I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, in 2013 to 2014 students are acting as though words are dangerous,

but books are violent, speakers will be traumatizing, and so we start hearing the first talk about

students requesting safe spaces, trigger warnings, talking about microaggressions.

It's as though the students were very, very thin-skinned, easily harmed and frightened.

I want to stress, we don't know the cause, but the two best hypotheses are social media,

and before they got social media, the vast overprotection that we subjected kids to,

basically took away childhood from them in the 1990s.

It seems to me we're going through a time now when we agree less and less with one another,

even about things we agree on.

More and more of we don't use the approved language we're called out.

New ones are suspected of agreeing with the other side, and the other side tends to be where the devil lives.

I thought it would be fun to talk with someone who seriously studied issues like this.

Jonathan Height has become one of the leading researchers in the psychology of morality,

and he's the author of books titled The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind.

More recently, he's been looking into the widening gulf that separates the political left and the political right in our country.

A chasm he argues that may habits roots in what he calls in his latest book, The Codling of the American Mind.

John, I'm really glad that you were able to come in and talk with me today,

because what you deal with, what you've studied and written about and talked about,

is something that seems endemic to the way we live today, which is how we're partly,

how we're divided up into two camps, and each camp can't stand the other.

And if we have conversations about relating and communicating, that seems to be central to the question.

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