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Why the Old Look Down on the Young
Ever since the Greeks, people have been complaining that the next generation is a disappointment. Nowadays, it’s Boomers fighting with those aggravating, avocado-toast crunching, emoji-texting millennials. The feeling is seductive—but isn’t it really an illusion? After all, the old folks who are complaining were once on the receiving end of the same complaints themselves. In the 1960s, the Boomers’ parents denounced them as irresponsible hippies. Have people really been steadily deteriorating since ancient times? In a new paper in the journal Science Advances, John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara call this feeling the “kids these days” effect.
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Authoritarian Leaders Thrive on Fear. We Need to Help People Feel Safe
Like many of us, I have worried about the rising tide of rightwing populism, nationalism and polarisation across the world. Within just a few years, we’ve witnessed the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit decision in the UK, the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy, Victor Orbán in Hungary, the Freedom party in Austria and the Law and Justice party in Poland. The world’s largest democracy, India, is menaced by a newly virulent nationalism and xenophobia. For a long time I wondered what explained the appeal of these apparently fringe movements that, in my view, had accidentally gone mainstream.
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How to Think Clearly in Beleaguered Times
George Monbiot makes a telling link between individuals’ affective state and the unwitting support we lend to demagogues (Journal, 3 October). In their fascinating book The Boy who was Raised as a Dog, Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz develop this notion of state-dependent functioning and apply it to organisations. ... Monbiot rightly calls for us to restore the mental state that allows us to think. For each of us as individuals, what might this involve? In the language of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, such a restoration entails moving from a state of dysregulation to one of regulation.
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After Trump, Will Our Politics Get Better or Worse?
The potentially baleful consequences of a Trump victory in 2020 are clear. But what if, as seems more likely at this point, he is defeated? If Trump loses, a cloud will lift from American politics. But the circumstances that produced him will not vanish—and the changes that he wrought will outlast him. Like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, when Donald Trump fades from the scene, his teeth will linger after him—but unlike the cat’s, those teeth will not be smiling. They will bite and draw blood for years to come. ...
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Five Steps to Opening Minds
Admitting mistakes can be difficult — especially in a polarized society where certainty is prized — but learning to be intellectually humble may be key to fostering productive dialogue across the differences that divide us. Inspired by the need for such virtues, a team of researchers is now working to help communities learn to appreciate curiosity, open-mindedness, and constructive dialogue in a new, three-year, $3.8 million project led by Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl. ...
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Groundbreaking UW Study: Transgender Kids’ Gender Identity is as Strong as That of Cisgender Children
Gender identity is as strong in transgender children as it is in cisgender children (those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth), no matter how long a child has been treated as being a gender they don’t identify with, according to initial findings from a University of Washington study that is the largest of its kind. The results bolster earlier UW research that has found transitioning doesn’t affect a transgender child’s sense of self. ... This research is part of the TransYouth Project, led by UW psychologist Kristina Olson, who earlier this year received the Alan T.
