At Reason Jonathan Adler writes about a study conducted by a couple of Northwestern psych profs which started out to be about psychology but ended up by being about something quite different:
Northwestern University researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman report in an op-ed on the results of a series of interviews they conducted with undergraduates.
Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”
We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.
These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.
The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.
Practicing dissimulation to pass a course isn’t new. I faced the same thing myself 60 years ago. I declined to lie to the professor and received a lower grade in the class as a consequence. But the scale is troubling:
Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.
In other words not only are they learning dissimulation rather than critical thinking in college, they are cultivating it as a habit. Kant taught that lying is immoral because it denies the fundamental worth of others. Over a century ago George Bernard Shaw observed “the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else”.
Clearly, we are transitioning from a society in which many, particularly the well-educated, believed you could trust other people to one in which even the well-educated cannot trust their fellow citizens. That has profound policy implications.
As we say on Twitter, “LOL LMAO even”