How Important Is Understanding Our Own Psychology in Creating Benign Pathways?

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Knowing stuff isn't going to change your behavior. I mean, it can sometimes on the margins, but generally not. We're being rewired by engineers in Northern California and they've given us miracles. But I don't think there's a single sociologist employed anywhere in Silicon Valley as far as I can tell. The inherent problem of people and cars doesn't have the moral externalities that social media has. And when social media companies, Facebook and Instagram in particular, when they rewired childhood, all they were thinking about was maximizing engagement.

Today, Nate is joined by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Professor Haidt is one of the leaders in the understanding of human biases and predispositions, and how they affect cooperation, communication, and change-making. Human psychology and behavior is at the root of the larger predicament that humanity faces. Is it possible to use a better understanding of our own psychology to change our behavior and the behavior of future generations? Is social media hijacking the vulnerabilities of our social-psychological nature? How can we redesign systems technologies and systems to bring out the better sides of our natures, instead of amplifying the worst?

About Jonathan Haidt:

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing two books: Kids In Space: Why teen mental health is collapsing, and Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share.

For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/59-jonathan-haidt

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