8 ms·

Cognitive distortions predict safetyism-inspired beliefs in college students

99 points by Bostonian 5y ago

cdot2 5y ago
So tldr they did a study to back up the anecdotes in the book "The coddling of the American mind"
- tomlockwood 5y ago
  Also the study that correlates the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing with "safetyism" states that "greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted." It'd be such a catastrophe if those "customs" were adopted, wouldn't it?
  - blindmute 5y ago
    Yes
- jmeister 5y ago
  Haidt is a top psychologist, the book’s appendix is full of citations to quality psych research to back up his claims. I don’t know how the authors of this paper are related to Haidt et al
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  There is only anecdotal data that parachutes save people falling from airplanes.
Supermancho 5y ago
I've never heard of "safetyism", so from the content: "safetyism-inspired beliefs (e.g., emotional pain or discomfort is dangerous)"
- safanycom 5y ago
  Searching for where the term is used, I can only find sources connected to churches, conservative news and self delared "centrists"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vmception 5y ago
  Is this an extension of epigenics? The idea/study that stressors within the current generation can be passed down, instead of purely genetic combination causing differences in the next generation?
thizzbuzz 5y ago
[dead]
Seattle3503 5y ago
Couldn't you just as easily say that a vulnerable population seeks extra protection? Another question, are these authors legit? I think its difficult for a bunch of software engineers to evaluate the quality of scientific work so far outside of their field.
- swayvil 5y ago
  But what he actually means is, "Crazy people go safety-crazy". And it's true. I know a few crazy people and they are unanimously and vehemently onboard with safetyism, as of the recent hubub. Markedly moreso than everybody else.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I’ve literally never heard of this term and am open to learning more about it but I don't weigh this observation heavily
    - someguydave 5y ago
      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_illness_and_the_left https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_il... Here is another study for you.
      - vmception 5y ago
        > Moderates are the largest group at roughly 40% of the population. People with extreme views represent approximately 10% of the population in 2018 but only about 5% in 1975. Okay this is amazing and makes me feel so much better that everyone is only pretending to agree with whichever loud ideological extremist is most convenient for them Very strange survey though
apocalypstyx 5y ago
My question is: who is deciding what is the correct reality to perceive? For example, this from their questionnaire: >Kim’s friends told her that she could not come to the concert with them because they were unable to get enough tickets for everyone. Kim knows they probably didn’t exclude her on purpose, but she feels rejected. Therefore, part of her believes she was rejected What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)? which they seem to indicate would be what a 'well-adjusted' person free of cognitive distortion would assume. Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?) People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone. The main intent, it seems to me, at least by some, is to obscure the notion that humans and systems may act in ways contrary to their expressed intent. Much atrocity and discrimination has been predicated on actions justified by philanthropic intent, ie 'elevating the savages'. And I wonder if a person free of cognitive distortions would even be referred to as human, as the quote goes: "Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions." --David Hume
- chmod775 5y ago
  > For example, this from their questionnaire: What you quoted isn't from any questionnaire. It's an illustrative example given in the paper. Edit: I am wrong. Those examples actually showed up in a questionnaire and participants were asked to rate how likely they are to engage in that kind of thinking.
  - apocalypstyx 5y ago
    Yes, I misread. But I would still scrutinize the reasoning expressed by the sample for the same reasons.
    - chmod775 5y ago
      Actually, no you didn't misread. I did. > Participants are given two vivid examples of each distortion [...] and then report how frequently they engage in each type of thinking. > For example, emotional reasoning is illustrated with the following examples: That sure sounds like participants faced those examples somewhere.
contravariant 5y ago
I'm not sure if I'm reading these results correctly but the correlations they seem to be reporting in Table 1 look both really significant and really really small. Which is an odd combination, if there was a strong causal link you'd expect both a big effect and high significance. You'd have to be pretty confident in the specificity of your test to rule out that there's not some confounding variable that accounts for the 10~20% of explained variance between most of their metrics (assuming they're reporting Pearson's correlation coefficients).
- tmalsburg2 5y ago
  It’s great that you actually looked at the paper and you inspired me to do the same. But could you please explain why you think the correlations seem “really really small”? To me they actually seem surprisingly high. Some examples: 0.25 for safetyism, -0.47 for resilience, 0.45 for loneliness. Especially the latter two are almost shockingly high given what we see elsewhere in psychology. You can’t expect one multi-faceted construct like social cognitive distortions to fully or almost fully explain some other complex and multifaceted construct like safetyism. If the correlation was super high, that would just mean that we’re likely using two different names for the same thing. Plus it’s not just a single correlation that supports the hypothesis in this paper but the whole pattern of correlations is consistent with it as far as I can tell as a non-expert. I haven’t read the paper closely, and the conclusions may very well be entirely wrong, but I wouldn’t conclude that based on the correlations.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    Asuming they're reporting the pearson's correlation coefficients and not the slope of some linear fit (which they seem to use elsewhere) then a correlation coefficient with an absolute value <0.5 only explains <25% of the variation. Now that isn't actually too bad for a psychological test, so the fact that resilience and loneliness have are related to cognitive distortions is reasonable (and not too dubious a claim). The main problem I have with it is that their main claim "Cognitive distortions predict safetyism" is based on a correlation coefficient of 0.25, this leaves roughly 90% of the variance unexplained which really stretches the meaning of the word "predicts" in their title. Also I don't have enough trust in their questionnaires to be sure that all of the variance in their results is actually directly caused by the thing they claim to be measuring so when you find some correlations it's hard to rule out it isn't caused by some confounding variable. All in all someone's Cognitive distortion score is a pretty bad predictor of their adherence to safetyism belief. There's a nonzero amount of correlation between the results of their questionnaires but given the small effect size I'm dubious about their claim of a causal link between them. I should at this point note that "percentage of variance unexplained" is a bit of a simplification and only really works for linear fits, but I'm using it here as a rule of thumb to reason about the strength of the correlation.
pxc 5y ago
Looks like the degree of engagement in cognitive distortions such as ‘emotional reasoning’, though, were measured based on self-reports. Seems likely to me that someone with an empathy deficit would be both less likely to agree that words can harm and less capable of realistically reporting how much emotional reasoning they engage in.
viburnum 5y ago
So a bunch of professors get together and decide that if students have issues with their (extremely expensive) education it’s the result of pathological cognitive distortions. They’re weaponizing CBT against people below them in the status hierarchy. Employers do this stuff too. If you’re not a good enough cog for the machine it’s a flaw in your psyche.
- skim_milk 5y ago
  This take floats on the assumption that the writers want those that aren't a "good enough cog" replaced. Perhaps the writers want those that react inappropriately negatively to situations get help in order to both improve the efficiency of the system and for the individual's healing? This and other similar takes in the comments section seem to just be anxious projections. Do we really think the authors want to watch the world to burn, or is it more likely they want to help everyone in reality?
  - viburnum 5y ago
    The very first sentence cites Haidt and his terrible book. Let’s not be naive about this. Haidt’s position is that racial stereotypes are correct and that whiny college students just can’t handle the truth.
    - moonshinefe 5y ago
      Did you read the entire paper? It doesn't sound like it.
toomim 5y ago
Although I appreciate the results of this study, there's a big misconception in here about Cognitive Distortions: > Cognitive distortions are errors in reasoning resulting from negative intuitive thoughts that are not evidence-based (Burns, 1980; Covin et al., 2011). This is not true. Cognitive Distortions are (a) not errors in themselves, and (b) usually do have lots of evidence for them. Take, for example, the Cognitive Distortion of Fortune Telling. In a CBT session, it typically applies to a thought like "I'm going to fail this test." Well, that thought might not be erroneous — you very well might fail. And there is probably plenty of evidence for it — you might have done poorly on your homework, or you might be behind on studying, or you might not know the answers to questions on a practice test. The issue with a Cognitive Distortion is not that it is erroneous, nor that it lacks evidence. The issue is that it makes you depressed, anxious, scared, and unable to function. In CBT, if you think that you will fail a test, you naturally start to feel anxious, frightened, and lose morale, and get really sad — after all, you think you are about to fail! It's pretty scary to fail. You start thinking about what's going to happen when you fail. All these actions actually prevent you from studying dutifully for the test and doing better on it. We need to stop thinking of people using Cognitive Distortions as being irrational. In actual practice, we all have Cognitive Distortions (like Fortune Telling) in most of our thoughts. They are little shortcuts that we use all the time to get by, because we can't think infinitely about everything, so we use shortcuts that explain the evidence as best we can. The problem is that we can sometimes get stuck in depressive loops on deeply distorted thoughts. In other words: a distortion by itself is not bad; but if you are doing bad, you are probably in a distortion. So it's no surprise that people who are fragile, who feel any thought or statement could trigger them into a dangerous panic attack, tend to have distortions in their thinking. Another way to put this is that people who are depressed and anxious are likely to be emotionally fragile and need restricted safe-spaces of speech in order to avoid being triggered into an anxious loop. The problem is that we're letting college students, and the public at large, become depressed, anxious, and lonely. Our mental health is suffering a psychic epidemic, as Carl Jung put it. Getting mad at overly restrictive safe-spaces doesn't help. We need to cure the depression, and heal each other's psyches. Calling people irrational isn't going to help. We need to listen to each other, love one another, and heal and grow our way out of this, by caring for each other as individuals and mending each other's minds. We have to do this in love.
Proven 5y ago
[dead]
native_samples 5y ago
"the final sample consisted of 786 participants (653 female, 127 male, 6 other/unspecified) ... 39% Asian, 32% Latino/a/x, 13% White; approximately 40% with household income $0 to $39,999, 28% with income $40,000 to $80,000, 31% with income $80,000 or higher .... an overwhelming majority of participants (94.3%, n = 739) indicated support for the use of trigger warnings in our sample." That's one heck of an unbalanced sample. The vast majority were women, nearly 1% were "other" and nearly 90% weren't white? Yes they're aiming to study college students specifically rather than the whole US population, but, how representative can this sample really be of even the college population? It feels like anyone who thinks safetyism is bunk didn't even show up for their study at all. Yes they go ahead and use the normal statistical techniques on the data but there are limits to how far you can fix a sample this overwhelmingly dominated by certain types of people.

99 points by Bostonian 5y ago

cdot2 5y ago

So tldr they did a study to back up the anecdotes in the book "The coddling of the American mind"

tomlockwood 5y ago
Also the study that correlates the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing with "safetyism" states that "greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted." It'd be such a catastrophe if those "customs" were adopted, wouldn't it?
- blindmute 5y ago
  Yes
jmeister 5y ago
Haidt is a top psychologist, the book’s appendix is full of citations to quality psych research to back up his claims. I don’t know how the authors of this paper are related to Haidt et al
bpodgursky 5y ago
There is only anecdotal data that parachutes save people falling from airplanes.

Supermancho 5y ago

I've never heard of "safetyism", so from the content: "safetyism-inspired beliefs (e.g., emotional pain or discomfort is dangerous)"

safanycom 5y ago
Searching for where the term is used, I can only find sources connected to churches, conservative news and self delared "centrists"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vmception 5y ago
Is this an extension of epigenics? The idea/study that stressors within the current generation can be passed down, instead of purely genetic combination causing differences in the next generation?

thizzbuzz 5y ago

[dead]

Seattle3503 5y ago

Couldn't you just as easily say that a vulnerable population seeks extra protection? Another question, are these authors legit? I think its difficult for a bunch of software engineers to evaluate the quality of scientific work so far outside of their field.

swayvil 5y ago
But what he actually means is, "Crazy people go safety-crazy". And it's true. I know a few crazy people and they are unanimously and vehemently onboard with safetyism, as of the recent hubub. Markedly moreso than everybody else.
- vmception 5y ago
  I’ve literally never heard of this term and am open to learning more about it but I don't weigh this observation heavily
  - someguydave 5y ago
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_illness_and_the_left https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_il... Here is another study for you.
    - vmception 5y ago
      > Moderates are the largest group at roughly 40% of the population. People with extreme views represent approximately 10% of the population in 2018 but only about 5% in 1975. Okay this is amazing and makes me feel so much better that everyone is only pretending to agree with whichever loud ideological extremist is most convenient for them Very strange survey though

apocalypstyx 5y ago

My question is: who is deciding what is the correct reality to perceive? For example, this from their questionnaire: >Kim’s friends told her that she could not come to the concert with them because they were unable to get enough tickets for everyone. Kim knows they probably didn’t exclude her on purpose, but she feels rejected. Therefore, part of her believes she was rejected What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)? which they seem to indicate would be what a 'well-adjusted' person free of cognitive distortion would assume. Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?) People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone. The main intent, it seems to me, at least by some, is to obscure the notion that humans and systems may act in ways contrary to their expressed intent. Much atrocity and discrimination has been predicated on actions justified by philanthropic intent, ie 'elevating the savages'. And I wonder if a person free of cognitive distortions would even be referred to as human, as the quote goes: "Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions." --David Hume

chmod775 5y ago
> For example, this from their questionnaire: What you quoted isn't from any questionnaire. It's an illustrative example given in the paper. Edit: I am wrong. Those examples actually showed up in a questionnaire and participants were asked to rate how likely they are to engage in that kind of thinking.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Yes, I misread. But I would still scrutinize the reasoning expressed by the sample for the same reasons.
  - chmod775 5y ago
    Actually, no you didn't misread. I did. > Participants are given two vivid examples of each distortion [...] and then report how frequently they engage in each type of thinking. > For example, emotional reasoning is illustrated with the following examples: That sure sounds like participants faced those examples somewhere.

contravariant 5y ago

I'm not sure if I'm reading these results correctly but the correlations they seem to be reporting in Table 1 look both really significant and really really small. Which is an odd combination, if there was a strong causal link you'd expect both a big effect and high significance. You'd have to be pretty confident in the specificity of your test to rule out that there's not some confounding variable that accounts for the 10~20% of explained variance between most of their metrics (assuming they're reporting Pearson's correlation coefficients).

tmalsburg2 5y ago
It’s great that you actually looked at the paper and you inspired me to do the same. But could you please explain why you think the correlations seem “really really small”? To me they actually seem surprisingly high. Some examples: 0.25 for safetyism, -0.47 for resilience, 0.45 for loneliness. Especially the latter two are almost shockingly high given what we see elsewhere in psychology. You can’t expect one multi-faceted construct like social cognitive distortions to fully or almost fully explain some other complex and multifaceted construct like safetyism. If the correlation was super high, that would just mean that we’re likely using two different names for the same thing. Plus it’s not just a single correlation that supports the hypothesis in this paper but the whole pattern of correlations is consistent with it as far as I can tell as a non-expert. I haven’t read the paper closely, and the conclusions may very well be entirely wrong, but I wouldn’t conclude that based on the correlations.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Asuming they're reporting the pearson's correlation coefficients and not the slope of some linear fit (which they seem to use elsewhere) then a correlation coefficient with an absolute value <0.5 only explains <25% of the variation. Now that isn't actually too bad for a psychological test, so the fact that resilience and loneliness have are related to cognitive distortions is reasonable (and not too dubious a claim). The main problem I have with it is that their main claim "Cognitive distortions predict safetyism" is based on a correlation coefficient of 0.25, this leaves roughly 90% of the variance unexplained which really stretches the meaning of the word "predicts" in their title. Also I don't have enough trust in their questionnaires to be sure that all of the variance in their results is actually directly caused by the thing they claim to be measuring so when you find some correlations it's hard to rule out it isn't caused by some confounding variable. All in all someone's Cognitive distortion score is a pretty bad predictor of their adherence to safetyism belief. There's a nonzero amount of correlation between the results of their questionnaires but given the small effect size I'm dubious about their claim of a causal link between them. I should at this point note that "percentage of variance unexplained" is a bit of a simplification and only really works for linear fits, but I'm using it here as a rule of thumb to reason about the strength of the correlation.

pxc 5y ago

Looks like the degree of engagement in cognitive distortions such as ‘emotional reasoning’, though, were measured based on self-reports. Seems likely to me that someone with an empathy deficit would be both less likely to agree that words can harm and less capable of realistically reporting how much emotional reasoning they engage in.

viburnum 5y ago

So a bunch of professors get together and decide that if students have issues with their (extremely expensive) education it’s the result of pathological cognitive distortions. They’re weaponizing CBT against people below them in the status hierarchy. Employers do this stuff too. If you’re not a good enough cog for the machine it’s a flaw in your psyche.

skim_milk 5y ago
This take floats on the assumption that the writers want those that aren't a "good enough cog" replaced. Perhaps the writers want those that react inappropriately negatively to situations get help in order to both improve the efficiency of the system and for the individual's healing? This and other similar takes in the comments section seem to just be anxious projections. Do we really think the authors want to watch the world to burn, or is it more likely they want to help everyone in reality?
- viburnum 5y ago
  The very first sentence cites Haidt and his terrible book. Let’s not be naive about this. Haidt’s position is that racial stereotypes are correct and that whiny college students just can’t handle the truth.
  - moonshinefe 5y ago
    Did you read the entire paper? It doesn't sound like it.

toomim 5y ago

Although I appreciate the results of this study, there's a big misconception in here about Cognitive Distortions: > Cognitive distortions are errors in reasoning resulting from negative intuitive thoughts that are not evidence-based (Burns, 1980; Covin et al., 2011). This is not true. Cognitive Distortions are (a) not errors in themselves, and (b) usually do have lots of evidence for them. Take, for example, the Cognitive Distortion of Fortune Telling. In a CBT session, it typically applies to a thought like "I'm going to fail this test." Well, that thought might not be erroneous — you very well might fail. And there is probably plenty of evidence for it — you might have done poorly on your homework, or you might be behind on studying, or you might not know the answers to questions on a practice test. The issue with a Cognitive Distortion is not that it is erroneous, nor that it lacks evidence. The issue is that it makes you depressed, anxious, scared, and unable to function. In CBT, if you think that you will fail a test, you naturally start to feel anxious, frightened, and lose morale, and get really sad — after all, you think you are about to fail! It's pretty scary to fail. You start thinking about what's going to happen when you fail. All these actions actually prevent you from studying dutifully for the test and doing better on it. We need to stop thinking of people using Cognitive Distortions as being irrational. In actual practice, we all have Cognitive Distortions (like Fortune Telling) in most of our thoughts. They are little shortcuts that we use all the time to get by, because we can't think infinitely about everything, so we use shortcuts that explain the evidence as best we can. The problem is that we can sometimes get stuck in depressive loops on deeply distorted thoughts. In other words: a distortion by itself is not bad; but if you are doing bad, you are probably in a distortion. So it's no surprise that people who are fragile, who feel any thought or statement could trigger them into a dangerous panic attack, tend to have distortions in their thinking. Another way to put this is that people who are depressed and anxious are likely to be emotionally fragile and need restricted safe-spaces of speech in order to avoid being triggered into an anxious loop. The problem is that we're letting college students, and the public at large, become depressed, anxious, and lonely. Our mental health is suffering a psychic epidemic, as Carl Jung put it. Getting mad at overly restrictive safe-spaces doesn't help. We need to cure the depression, and heal each other's psyches. Calling people irrational isn't going to help. We need to listen to each other, love one another, and heal and grow our way out of this, by caring for each other as individuals and mending each other's minds. We have to do this in love.

Proven 5y ago

[dead]

native_samples 5y ago

"the final sample consisted of 786 participants (653 female, 127 male, 6 other/unspecified) ... 39% Asian, 32% Latino/a/x, 13% White; approximately 40% with household income $0 to $39,999, 28% with income $40,000 to $80,000, 31% with income $80,000 or higher .... an overwhelming majority of participants (94.3%, n = 739) indicated support for the use of trigger warnings in our sample." That's one heck of an unbalanced sample. The vast majority were women, nearly 1% were "other" and nearly 90% weren't white? Yes they're aiming to study college students specifically rather than the whole US population, but, how representative can this sample really be of even the college population? It feels like anyone who thinks safetyism is bunk didn't even show up for their study at all. Yes they go ahead and use the normal statistical techniques on the data but there are limits to how far you can fix a sample this overwhelmingly dominated by certain types of people.