, you have this like shallow cognitive aristocracy that is driving us off a cliff.

David Brooks

I mean, they got selected into that aristocracy by an admissions process, which was designed largely by a guy named James Ryan Conant at Harvard in the 1940s. The 1940s was the second most important high watermark of rationalism. About a mile north of here, there was a woman named Jane Jacobs trying to save the West Village. And there was a guy named Robert Moses who was a rationalist who said, no, a neighborhood is not an organism.

A city is a machine for moving traffic. And he wanted to put a highway through her village. And she said, no, a neighborhood is an organism.

It’s not, it’s not, it doesn’t follow neat logical rules. And she fortunately won. And Robert Moses happened to lose that one.

And so I’m just trying to emphasize that our world is designed by the worldview we bring to it.

Jonathan Haidt

Absolutely.

David Brooks

And our current moment, the 1940s was a high watermark of rationalism. We’re entering another because of the influence of the technologists, frankly. Yeah.

And what’s perverse about it, it comes at exactly the moment what we understand about the mind is going the exact opposite way. This is not just Jonathan talking about this. The whole field, basically, most of it.

And so it’s perverse.

Jonathan Haidt

the PISA results that came out a week or two ago. Everybody was expecting, we all knew that cognitive ability, reading ability, science and math, everything, we all knew that that dropped during COVID and people were expecting it to bounce back. In 2022 was the previous time and then data from 2025 just came out a week or two ago.

And it was stunning. It was way beyond what I expect. I’m really tuned into what the technology is doing to kids’ development, but I was expecting it to bounce back somewhat because we’ve seen that on the mental health.

We have seen the mental health bounce back somewhat. But the reading scores went down and down and down. The decline didn’t even slow.

When you look at the graph, you can’t see any effect of COVID. The decline actually started after 2012. And it goes down faster and faster and faster.

COVID is along the way, but it’s plummeting, our ability to read. And it’s because people, young people especially, they can’t, they’re called hasty readers. They’ll just read a little bit and then they stop.

They can’t read several paragraphs in a row, many of them. And so this, I think, is really code red for education. And this, I think, is a good reason why we need to be considering, you know, what New York City is doing.

How about we just rip it all out for the younger kids? Sure, maybe there could be a benefit, but they’ve been telling us for 20 years that this could be a benefit from all the tech and the tutoring. Hasn’t shown up yet.

How about we rip it all out? Just stop. Stop.

Get it away from our kids until we know what this stuff is doing. I mean, those reading scores, you know, if you don’t know this, like, just look up PISA 2025. Just look up PISA.

It’s the international test. It’s happening around the world. Humanity is getting dumber, literally dumber, or at least less able to.

And if we lose books, if future generations don’t read books, if everything comes from an AI summary or a TikTok video, then the neural networks tuned up will be as unwise as is humanly possible.

David Brooks

Okay, we have to end on an upbeat note. Okay. Or else everybody’s going to go home and suck on the gas pipe.

Jonathan Haidt

Damn those electric cars.

David Brooks

You got your PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, which is the home of positive psychology. Martin Seligman and others. And they said, let’s stop focusing only on psychoses. Let’s talk about something positive. So what is your favorite finding from positive psychology?

Jonathan Haidt

Yeah, there are so many. But just off the top of my head, what I’d say is the insight early on that we need a manual of the strengths. The DSM has hundreds and hundreds of things that are wrong with you. And so an early project for us was a sort of a manual of the sanities or the strengths and virtues. And I wrote the chapter on awe and responsiveness to beauty, which is about the elevation stuff.

David Brooks

It’s about me.

Jonathan Haidt

I am in awe of your intellectual abilities.

David Brooks

I was going for the beauty, but.

Jonathan Haidt

And so what grew out of that was a way to get to know And then the idea is that to live a good life, a full life, a life that fully engages you, you don’t have to be well-balanced. You don’t have to work on your weaknesses if you find a couple of strengths. And so my strengths, it was especially love of learning and curiosity.

And I was a professor and I realized, oh my God, this is like the absolute perfect job for me. And, you know, am I a workaholic? Well, I sure work a lot and I think about work all the time, but actually I love it.

And so realizing, you know, I’ve lived a very unbalanced life. And while that has, you know, there are certainly some downsides and that has interfered with some social relationships. I’m not saying, you know, go out and do this.

We each make decisions and there are tradeoffs. But at least this gives me a language for understanding that a great life is one in which you get to use your top strengths every day. And if you don’t get to use your strengths on a regular basis, you’re probably not going to be very happy with your work and how your life is going.

David Brooks

Okay, please help me thank Jonathan Heitz.

Jonathan Haidt

Thank you.

David Brooks

So this conversation hit me pretty hard because I think it revealed that we have built our systems in society on a false view of human nature. And you could call that view rationalism. And our school systems are built on a concept of rationalism, that students are treated like brains on a stick on whom information is downloaded.

Our admissions criteria for our college is based on the idea that the most important thing about a person is their SAT score and their IQ. Our technology, AI, is built on the idea that intelligence really is the most important thing about people. And everything is about rationalism, control, optimization, efficiency.

And one of the things we learned, and I think Jonathan made this very clear, rationalism is a false view of human nature. It overemphasizes intelligence and what goes on in the front of the brain, and it underestimates everything else. Imagination, memory, emotion, desire.

We are whole creatures, and our systems are built on a false view that amputates most of our faculties. And that’s just a strong thing to walk away from, and it leaves me thinking. Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jonathan Haidt.

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