Transcendent thinking, positive life outcomes, and school.

I'm going to get a little topical in this Bemusing, so if that's not your cup of tea, then feel free to close this tab. I worry that laws banning the discussion of "divisive concepts" will have a chilling effect on education. These laws could make teachers feel like they have to hold back or simplify their instruction, for fear of crossing some hard-to-define line and getting fired. That would be a tremendous loss, for society, for educators, and for students themselves. Schools can play a large role in helping students learn to think deeply about complex issues, consider broader perspectives on themselves, others, and society, and reflect on how their values and emotions inform their understandings social and ethical implications of decision. Such cognition is called "transcendent thinking" and new neuroscience research by Gotlieb and colleagues (2024) suggests it may play a role in later identity development and life satisfaction.

This is the kind of educational neuroscience research I like. Gotlieb and colleagues had a strong theoretical justification to examine how middle adolescents' disposition to think in transcendent ways might be related to changes in the structure of the brain, which, in turn, have been found to predict positive development later in life. The authors had a pretty large and diverse sample for neuroscience work (i.e., 65 14-18 year olds from low-income urban communities, with parents who had immigrated to the US from 13 different countries). And the study was truly longitudinal, with fMRI results gathered at baseline and 2 years later, identity development measured 1.5 years after that, and then self-reported satisfaction with self, relationships, and schools measured 5 years after the start of the study. The results showed statistically significant, albeit small, relationships between transcendent thinking in adolescence and subsequent changes in connectivity between two important neural networks. Those changes, in turn, strongly predicted late-adolescence identity development, which in turn strongly predicted young adult life satisfaction. And they controlled for factors like age, sex, IQ, and SES.

Now, of course, this was not a causal design, so it could be that transcendent thinking is not the true "cause" of later positive changes in identity development and life satisfaction. But the results are promising and align with theory. The authors hoped this study would justify investigations of interventions to promote transcendent thinking, to test causal hypotheses - so do I! And I really hope that pressure to avoid teaching "divisive concepts" is not creating an antithetical natural experiment, where fewer opportunities to think in transcendent ways in school might lead to poorer identity development and life satisfaction. Such findings would add another worry to the pile of worries I have about the effects of such laws.