The only book that actually explains both psychology and neuroscience behind your own political and religious beliefs
The Righteous Mind
- Jonathan Haidt
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New York Times Book Review
You?re smart. You?re liberal. You?re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can?t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they?re being duped. You?re wrong.
This isn?t an accusation from the right. It?s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In ?The haRighteous Mind,? Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He?s looking for wisdom. That?s what makes ?The Righteous Mind? well worth reading. Politics isn?t just about hamanipulating people who disagree with you. It?s about learning from them.
Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt?s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be ?the slave of the passions,? was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato?s ?Republic? who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was ?the guy who got it right.?
To the question many people ask about politics ? Why doesn?t the other side listen to reason? ? Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they?ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt?s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.
The problem isn?t that people don?t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn?t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.
To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people?s minds, Haidt concludes, don?t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason?s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.
Haidt?s account of reason is a bit too simple ? his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning ? and his advice sounds cynical. But set aside those objections for now, and go with him. If you follow Haidt through the tunnel of cynicism, you?ll find that what he?s really after is enlightenment. He wants to open your mind to the moral intuitions of other people.
In the West, we think morality is all about harm, rights, fairness and consent. Does the guy own the chicken? Is the dog already dead? Is the sister of legal age? But step outside your neighborhood or your country, and you?ll discover that your perspective is highly anomalous. Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.
The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don?t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status ? elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.
These moral systems aren?t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they?re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we?re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn?t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don?t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.
You don?t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order ? these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt?s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt?s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.
This is where Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left?s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-hapundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters? neural roots ? playing on our craving for authority, for example ? to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there?s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to ?explain away? conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that?s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren?t fools. In Haidt?s words, they?re ?voting for their moral interests.?
One of these interests is moral capital ? norms, prachatices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition.
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Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group ? particularly those who have made sacrifices for it ?than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren?t natural. What?s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.
How far should liberals go toward incorporating these principles? Haidt says the shift has to be more than symbolic, but he doesn?t lay out a specific policy agenda. Instead, he highlights broad areas of culture and politics ? family and assimilation, for example ? on which liberals should consider compromise. He urges conservatives to entertain liberal ideas in the same way. The purpose of such compromises isn?t just to win elections. It?s to make society and government fit human nature.
The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves ?very liberal,? were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don?t understand conservative values. And they can?t recognize this failing, because they?re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.
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