Jonathan Haidt on the psychological and social impact of COVID-19.
What follows is my transcription of Professor Scott Galloway’s engaging interview with social psychologist, Professor Jonathan Haidt. This is not an official transcript and I take responsibility for any errors, though I have taken care to be as accurate as possible.
Scott Galloway: [00:01:42] Okay. Week two or week 17 of this thing called the Coronavirus. And we now have the lieutenant governor of Texas suggesting that senior people similar to a call to action of war need to return to work, even if it puts their health at risk such that we can ensure a great economy is waiting for our kids. Take a listen to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick:
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick: [00:02:04] “My message is that let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country.”
Scott Galloway: [00:02:15] OK. So that’s the lieutenant governor suggesting that Nana and PopPop return to work, risking their own health. Such that little Jimmy and Johnny can buy that Hyundai they have their eye on. Regardless of the morality or the logic here, which, by the way, this guy has his head up his fucking ass. Economically, it makes no sense. If you have a breakout of the most vulnerable are amongst the most vulnerable population in America, that’s not going to be good for the economy. That’s going to tax our resources. It’s going to spread panic. And you’re going to have incredible taxation and misery and stress on young people as they realise their grandparents are coming home from work. I haven’t listened to Dr. Fauci or any other representative from the CDC or anyone who has ever read anything, anything from an epidemiologist of any credibility this notion that somehow we’ve gone into a war footing in it rather than personal freedoms or turning back fascism or turning back an invading army, that the real enemy here is a lack of economic growth. It’s just this is so wrong on so many levels. So let’s hope that logic wins out here. The best thing for the economy. The best thing for our collective humanity is to flatten this curve.
Scott Galloway: [00:03:37] And that is about social distancing. Remember, again, 14 days, six feet from one another and boom, this virus ends. You heard it. That’s right. The virus goes away. If we can distance six feet from each other for 14 days. Nana and PopPop, grab the couch, sit down, stare at pictures of your kids, figure out zoom, but for God sakes, don’t go back to work. As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, here’s my offer and it’s a sincere offer. I will give I will donate 50 thousand dollars to you after this thing is over, because the terrible thing about crises, they always happen. The wonderful thing about them is they always and and this will end. I will donate 50 thousand dollars to your re-election campaign. If you agree to go on a ventilator for just an hour, such as you can see what kind of sacrifice would be required here, what kind of idiocy would be involved in older people, our most vulnerable population deciding to return to work such that Johnny and Jimmy’s 401k would start to recover faster. What the fuck are you thinking?
Scott Galloway: [00:04:50] So, Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist, a professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a colleague. And last week we had another colleague, Aswath Damodaran, who I believe is probably the best teacher in graduate education right now.
Scott Galloway: [00:05:06] Professor Haidt is probably the most influential academic in all of NYU, and I would argue probably one of the ten most influential scholars in the world right now. And the thing I admire most about Jonathan is that he’s courageous. Professor Haidt is one of the few people who has the courage to consistently see the other side. I don’t know what his political viewpoints are, I would describe him probably as a raging moderate. But his data, his heft, his clarity of thought is able to bring both sides together to really think about science and truth. So, I’m excited to introduce our interview with Professor Jonathan Haidt.
Scott Galloway: [00:05:45] Give us the state of play. What is happening to us?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:05:49] OK, well, you know, everybody’s giving a state of play. I guess the only way I can justify my presence on the show is to say why somebody should think that they’re going to hear something different from me. So I’m a social psychologist. I study morality, politics. I take an evolutionary view. You know, what’s human nature? And then I also look at culture. Why are we so different in different cultures? And so if we look at what’s going on with the Coronavirus from a social-psych point of view or moral-psych point of view, I would start by saying there are three major psychological systems that are these really interesting adaptations. It’s like we have all kinds of stuff, we have this big tool box in our heads that we inherited from hundreds of thousands of years ago. And so I’ll just go through three of the really important ones:
Jonathan Haidt: [00:06:37] We have one toolbox which says in case of foreign attack, awebreak glass and, you know, here’s a bunch of tools for you. And so and that’s because everyone on Earth today is descended not just of individuals who survived, but of the groups that wiped out other groups, or at least that resisted efforts by other groups to wipe them out. So human beings, I believe, evolved by a process of multi-level selection, including a little bit of group selection. And that means that we have this tribal instinct — if another group attacks us, boy, do we come together quickly. And so we had that at 9/11. We don’t have that now.
Scott Galloway: [00:07:16] And why not? Why don’t we have that now?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:07:18] Well, because this wasn’t a foreign attack, 9/11 was — —
Scott Galloway: [00:07:22] — — So this is the Reagan and Gorbachev of aliens landed we’d all get along fine?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:07:26] Exactly. That’s right. And there’s that cheesy movie, Independence Day. And yeah, that’s exactly what they did there.
Scott Galloway: [00:07:32] If by cheesy. You mean genius. I agree.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:07:35] Well, OK — —
Scott Galloway: [00:07:36] — — Go ahead. Sorry. Sorry.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:07:39] So, then the second system is the pathogen avoidance system. And, you know, as far as I know, pathogens killed a lot more of our ancestors or the people who failed to become our ancestors, then did foreign attacks or murder or violence. So we have a really elaborate system of disgust and contagion sensitivity. Maybe I’ll get into this later. It’s worth talking about discussed here. But the psychologist Mark Shalah calls it the behavioural immune system. So just as we have this immune system in our body that fights off viruses and bacteria, our brains make us engage in behaviours that minimise the risk of contagion. So this pulls us apart. This makes us stay away from people. This makes us treat people as contaminated and so this is causing some of the some of the the racism or anti-Asian attacks or insults that we’re hearing. So this pulls us apart. And the third system is let’s call it the starvations system, which reflects the fact that when you when you look at accounts of hunter-gatherer life, sometimes they’re swimming in food and then, for a month or two, there’s nothing. And we we evolved to live in times of feast and famine and when there’s a shortage we get pretty selfish, at least where we see others as competitors. We’re good at hoarding and lying. So if you look at these three systems after 9/11, we had the first one which pulled us together. That was the foreign attack and not the other two. But this time around, we don’t have the foreign attack, but we do have the other two, the pathogen threat and the starvation threat, the shortages. So, I think we’re starting off at a real disadvantage here, that things are kind of set up to be ugly, but so far they’re actually not that ugly or rather there’s a mix. And that, I think, is because we have this general tendency, this general longstanding evolutionary selection force that shaped us for cooperation. We’re really, really good at cooperating. And we’re not blind co-operators. We don’t co-operate naively. But it’s. Initially, when we go through adversity together or we have a sense of overarching identity, we’re actually very good at cooperating.
Scott Galloway: [00:09:57] That’s our advantage as a species, right?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:09:57] Yeah, it’s it’s true throughout human beings much better than any other primate or any any other mammal except for the naked mole rat, which is better than us because they are like bees. But leaving aside the naked mole rats, we are the world champion mammals at cooperation. I’m really interested in the evolution of cooperation. You know, a lot of people who have a superficial understanding of Darwin think that it’s survival of the fittest and that, you know, the war of all against all. But that’s not really right. And species that are able to find ways to co-operate are amazingly successful. So the bees, ants, wasps and termites, those are the main the super the super social or eusocial organisms. Those are incredibly successful species. And same with humans. When a species figures out a way or evolves away to co-operate at a very high level, it tends to spread across the planet. It’s very hard to wipe out. And that’s probably going to be true of us.
Scott Galloway: [00:10:52] So let’s unpack that a little bit. It’s interesting that you, I understand the kind of foreign adversary or enemy being a catalyst for us rallying together. It’s the scene from Gladiator. The only way we’re going to survive is if we work as a team. Right? Why don’t we see a pathogen as the same sort of uniting threat as we would an invading army or aliens?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:11:16] Hmm. So, yes. So we it’s possible to see it that way, but it’s it doesn’t come easily. You have to do some some framing work to do that. And so a pathogen, if you look at plague or any other time in history that it’s wiped out a third of the population, there was certainly no sense of humanity is in this together. I mean, back then, they didn’t even know who was suffering from it. So a plague is pretty well set to drive us apart and make us fear each other and treat each other as as a threat. Now, today, what we’re what we’re what we’re seeing is for the first time, we are seeing hints of the play of the virus has as bringing together team humanity. So there was a wonderful tweet someone had where they said, you know, look at this amazing timeline. The virus was first discovered in China in December, something or other. It’s first sequenced by the Chinese in December or January. The first virus, the first vaccine is tested in February or March. And then it ended with something like go team humanity. And so unlike previous disease outbreaks, which always happened “over there”, you know, we had REMS and SARS and MERS and various others. Those always happened over there. And they threatened us maybe, but they didn’t really come here. And this is the first time in modern history that it’s been truly global and we know it. I guess that’s, I guess, the the flu epidemic in 1917, people knew that it was global. But here there really is a sense that team humanity can fight it. And so I think we are seeing some stirrings. I mean, it’s an incredibly interesting time because this ancient threat of a pandemic is hitting us at a time. And we have new technological tools and social arrangements that have never been tried before. So it’s working out in interesting ways.
Scott Galloway: [00:13:07] The other thing you talked about in terms of a pathogen actually being a greater threat or have taken more lives than war or violence and that struck me as — I mean, if you were to take that one step further, it feels as if OK shouldn’t the CDC have a $580 billion budget? And the defence budget should be, you know, several billion dollars it feels as if we got our priorities screwed up here, that if pathogens are, in fact, a greater threat, it feels as if our priorities are mixed up. And is it is this one of the reasons the pathogens have been so effective is that we don’t have this collective team response, if you will?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:13:48] Well, let’s unpack that. Yes. If we were logical and rational and if our budget priorities were set by, you know, people who calculated probabilities, yes. They would put an awful lot into the CDC. This is one of the known defects of democracy. Democracies are terrible at planning ahead. Democracies tend to you know, it literally means rule by the people the “demos” and the people en masse are not generally very good at probability. They tend to want lower taxes and more benefits. So democracies tend to only get active after a crisis they tend to be driven to be reactive. Where the Chinese government is an authoritarian government, they have all kinds of leadership centres and they you know, the Communist Party is responsible, is held responsible. So, you know, they might have more of a structural ability to plan ahead than than we do in the United States. Now, given that, you know, democracies then have a kind of a flexibility and a creativity. So when we do react, we can be quite creative. And one of the silver linings that I’m finding here is that this coronavirus epidemic may turn out to be the best thing that happens to us in the 21st century. And the reason is because this is this greatly reduces the chance of a planet wide catastrophe.
Scott Galloway: [00:15:13] Why’s that?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:15:13] So, if you look at the lists of things that could end humanity, if you just Google, you know, things that will end humanity, they all have things like basically a plague. You know, there is some sort of plague that could kill it at least a quarter or half of all people or conceivably all people. And so a natural plague could come our way. And if it does, suppose a really deadly plague does come our way in ten years. Well, if this hadn’t happened, it would have a big jump on us and we would not be prepared. But because of this boy, are we going to be prepared. I mean, the things we’re learning, working together on international cooperation, the virus research, the businesses that are going to be started, this is really preparing us for the big one. And then the other one related to that is bioterrorism. There was a talk the there was talk at the TED conference last year by a guy, I’ve forgotten his name, but it was absolutely terrifying. He went through the cases, the several dozen cases where eat where men had tried to kill as many people as they could. Like their goal was not just to kill themselves, was to kill as many people as they could. And, you know, and then like just just before that talk, we had a talk on, you know, on digital biology and the ways that soon anyone would be able to type out a DNA sequence and make whatever bacteria they want. In 20 years, if knowledge of how to create a super bug is widespread and available to anybody with an undergrad degree in biology, we really could face people who try to kill as many people as they could. And all that we’re learning now is really going to make us respond to those future threats more effectively.
Scott Galloway: [00:16:57] That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. That Coronavirus might be seen in history, looking back, as a vaccination. And that is when you vaccinate somebody, a very small percentage of the people receiving the vaccination, something goes wrong, but you develop immunities. And I think the probably most positive way we can look at this is that, as you said, this is this is giving us a sense or a call to arms and this can be a tremendous amount of investments such that we can vaccinate ourselves against something that makes this look like a —
Jonathan Haidt: [00:17:28] — — I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right that the vaccine metaphor is exactly what I’m saying. That’s beautiful.
Scott Galloway: [00:17:35] The other thing that’s less optimistic — I’m thinking about this a lot because I’m definitely a glass half empty kind of guy — my understanding is that typically the good news about bioterrorism or germ warfare is it’s my understanding is it’s harder than most people — but if you found 50 people who heard about this immediately travelled to Wuhan and then purposely became super spreaders around the world. That to me seems like a more a pretty effective way to wreak havoc across our across our global economy.
Scott Galloway: [00:18:13] When we look at this, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that we’re kind of put in a post-Corona world and you talked about democracy being sometimes ineffective or it’s good in some ways and bad in others; I think we’re going to really look at systems after this and that is kind of collective versus capitalism. And if you think about democracies versus liberal democracies, where the Liberal part is supposed to be institutions insert themselves to make sure that we’re all just not voting for lower taxes and more transfer payments. And that to a certain extent, a lot of those institutions have failed, that we have digressed to where Marx was saying we’re collapsing on our own weight of greed and self-interest, that we’re de-funding the government, we’re de-funding these institutions that are supposed to step in and make us think long term. Does this help restore our long term thinking?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:19:09] Yes, it does. But I would I would I would trace it out in a different way. So the simplest and most direct, the most optimistic way to think about this is, hey, we’re realising the importance of thinking systemically and thinking systemically about epidemics and funding the institutions that will study them. And so we learned our lesson and we fix the problems. Maybe that’ll work, but I wouldn’t put my money on it. I’m really intrigued these days with the work of a of a of a scholar named Peter Turchin. I met him at a conference about 10 or 15 years ago and I read a little bit of his work.
Very, very briefly, what Turchin studies is the cycles of history. He’s he’s creating this field that he calls “Cliodynamics” — it’s the study of history from an almost mathematical point of view. And in his various books, he talks about his book like “Ages of Discord” and he has a book called “War and Peace and War”. It takes off, from what I remember of it, is takes off from the 14th century Muslim scholar named Ibn Khaldun, who wrote about this repeated cycle where a tribe would come out of the desert, they’re toug, they’re warriors. They’d easily kill the King and his soft people, and then they’d take over. But by the third or fourth generation, you know, their grandchildren got pretty soft and then they would be taken over by the next wave.
And so various historians throughout the millennia have noticed this pattern and Turchin traces it out mathematically. He says that there are these sort of 300 year long mega-cycles. And then within that, there are these 50 or 60 year long sub-cycles. And and he said this is really this is so-called this is all but this is really kind of eerie. In 2010, he wrote a letter to Nature magazine, Nature had just done a series of predictions about how great science will be in 2020. And in 2010, Peter writes writes a letter to the editor saying, “I beg to disagree”. The 20th century, he says, we’re kind of due for a cycle and there’s going to be, he predicts in 2010 there is gonna be a lot of political instability here. Here’s a quote, actually:
“The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in that as very long secular cycles interact with shorter term processes. In the United States, 50 year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970. So another could be due around 2020. We are entering a dip in the so-called Kondratieff wave, which traces 40 to 60 year economic growth cycles. This could mean that future recessions will be severe.
So, you know, it’s it’s it’s easy to find prophecies made a while ago, but at least here he’s not just going by a dream he had one night. He did go on record in 2010 based on his research as a mathematician, saying we’re due for a big change around 2020.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:22:21] So to come back to your question, I don’t think we’re just gonna learn our answer and fix things. But what might happen and this is actually kind of optimistic, even though it’s a little scary, what might happen is that this shakes things up, especially if there’s a huge recession, especially if there’s huge dislocation, it shakes things up. We’ve been stuck on a downward path certainly for the 2010s, but it goes back longer. Our political system has been a mess. It’s been getting worse. It’s been hopeless. I’ve been very pessimistic about our future as a country in the last five or five or six years. And it could be that the Coronavirus, especially if its effects are prolonged and the economic dislocation is severe, this could shake things up and force a reckoning, force a deep, deep rethink. And it’s not going be the end of the world, but it could be the end of a cycle. And that could be a very good thing.
Scott Galloway: [00:23:23] And make some predictions here or put forward some theses around what happens to systems, you know, kind of our collective self, our approach to each other, kind of post-Corona. Have you thought about do you have any thoughts about how we and how our systems might or our political constructs might change or be different once we’re kind of 12, 24, 36 months past us?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:23:54] I have some thoughts. I’m always wary of making predictions. I’m a friend of Phil Tetlock who has written about how difficult it is to make predictions as an individual. But actually, what Tetlock recommends is that you actually need to put people together with viewpoint diversity and mechanisms to challenge their thoughts and if you do that, actually, groups can actually predict. So I’m not quite at that stage, but I’ll just share a few thoughts.
One thing that we can say with some confidence is that the way the world looks to people between the ages of about 14 and 22 tends to imprint on them, and that stays with them for life. So the easy, cheap way to make predictions is just do demographics. And if we look at Gen Z, we can make a few predictions about what they’ll be like as they as they become, the more the dominant political class when they reach their 30s, let’s say. So Gen Z is people born in 1996 and later. And until now, I’ve been kind of pessimistic about about how they’re coming along. Not blaming them in any way. But in my book, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Greg Lukianoff and I note that they were denied the chance to play independently, we overprotected them, they got on social media when they were in middle school where the millennials didn’t get it until college and they have very high rates of anxiety and depression.
So, I’ve been very concerned that as Gen Z is entering the corporate world, we’re seeing the map there as they did in universities since 2015, in which there’s talk about safe spaces, microaggressions, bias, response teams call up culture that is coming into the corporate world, maybe a return to that later. It’s coming to the corporate world and I think it’s going to come in to our democracy.
So, in general, I thought that because of the things we did to Gen Z, we in a sense denied them the ability to develop the skills of democracy or at least we’ve reduced reduce some of those skills. So that’s the that’s the pessimistic take. On the optimistic side, though, in a sense, they are pre adapted or prepared for this new remote world. They’re very, very good at having relationships online and before the virus I think social media was almost entirely about amplifying your brand as an individual, which is a terrible thing to do to teenagers, especially in pre-teens — —
Scott Galloway: [00:26:13] — — Very performative.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:26:13] Exactly. Social media had, I think, a really damning effect of really crippling effect, especially in middle school. That’s where I think it’s most important to get get it out of middle school. But by the same token, if we are now entering more an age of we rather than I, if we are all in this together, or at least most of us, if there is a more a sense of pro-sociality, a sense of needing to reach out and connect and support people, this could really change Gen Z for the good and they will be particularly skilled at some of the new ways of relating. So I think, you know, we’ve just begun to pay attention to Gen Z and I think in the next couple of years we will see that possibly in a new light or we’ll understand both their strengths and weaknesses better. That’s that’s one set of predictions. Let’s see.
Scott Galloway: [00:27:05] Well, let me ask you this, Jonathan. So you’re a husband and a father. How old is your daughter?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:27:12] My daughter is 10. My son is 13.
Scott Galloway: [00:27:14] That’s right. So 10 and 13 years old — I have a 9 and a 12 year old — the 13 year old is sort of old enough to know what’s going on and not really understand it. The 9 year old, I find, is really kind of doesn’t know or understand or care much about it, although maybe more is registering than I would imagine. Being in New York, I left there two weeks ago, my sense is that really is the epicentre right now. Have you made any have you any observations around your own personal behaviour or thoughts around what the impact it’s having on you and your family?
Jonathan Haidt: [00:27:50] Yeah, I mean, we’re very fortunate in that I have tenure, so we don’t have to worry about losing our job. We don’t have the financial threats and fears that a lot of families have. We also have a nice view out over Washington Square Park and we feel perfectly safe going out to the park and and walking around and jogging. You know, it seems that the virus doesn’t really spread from that sort of just passing people, even if they have it, just passing them doesn’t seem to pass it on. So we’re not feeling too claustrophobic yet. Of course, it’s only been like nine days, so who knows? And my kids are not alarmed, my son is an introvert and he actually says he prefers this to going to school. Thank God it doesn’t really threaten kids, you know?
Scott Galloway: [00:28:35] Can you imagine if this had been reversed, like some of the previous pandemics and it was preying on our children? I think you’d have chaos.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:28:43] You’re right. People would be much more selfish in the sense of doing it to protect their own kids. I think you’re right about that. So, you know, in my family, the disruption hasn’t been actually too great. We can get groceries delivered. There is a funny thing where even though, yes, this is the epicentre now in the country because we’re all locked away, my sense of what’s happened in New York is not that different from your sense. That is, you know, most of what I know is what I see on the news. Now, when I’ve gone out a few times, it’s quite amazing to look up, say Sixth Avenue or Fifth Avenue. And you see just as far as the eye can see, you see a couple of cars here and there and you see some delivery bicycle’s and people walking. It’s like North Korea. I mean, it’s like the street scenes we see from Pyongyang. But I think where we are now is we kinda know that this tidal wave is coming and I just heard from I spoke to somebody yesterday whose wife is an emergency room doctor, and she said yesterday the surge is beginning. Like we’re not over capacity yet, but we’re getting close. And that was just yesterday. And of course, it’s going to get a lot worse in the coming weeks. So I think we’re all bracing for the tsunami. But I think our eyes are really much more on the hospitals than on ourselves. I’m not sure about that, but that’s the way it feels to me.
Scott Galloway: [00:29:59] So, Jonathan Haidt, yours is the most optimistic view I’ve received so far, and it’s nice and it’s reinforcing this notion that this might be. In retrospect, an expensive vaccination for a society where we decide we’re in this together and that hopefully we’ll look back on this and having seen this as a inspiration for what was one of the greatest collective efforts, both forming new alliances and innovations such that we could flatten this curve, get past it and hopefully a new generation of leaders and activists and very socially-minded people that realise that obviously we’re much stronger together, in that institutions matter and that we get through this and are much more prepared, that the muscles damaged here; but it’s only damage such that it grows back stronger, more able to face these things with much greater vigour and resilience. Professor Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and an author.
Scott Galloway: [00:31:01] Jonathan, thank you so much for doing this. This is our second podcast. And I said this in the intro, I find you courageous; I just love hearing from you and I find you one of the few academics that is willing to take a — I don’t want to call you a conservative — but I think of you as a raging moderate and utterly, totally unafraid to kind of kind of call it as you see it. Stay well and I’ll see you back on campus office rather than later.
Jonathan Haidt: [00:31:26] Well, thank you, Scott. Let me just say that that summation you gave of what I said was better than what I said. That was amazing. If you can summarise things like that. Well, thank you.
Scott Galloway: [00:31:35] It’s because I’ve been drinking. It’s cocktail hour somewhere. All right, Professor, Haidt. Take care. I’ll see you soon.
