1-Page Summary

In The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all have different understandings of right and wrong. He argues that moral judgments are emotional, not logical—they are based on stories rather than reason. Consequently, liberals and conservatives lack a common language, and reason-based arguments about morality are ineffective. This leads to political polarization.

The Righteous Mind builds this argument on three basic principles:

Principle #1: Morality Is More Intuitive Than Rational

Morality’s Origins

To understand why morality is primarily intuitive, we first need to understand how morality evolved.

The question of where morality comes from has plagued scholars for centuries. One of the most common answers is that morality is innate. However, the truth is more complex.

In fact, morality is culture-dependent. For example, Westerners are unique in their prioritization of individual rights over the common good. The individualistic society, in which Westerners live now, is a product of the relatively recent Enlightenment. In individualistic societies, the role of society is to serve the individual. However, most societies subordinate the needs of the individual to the needs of the group—they are sociocentric.

Individualistic and sociocentric societies make different moral judgments. For example, in a sociocentric society, it might be morally wrong to move away from your family to pursue a promotion, whereas this is expected in an individualistic society. This shows that, contrary to what many people think, morality isn’t innate.

Intuition and Rationality

If morality is largely a cultural construct, do intuition or rationality play any part in moral decision-making? Yes, but their roles may surprise you.

The human mind functions something like an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant, which represents intuition, makes most of the decisions, guiding itself and the rider in different directions in response to all of the stimuli it takes in. The rider, or reason, can occasionally affect the elephant’s path a bit, but it’s mostly there to explain the decisions of the elephant after the elephant makes them. Moral reasoning is thus not a search for any empirical truth as much as it is a method by which we justify our moral decisions.

We only change our minds when people we respect talk to and appeal to our intuition. We’ll listen to them because we are social creatures who are desperate for the approval of our peers. Essentially, we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

How We Justify Our Moral Decisions

The fact that we’re social creatures is key to understanding why we make the moral decisions we do. We act “morally” primarily because we fear the social ramifications of getting caught acting immorally—we behave in ways we know we could justify to others if we had to. In this sense, the purpose of moral reasoning is to help us advance socially, whether by maintaining our reputations as moral individuals or persuading others to take our side in conflicts. Consequently, we think much more like a politician trying to win over constituents than a scientist looking for truth. Five examples prove this point:

  1. We are fascinated by polling data (of ourselves): Experiments show that no matter how much someone says they don’t care what others think of them, their self-esteem will plummet when told that strangers don’t like them and will rise rapidly when told strangers do. On an unconscious level, we’re constantly measuring our social status. The elephant part of the mind is concerned about what others think of us, even if the “rider,” the rational mind, isn’t.
  2. We all have a “press secretary,” constantly justifying everything: In other words, we all have confirmation bias and are constantly on the hunt, like a press secretary, for evidence that justifies our way of thinking. Simultaneously, we ignore anything that might challenge it. Research shows that people with higher IQs can generate more arguments to support a viewpoint, but only for their own side. As soon as the elephant leans in a direction, the rider starts looking for reasons to explain it.
  3. We rationalize cheating and lying so well that we can convince ourselves we’re honest: Like politicians, when given the opportunity and plausible deniability, most people will cheat but still believe that they are virtuous. They cheat up to the point where they can no longer rationalize the cheating: In one study, when a cashier handed a subject more money than she was due, only 20% of the subjects corrected the mistake—because they were passive participants in the transaction, they could reconcile keeping the extra money with the belief that they were honest people. However, when the cashier asked if the amount was correct, 60% of people corrected the cashier’s mistake and gave the extra money back—in this case, it was harder to deny responsibility for the mistake because the cashier directly asked them about it.
  4. We can reason ourselves into any idea: If we want to believe in something, we ask, “Can I believe it?” and look for reasons to believe. As soon as we find a piece of evidence, even if it’s weak, we stop searching and feel justified in that belief. On the other hand, if we don’t want to believe something, we ask, “Must I believe it?” and look for reasons not to. If we find even one piece of counterevidence, we feel justified in not believing it. In sum, unlike scientists, who generally change their theories in response to the strongest evidence, most people believe what they want to believe.
  5. We believe any evidence that supports our “team”: This is why people don’t vote based on their self-interest. Rather, people care about their groups—political, racial, regional, religious—and base their decisions on their participation in those groups. For example, when people are shown hypocritical statements made by political leaders in their chosen party, they start squirming and looking for justifications. On the other hand, when they see the same hypocrisy from an opponent, they delight in it and don’t attempt to justify it. Furthermore, when they’re shown a statement that releases their candidate from something that looked hypocritical, they get a hit of dopamine. The brain of the partisan starts to need that dopamine—being a partisan person is literally addictive.

These rationalizations don’t lead or create our morality. Rather, rationalizations happen after we make decisions in order to justify our intuition and convince others (and ourselves) that we’re moral beings.

Principle #2: Morality Is More Than Fairness and Harm

Even once we know that morality is both intuitive and socially constructed, it’s natural to believe that everyone’s morality is at least based on the shared principles of not harming others and ensuring fairness. This section proves that, actually, groups around the world operate according to different moral frameworks, and that we need to consider these differences when we’re thinking about how to get along better with one another.

WEIRD Moralities

People who grow up in places that are Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (or WEIRD) are significant statistical outliers. However, they are the subjects of the grand majority of social science research. This means that research gives us a narrow and inaccurate understanding of human nature, causing us to believe that WEIRD morality is the normal or “right” morality.

For well-educated, secular Westerners, ethics centers around the “harm principle” introduced by John Stuart Mill in 1859: The only reason anyone should exercise power in a civilized society is to prevent harm. However, if you’re living in a non-WEIRD place, your morality is likely to be more expansive than just preventing harm and ensuring fairness. (In WEIRD societies, morality also sometimes extends beyond the harm principle, but this is more foundational in non-WEIRD places.)

Rather than just the harm principle, morality actually centers around three types of ethics:

  1. The ethic of autonomy: This is the concept that people are individuals who have their own, autonomous wants and needs. Societies develop “rights” like the right to liberty and justice in order to allow people to pursue their own individual wishes. This is the dominant ethic, as you might expect, in an individualistic society. Along with the harm principle, the ethic of autonomy is the foundation of morality in WEIRD societies. But there are two other ethics that are strong around the world.
  2. The ethic of community: This is the idea that people are first part of a group—a family, nation, team, company, and so on. These entities are important beyond the people who make them up. Moral concepts like duty, respect, and hierarchy are essential to this ethic. The idea that people should design their own lives is actively dangerous to the group and will weaken the social fabric.
  3. The ethic of divinity: This is the idea that people are simply vessels of a divine soul. They are God’s creations, and the intent of honoring God should guide their behavior. According to this ethic, sex with a dead chicken is morally wrong not because it hurts the community or the individual, but because it dishonors the creator and violates the universe. The concepts of purity, sanctity, pollution, degradation, and elevation are particularly important in this ethic. People who believe in this ethic view the personal liberties in Western nations as libertinism, because they often conflict with more orthodox religious teachings.

The Western attempt to ground society in just one principle, like preventing harm, leads to societies that are both unsatisfying and potentially inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles. Additionally, it’s hard to accept that another morality is possible or moral (for example, a WEIRD resident traveling to a non-WEIRD place might have trouble understanding the ethic of divinity). This is part of what makes it difficult for us to understand one another.

Morality’s Taste Receptors

Another reason people from different backgrounds have so much trouble understanding each other’s values is that, in addition to the three types of ethics, the righteous mind has six “taste receptors” like a tongue. These receptors are the foundation of our personal moralities. People respond to these foundations in different ways, just like people’s tongues respond to food differently. Here are the foundations:

1. The Care/harm foundation prioritizes the values of kindness and nurturing. Humans have innate feelings of protectiveness and understanding of distress or suffering. This helps children to survive (because their parents or even strangers feel the need to take care of them) and makes groups more tight-knit, brought together by caring for one another. In the U.S., liberals rely much more on the Care/harm foundation than conservatives. For instance, a liberal might have a bumper sticker with a message like “Save Darfur” or “Peace” or even “Save the Planet.” The Care/harm foundation is part of the conservative morality as well, but it’s not as foundational. For example, conservatives might have a bumper sticker that reads “Wounded Warrior,” which asks that we care for people who have sacrificed for the larger group.

2. The Fairness/cheating foundation prioritizes the values of rights and justice. The left and the right are both concerned about fairness in American society but in different ways. The left is often angry that the rich don’t pay their “fair share.” The right argues that Democrats are trying to take money from Americans who work hard and give it to lazy people or illegal immigrants. Fairness is utter equality on the left but proportionality on the right (people are rewarded for their contribution to society).

3. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation prioritizes the values of self-sacrifice for the good of the group and patriotism. For thousands of years, humans created groups in order to fend off rival groups. This creates an intense and innate sense of loyalty within all of us. However, the left has much more trouble using the loyalty foundation to their advantage because they often disparage nationalism and sometimes American foreign policy. Because they admonish American policy, some conservatives see liberals as disloyal.

4. The Authority/subversion foundation prioritizes the values of leadership, deference, and tradition. Cultures vary significantly in how much authority and hierarchy they demand. Authority comes with responsibility. People in a hierarchy have mutual expectations of each other—those at the top are expected to protect those at the bottom, while those at the bottom are expected to serve those at the top. Again, it is easier for the right to adopt this foundation than the left, because the left defines itself against hierarchy and the inequality and power structures that result.

5. The Sanctity/degradation foundation prioritizes the values of purity and sanctity. This foundation is based on the idea that, unlike mere animals, we have a soul. Sacredness helps us build communities around a shared principle—often that humans have a creator or creators who ask them to perform specific rituals to honor them and their creations. Certain cultures are more likely to believe immigrants will bring disease or dishonor to their society than others. Certain actions are untouchable because they are too dirty (like drinking straight from the Hudson River in New York City) and others are untouchable because they are too sacred (like a cross for Christians, or even the principle of liberty). American conservatives talk about “the sanctity of marriage” or “the sanctity of life” much more than liberals. Religious conservatives are more likely to have this foundation, as they are likely to view the body as housing a soul.

6. The Liberty/oppression foundation prioritizes the value of and right to liberty. We recognize legitimate authority, but we want our authority figures to earn our trust. We are resistant to control without purpose, which can lead to a reactance—when an authority figure tells you to do something and you decide to do the opposite. People band together to stop widespread domination, and they may resist or even sometimes kill the oppressor. Biologically, people who couldn’t recognize this kind of oppression coming were less likely to thrive. Oppression concerns both liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more worried about large systems of oppression that are helpful to the 1% but keep the poor without opportunity. Conservatives are more worried about the oppression of their own groups. They say, “Don’t tread on me with high taxes, my business with regulations, or my nation with the UN and international treaties.”

Conservatives have an advantage in persuasive arguments because they can tap into all six of these foundations. They can talk to people with each of these taste receptors, whereas liberals concentrate significantly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations, along with the Fairness/cheating foundation to a lesser extent. Their arguments are thus limited to a smaller group of people.

Principle #3: Morality “Binds and Blinds”

At this point, you might be viewing morality cynically, believing that humans are inherently selfish and that morality is primarily self-serving and blinds us to reality—we make decisions with our guts and then rationalize them so well we think we made them using reason; we cheat when we think we won’t get caught and then convince ourselves we’re honest; we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

But this portrait of morality based solely on self-interest isn’t complete. In addition to being selfish, people are also groupish. We love to join groups—teams, clubs, political parties, religions, and so on. We are so happy to work with lots of others towards a common goal that we must be built for teamwork. We can’t fully understand morality until we understand the origin and implications of our groupish behavior and how our moralities bind us together, as well as blind us.

Groupish Behavior

How did we become groupish? Darwin argued there are multiple reasons humans first banded together.

Thus, evolution selects for people who act for the good of the group. Since Darwin’s time, researchers have found further evidence that humans do have groupish tendencies:

Remember that while groupish thinking is part of our evolution, we are still mostly selfish and individual. We’re about 90 percent chimp, who is self-interested, and only 10 percent bee, who is group-interested.

Flipping the Switch

Humans have the ability to flip a switch from being that self-interested chimp to working like a group-interested bee. We’re only hive creatures in certain surroundings. There are probably times in your own life when you flip the switch from “chimp mode” to “bee mode”—maybe when you’re walking alone in nature and you feel removed from temporal worries and connected to the universe. Or perhaps you experienced the flipped switch while you were at a rave, dancing with others together and feeling a shared exaltation. Lots of hive behavior, like dancing together, comes naturally to humans and serves to break down social class and difference.

There are appeals to the hive all over. Successful corporations will make their employees’ jobs specific and also make them feel as if they’re contributing to the output of the company, thereby reinforcing a feeling of togetherness. Politicians also frequently employ the hive. Think about JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

The most successful nations are ones with lots of little hives that cross with each other—someone can be part of a family unit, a workplace, a sports team outside of work, and on and on. In contrast, nations with no hives, or those with one huge hive, are much more likely to break down.

If we have a switch that allows us to work together in a group, and if we can be members of different hives simultaneously, it’s possible we can also flip the switch to act in certain situations according to a shared morality. This suggests that we can find common ground with one another and that our moral frameworks are not always set in stone.

The Cons (and Pros) of Groupish Behavior

In sum, we have evolved to cooperate with members of our group and prevail over members of rival groups. Given our groupish tendencies, it’s not surprising that tribal thinking is so prevalent in modern society. We were not made to love everyone equally and unconditionally—rather, we were made to feel kinship with and loyalty to those with similar traits, and our righteousness springs from this tribalism.

For some, this idea is a depressing one. But, as we’ve seen, a lot of moral good comes out of our groupish behavior. Without tribes, there would be no community and no cooperation. Our groupishness pulls us out of our self-interested individualism and, for many, provides a higher purpose.

Making Better Political Arguments

Despite their benefits, our moral frameworks are increasingly making us more blind to how others understand the world.

Largely because of gaps in moral foundations, there’s significant evidence that America is polarizing rapidly, with the gap widening between political opinions on the left and the right.

For example, liberals and conservatives in America have different foundational stories about the country:

There is significant value to the liberal understanding—it promotes a narrative of heroic triumph over the powerful through the weak banding together. In doing so it often is in a better position to secure rights and material gains for the less fortunate in society.

Nevertheless, liberals have more trouble understanding the concept of moral capital, defined as the resources that are necessary to sustain and grow a moral community. Conservatives argue that people need outside constraints to behave properly and thrive. Without them, people will cheat, and social capital, or trust, will begin to decline. Moral capital is what promotes these constraints. If we don’t promote constraints like laws, traditions, and religions, society will come apart at the seams.

A lot of left-wing policies fail because they don’t seriously consider these constraints and the quick changes to them that their legislation brings. As a nation, we must find a way to understand moral capital while also promoting ideas and laws that benefit all sectors of society. This will only happen if we can productively talk across party lines.

Finding Civility

Haidt offers three recommendations for improving bipartisan collaboration in government:

  1. Change how we run primary elections.
  2. Change how we draw electoral districts.
  3. Change how candidates can raise money.

However, Haidt primarily focuses on how individuals who disagree can find civility and common ground. We live in more polarized areas than we used to—in 1976, only around a quarter of Americans lived in a county that voted overwhelmingly (by a margin of 20% or over) for one presidential candidate. By 2008, that number was almost half. These counties maintain distinct cultural differences. In the 2008 election, 89% of counties with a Whole Foods voted for Obama, while 62% of counties with a Cracker Barrel voted for McCain.

It’s easier to live with people who share our moral matrices, and as we’ve discovered people with the same moral matrices regularly have the same political beliefs. Even if we can’t find like-minded people in our communities, we can now easily find them online. We think increasingly that the other group is blind when talking about politics, but truthfully, everyone is blind when discussing “sacred objects” like political candidates or policies. If we can remember our own blindness, though, we may be less inclined to judge the blindness of others. When you disagree with someone else on a moral or political issue, first consider which of the six moral foundations are at the heart of the issue. Then, try to practice empathy. If you have a friendly interaction with someone with different moral matrices, you’re much more likely to understand them better. You might not always change your mind, but you will respect their opinion more.

Introduction

Why is it so hard for us to get along? The Righteous Mind attempts to answer that question and better understand why hostile groups have different conceptions of what it means to be “right.”

Author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, uses examples from history and studies of human nature to explore why we hold the moral beliefs we do and why moral values differ so dramatically across historical, geographical, and party lines.

Haidt agrees with Bible verse Matthew 7:3—he says we are all often self-righteous hypocrites. To understand ourselves and reach some form of enlightenment, we must drop our own moralism and examine the world through the lens of moral psychology, which states that people are governed by different moral frameworks. Consequently, we have trouble understanding humans with moral frameworks that are different from ours. This leads to many of the large conflicts in the world today.

Consider whether you think these situations are morally wrong:

The first situation will probably seem a little less disgusting than the second, but if you’re a well-educated, liberal or libertarian, non-religious Westerner, you likely evaluated both scenarios with some nuance, believing that it’s not easy to place an obvious moral judgment on either case. (We’ll discuss why you have trouble making these moral judgments later in the summary.)

However, if you do not exist in one of these categories (you’re not a Westerner, or you’re religious), it’s likely that you think it’s simply morally wrong to eat your pet dog or have sex with a chicken carcass and eat it after. As you can see, moralities are different across societies. Once you understand this, it becomes easier to understand and empathize with different groups of people and their moral beliefs.

Haidt argues that morality is intuitive, not rational, and that our cultures shape these intuitive moral judgments. He builds this argument on three basic principles, which make up the three parts of the book:

Part 1: Morality Is Intuitive | Chapters 1-2, 5: Morality’s Origins

Clearly, we all define “morality” differently. But why are our beliefs about what’s right and wrong so different? To understand why morality is primarily intuitive, we first need to understand how morality evolved.

Moral psychologists ask where morality comes from and how kids learn what’s right and what’s wrong. The two clear answers are nature and nurture.

Moral psychologists argue that the answer is somewhere in between nativist and empiricist views. They put forth rationalism, the theory that knowledge comes from reason, not experience or intuition.

However, Haidt argues that this common theory is wrong as well. We’ll move through three common arguments for rationalist thought and three counterarguments that, according to Haidt, debunk the theories of rationalism:

Rationalist Argument #1: Children Develop Moral Frameworks on Their Own

According to the theories of rationalism, kids figure out and understand morality on their own, through reason. Consider this experiment from psychologist Jean Piaget:

After more experiments, Piaget concluded that how a child learns about morality is similar to how she learns about volume—understanding is not innate, nor is it taught. It’s self-constructed, and it happens as kids socialize with other kids, learning how to play and creating and abiding by the rules of games.

If a child is exposed to enough experiences, she will eventually become a moral human being. Rationalists believe that it is the growth of reasoning that helps us gain moral knowledge.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg updated and deepened Piaget’s theories. He argued that children develop through six stages of moral judgment:

Counterargument: Rationalists Don’t Account for a Diversity of Moral Attitudes

Piaget and Kohlberg’s theories were unconvincing to cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, who argued that the diversity of moral attitudes across cultures shows that children don’t construct their own understanding of morality.

Shweder argued that moral psychologists created rationalist arguments based on their studies of individualistic societies, which are unique to the West. These arguments might not apply in the sociocentric societies that are common in the rest of the world. In these societies, there is less of a line between moral rules and social conventions. Shweder conducted an experiment to test this theory, with kids and adults from Chicago (an individualistic society) and Orissa, a state on the East Coast of India (a sociocentric society).

Shweder and his collaborators came up with nine short stories where someone violates a rule in either the U.S. or Orissa. Everyone condemned the actions in some of the stories as obviously wrong. But in others, the Indian subjects condemned actions that the Americans didn’t see as wrong, such as a 25-year-old son calling his father by his first name. Indian subjects as young as five believed that older sons shouldn’t call their father by his first name.

In sociocentric societies like Orissa’s, the social order and the moral order are the same. Therefore, it’s clear that kids are not teaching themselves morality without the assistance of their societies.

Rationalist Argument #2: Morality Is Only About Reducing Harm

While developing his theories about the six stages of moral judgment, Kohlberg noticed that children who were given more chances to “role take”—step into another’s shoes and see the situation from his viewpoint—progressed through the moral stages more quickly. Kohlberg reasoned that hierarchy and submission to authority hindered a child’s moral development by keeping him from stepping into another’s shoes and resolving conflict independently. In diminishing the importance of respecting authority figures and traditional social structures, Kohlberg set the stage for decades of subsequent research that assumed that morality was unrelated (and even in opposition to) these values.

Kohlberg’s student Elliot Turiel developed a test to figure out how quickly children were progressing through Kohlberg’s six steps. Turiel presented young children in Western societies with two examples—a child not wearing a school uniform and a child pushing another off of a swing. Kids as young as five answered that it was okay for a child not to wear a uniform if the teacher said it was alright, but that it was not okay for a child to push another one, even if a teacher said it was alright.

Building on Kohlberg’s theories, Turiel thus argued that children who are able to make choices for themselves develop a morality that’s centered around reducing harm—if an action doesn’t cause harm, it’s not immoral.

This argument has some merit if we’re considering only the secular West. For well-educated, secular Westerners, ethics does center around the “harm principle,” introduced by John Stuart Mill in 1859: The only way that anyone should exercise power in a civilized society is to prevent harm.

Counterargument: Morality Is About More Than Fairness and Harm

The issue is, almost all psychology research (including Kohlberg’s) is conducted on people from the secular West. This leads some scientists to believe that the moral code in these places is the moral code everywhere. We’ll call the secular Westerners WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. These WEIRD people, as Haidt proved, are often statistical outliers. As we’ve discussed, people who are WEIRD are much more individualistic than others, which affects their perceptions of the world—they even see objects in their environment as individual, where others see them as connected. For example, when WEIRD people see a drawing of a square, they see four lines; when non-WEIRD people look at the square, all they see is a complete square.

Philosophers who are WEIRD like Kant and Mill have helped to create societies that are individualistic (they prioritize the individual) and universalist (they believe in the existence of universal truths). Their philosophies are based on generalizations about human nature.

In contrast, philosophers who are not from WEIRD societies don’t include proclamations about how humans behave—non-WEIRD writers like Confucius offer lessons on how to behave in specific relationships or situations, but they don’t offer universal rules that apply to everyone in the world.

The view of WEIRD philosophers makes moral judgment simple: An action is either harmful or it’s not. But in practice, morality isn’t this cut and dried—particularly beyond the Western world, but in secular Western societies as well. In addition to preventing harm, moral judgments may serve to order society or resolve tension within a group (we’ll cover the functions of morality in more depth in Part 2).

Moral frameworks like religion order society.

In the same way, moral frameworks often express and resolve tension within a group by creating competition among other groups.

Westerners also follow moral rules that have little to do with justice or preventing harm.

In truth, in the U.S., the social order is also the moral order, as in sociocentric societies—it’s just based on a much more individualistic framework: When the individual comes first, any rule that impedes the individual, or personal freedom, can be questioned.

All of these disparate societies make it clear that, in fact, the modern U.S. and Western Europe are historical exceptions in their narrow definition of morality as that which prevents harm. Furthermore, Westerners are hypocritical, extending their own morality beyond this definition while disdaining other societies that do the same.

If every society has moral rules that are unrelated to preventing harm, then the rationalist argument—that learned morality is only about preventing harm—must be flawed.

Haidt’s Study

Rationalists argued that Shweder’s Chicago and Orissa study was flawed because “harm” has a different meaning in different societies. To study if morality extended beyond harm in Orissa, Shweder should have asked whether people would condemn actions they thought weren’t harmful. So Haidt set out to write that study himself, coming up with “harmless taboo violations,” like the sex with the chicken example previously mentioned. With Brazilian academic Silvia Koller, they conducted the study across social class and culture in Brazil (they used differently educated people from two different cities). In addition, they used Philadelphia for the Western, secular case.

The results supported Shweder’s theory. In Philadelphia, it was clear that the Americans made a distinction between a moral wrong and a social/conventional violation. The upper-class Brazilians agreed with the Americans. But the lower class Brazilian kids did not, and argued, for example, that it was a moral wrong to not wear a mandated uniform to school.

Ethics and morality are different from society to society. Even groups within societies have different moralities from one another. However, particularly if you’re living in a non-WEIRD society, your morality is likely to be more expansive than just preventing harm and ensuring fairness.

Finding Different Ethics

Ethical concerns around the world, including in non-WEIRD places, are clustered in three major bunches, according to Shweder.

  1. The ethic of autonomy: This is the concept that people are individuals who have their own, autonomous wants and needs. Societies develop “rights” like the right to liberty and justice in order to allow people to pursue their own individual wishes. This is the dominant ethic, as you might expect, in an individualistic society. Along with the harm principle, the ethic of autonomy is the foundation of morality in WEIRD societies. But there are two other ethics that are strong around the world.
  2. The ethic of community: This is the idea that people are first part of a group—a family, nation, team, company, and so on. These entities are important beyond the people who make them up. Moral concepts like duty, respect, and hierarchy are essential to this ethic. The idea that people should design their own lives is actively dangerous to the group and will weaken the social fabric.
  3. The ethic of divinity: This is the idea that people are simply vessels of a divine soul. They are God’s creations, and the intent of honoring God should guide their behavior. According to this ethic, sex with a dead chicken is morally wrong not because it hurts the community or the individual, but because it dishonors the creator and violates the universe. The concepts of purity, sanctity, pollution, degradation, and elevation are particularly important in this ethic. People who believe in this ethic view the personal liberties in Western nations as libertinism, because they often conflict with more orthodox religious teachings.

Haidt himself learned that, while we are stuck in our own bubbles of morality most of the time, it’s actually not that hard to see other ethical foundations in action and appreciate them.

Despite knowing and understanding these systems in the abstract, when Haidt went to study in India, he felt his own identity—that of a liberal atheist—come into conflict with what he was experiencing. He had meals in houses where wives would serve him silently and retreat back to the kitchen, and he watched people cook and bathe in water that was called sacred but was obviously polluted. However, after a few weeks, natural empathy kicked in, and since he liked the people he was around, it was easier to understand their perspective. The ethics were simply different, and he found some beauty in these different moral codes.

When he returned to Chicago, he began to feel that certain objects radiated a degree of “positive essence.” For instance, it didn’t feel right to bring certain books to the bathroom. Haidt also found he could listen to social conservatives with more of a clinical detachment and understand that they were existing on a different matrix. It then began to make sense to Haidt why the American culture wars were so concerned with sacrilege. What is a flag—a piece of cloth or a symbol of our greatness as a nation, infused with divinity? Does the existence of artwork defaming the church make our world dirtier? Many Americans saw national symbols and religious institutions as sacred and attempts to destroy them as immoral. Haidt, who grew up only understanding the ethic of autonomy, began to empathize with people whose ethics were centered around community and divinity.

Many different moral matrices—or moralities formed from the ethical codes of autonomy, community, and divinity—exist within every nation. Each provides a complete worldview, and each is almost impossible to attack from the outside. Based on the environment in which we grow up, there are different matrices imbued within us from early childhood.

People can change—someone raised in a society that’s concerned with ethics of autonomy can understand and start to believe in ethics of community and the converse can happen as well—but usually we maintain our moral matrices throughout our lives.

Rationalist Argument #3: Morality Is Governed by Reason

An ancient truth, expressed by the Greek poets and philosophers, is that the mind can conflict with itself. Desire can pull you in one direction while reason pulls in another. As Plato expresses in Timaeus, feelings like pleasure, emotion, and even senses are necessary evils that separate us from reason, just like the neck separates the head from the body. Reason should be the master of emotion, even if it’s only the philosophers who can reach this mastery.

We can draw a line from Plato to Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg—all great celebrators of reason. In the second half of the 20th century, this theory—that morality is based on reason—became particularly popular. Into the 60s and 70s, reformers at universities interested in promoting equality advanced the blank slate theory, the idea that at birth, everyone’s mind is a blank slate. If so, then everyone can learn to reason in the same way. If we could build a society that prioritized reason over all else, reformers argued, then we could do away with social problems like nativism and misogyny. People would be judged by the quality of their arguments alone, not by their gender, class, or race.

Counterargument: Morality Is Governed by Emotion

This sort of worshipful attitude is a rationalist delusion. Reason becomes so sacred that, like members of a cult, these thinkers can’t consider it clearly.

Haidt argues that, rather than being based on reason, moral judgment is intuitive, or emotional.

Think of intuition and reasoning like an elephant and its rider:

Haidt conducted experiments to codify his theory of the elephant and the rider—he began by testing the theories of Thomas Jefferson and David Hume.

Jefferson vs. Hume

Two famous philosophers, David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, agreed that morality couldn’t be based entirely on reason. But they had slightly different interpretations of how reason and passion (or intuition) interacted with one another. Hume argued that reason is slave to the passions, whereas Jefferson thought of reason and passion as independent actors fighting with each other.

Haidt’s early thought was that, similar to Jefferson’s argument, reason and emotions like fear or sympathy could both lead to a moral judgment. He decided to test the role of reason in moral decision-making by asking people to make decisions in environments that made reasoning more or less difficult. For example, he had subjects make judgments while thinking of a large number that was hard to remember. Even in stressful cognitive conditions, though, people’s moral judgments didn’t change. Because reason was weakened and people still made strong moral judgments, this seemed to disprove Haidt’s original theory—perhaps reason wasn’t as necessary to morality as emotion.

Haidt then explored if reason could change a person’s moral judgment. He produced experiments that asked, would subjects change their minds when presented with someone challenging their immediate judgments?

Haidt, through this information, came up with the concept of the elephant and the rider and decided to change his model to a more Humean one, where it is mostly intuition that leads to moral judgment. He made the model more complex, where a triggering event leads to intuition, followed by judgment, and then reasoning to justify it.

Changing Minds

If people’s intuition leads, it’s not going to do much good to appeal to their reason when making arguments. To begin to change people’s minds, talk to the elephant. (Shortform note: To learn more about this concept, read our summary of Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People.)

Even though we know it would be helpful to try to understand things from another’s point of view, most of us shift immediately into combat mode when trying to convince others of our righteousness. The rider and elephant can fend off attacks well—this shows our allies we are committed to our cause, but it won’t win anyone over, in particular if they shift into combat mode too.

To change others’ minds, begin to practice empathy, even though it’s difficult to do so across a moral divide.

Chapters 3-4: Intuition First, Reasoning Second

The last section demonstrated that we respond to stimuli first with our intuition and then use reasoning later to justify our response. This section will deepen that understanding and provide examples of why and how this happens.

We’ll begin with intuition and move on to reasoning.

Intuition First

In addition to Haidt’s experiments, there’s ample evidence that intuition comes before reasoning:

  1. Our brains are instantly evaluating: Every time we see something, we have what’s called an “affect” reaction. From something as simple as reading a positive word, like “happiness,” we get a little bit of positive effect. This sort of feeling is the first process that humans developed evolutionarily—thinking came second.
  2. All of our social or political judgments are intuitive: People have immediate and intense reactions when they see social groups. Most people have implicit biases against certain groups as well—think of it like the elephant seeing something and leaning away. This doesn’t have to do with any reasoned morality. For example, most younger people are biased towards the elderly, but not based on a moral reason—they have inherent biases against people who aren’t like them who they cannot understand. The same is true with politics—when conservatives see the name of a liberal president, they have an immediately negative reaction. When liberals see the name of a conservative president, they also have a negative reaction.
  3. Our bodies influence our judgment: For example, seeing, tasting, or smelling something disgusting can make us judgmental. A grad student at Stanford tested this theory by giving people a questionnaire to fill out about their opinions on controversial issues. One group of respondents answered in a place that smelled bad and another did not. The group that filled out the questionnaire in the room that smelled bad gave much harsher opinions on the issues. The reaction to the smell was pure intuition and overpowered respondents’ reason.
  4. Psychopaths can reason but can’t feel: When the elephant isn’t functioning properly, it’s difficult to be a productive member of society. Psychopaths have some emotions but don’t have empathy for others. This allows them to break all kinds of social contracts that bind society together, as they don’t care about torturing or killing others. The rider functions fine, but the elephant doesn’t respond. In basing their moral judgments only on reason, psychopaths often break basic social contracts that require people to make decisions based on emotion.
  5. Babies can feel but can’t reason: Experiments prove that babies, while they can’t yet reason, have an innate understanding of their environment. They’ll stare at something longer if it appears to be physically impossible, like a car traveling through a wall. They can understand social interactions as well. If shown a puppet show with three puppets, one puppet helping another trying to get up a hill and a third puppet trying to stop them, babies will register surprise when one of the puppets attempting to get up the hill befriends the hinderer. By the time they are six months old, infants develop a preference for people who are nice to others, outside of their own needs.
  6. Affective reactions happen in the right place, right time: The famous “trolley problem” (you are told that pushing one person to his death will save five lives) pits utilitarianism against deontology. Utilitarianism suggests that you should push because you are doing an overall good. Deontology says that you have a duty to others’ individual rights to not push. The truth of the matter is deontology generally comes from a gut feeling, where utilitarianism is more calculating, based on reason. Studies show that areas of the brain involved with emotional processing activate immediately when exigent harm is involved. We feel strongly that certain actions are okay and others are not, and when immediate harm is involved our brain reacts to those feelings, making it unlikely we’d push someone into harm’s way in the moment.

The bottom line is that when we see or hear anything in the world, the elephant, emotion or intuition, reacts right away, before reason has a chance to.

Reasoning Second

There are, though, certain cases when reason can make us revise our intuition, so reason might not be a total slave to passion. The elephant is more powerful, but not all-powerful.

Intuitive Politicians

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon—a Greek philosopher and Plato’s older brother—argues that it is the appearance of justice that keeps us just, rather than any actual justice. In contrast, Socrates argues we should always act based on reasoned justice. Socrates says that a truly just city has to have a philosopher-king who can divine right from wrong. Socrates is the hero of the book, but according to Haidt, it’s Glaucon who’s right.

We are all constantly acting like intuitive politicians. We’re guided by intuition but concerned with justifying our actions so that others like and trust us. Appearance in social situations like a workplace matters more than reality.

When people know they’ll have to justify a decision, they’re more self-critical and willing to revise their beliefs when presented with different evidence. Essentially, this is because people respond to outside social pressures. We’re looking for confirmation from the group that we’re right.

There are five examples that indicate that morally, we think much more like a politician trying to win over constituents than a scientist in search of truth:

  1. We are fascinated by polling data (of ourselves): Experiments show that no matter how much someone says they don’t care what others think of them, their self-esteem will plummet when told that strangers don’t like them and will rise rapidly when told strangers do. On an unconscious level, we’re constantly measuring our social status. The elephant part of the mind is concerned about what others think of us, even if the “rider,” the rational mind, isn’t.
  2. We all have a “press secretary,” constantly justifying everything: In other words, we all have confirmation bias and are constantly on the hunt, like a press secretary, for evidence that justifies our way of thinking. Simultaneously, we ignore anything that might challenge it. Research shows that people with higher IQs can generate more arguments to support a viewpoint, but only for their own side. As soon as the elephant leans in a direction, the rider starts looking for reasons to explain it.
  3. We rationalize cheating and lying so well that we can convince ourselves we’re honest: Like politicians, when given the opportunity and plausible deniability, most people will cheat but still believe that they are virtuous. They cheat up to the point where they can no longer rationalize the cheating: In one study, when a cashier handed a subject more money than she was due, only 20% of the subjects corrected the mistake—because they were passive participants in the transaction, they could reconcile keeping the extra money with the belief that they were honest people. However, when the cashier asked if the amount was correct, 60% of people corrected the cashier’s mistake and gave the extra money back—in this case, it was harder to deny responsibility for the mistake because the cashier directly asked them about it.
  4. We can reason ourselves into any idea: If we want to believe in something, we ask, “Can I believe it?” and look for reasons to believe. As soon as we find a piece of evidence, even if it’s weak, we stop searching and feel justified in that belief. On the other hand, if we don’t want to believe something, we ask, “Must I believe it?” and look for reasons not to. If we find even one piece of counterevidence, we feel justified in not believing it. In sum, unlike scientists, who generally change their theories in response to the strongest evidence, most people believe what they want to believe.
  5. We believe any evidence that supports our “team”: This is why people don’t vote based on their self-interest. Rather, people care about their groups—political, racial, regional, religious—and base their decisions on their participation in those groups. For example, when people are shown hypocritical statements made by political leaders in their chosen party, they start squirming and looking for justifications. On the other hand, when they see the same hypocrisy from an opponent, they delight in it and don’t attempt to justify it. Furthermore, when they’re shown a statement that releases their candidate from something that looked hypocritical, they get a hit of dopamine. The brain of the partisan starts to need that dopamine—being a partisan person is literally addictive.

These rationalizations don’t lead or create our morality. Rather, rationalizations happen after we make decisions in order to justify our intuition and convince others (and ourselves) that we’re moral beings. In fact, studies show that expertise in moral reasoning (like being a moral philosophy professor) does not make people any more moral, and might actually make them worse because they’re more capable at making post hoc justifications.

We have evolved not to find truth but to argue, be persuasive, and manipulate when necessary to get others to like us or be on our side. This is why confirmation bias is so strong. We should thus understand that an individual’s power to reason is limited. However, if we put a lot of individuals together, the interactions between them can produce good reasoning if these individuals also have respect for one another. Think about a group of individuals discussing how to fix a car. They might have different ideas about what’s wrong with the car, based on their different experiences, but if they respect one another they’ll be much more likely to come to a solution together than one person trying to fix a car alone. Any group looking for truth should have ideological and intellectual diversity.

If the goal is to produce good behavior, then we should trust intuition over reason even more, and create environments like the one Glaucon believed was necessary for a just society—one where humans concerned about their reputations will be more ethical.

Exercise: Identify Your Press Secretary

Consider times in your own life that your press secretary was working overtime.

Part 2: Morality Is More Than Fairness and Harm | Chapters 6-7: The “Taste Receptors”

In Part 1, we explored the rationalist principle that evaluates the morality of a behavior based on whether or not it causes harm. In Part 2, we’ll continue to question the validity of this principle and discuss the diverse foundations of people’s moralities.

Haidt argues that the rationalist’s narrow definition of morality is not only incorrect but dangerous. The attempt to ground society in just one moral principle, like preventing harm, leads to societies that are both unsatisfying and potentially inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles. In fact, the righteous mind has six “taste receptors,” or foundational moral principles.

This section will first explain how popular Western theories about morality came to be and then discuss the different taste receptors and the principles associated with each.

A Science of Morality

We’ll use a graph to understand how our current misconceptions about morality came to be. Levels of empathy are on the Y-axis and levels of systemizing, or the ability to analyze the rules of the system, are on the X-axis.

the-righteous-mind-empathy-systemizing.png

People who are autistic fall in the bottom right corner. They are high systemizers and low empathizers. The two people who created much of the leading ethical theory of Western philosophy are also in that corner: Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant.

The problem with these two theories is not, of course, that these men may have been autistic. Rather, it is that their theories are based on systemizing without considering empathy as equally important—they were asking how the moral mind should work, not how it does work.

The Foundations of Morality

In creating his own theory, Haidt examined normal social life and the challenges associated with it around the world. Then, he considered how people in different cultures deal with these challenges differently, and what they prioritize as virtues. Haidt found five foundations of morality, or “taste receptors.” Just as we all have the same five taste receptors but prefer different foods, we all have these same five moral foundations, but in different proportions. The foundations are:

  1. Care/harm
  2. Fairness/cheating
  3. Loyalty/betrayal
  4. Authority/subversion
  5. Sanctity/degradation

Each foundation has an adaptive advantage—in some way, each one helped humans succeed. Each also has triggers that existed generations ago and triggers that exist today. Finally, each foundation is associated with certain emotions and virtues. Find the characteristics of each foundation, or “taste receptor,” in the table below.

Care/Harm Fairness/

Cheating

Loyalty/

Betrayal

Authority/

Subversion

Sanctity/

Degradation

Evolutionary Purpose To raise children and keep them from harm To work with others for mutual benefit To form groups that can stick together To create and sustain positive hierarchies To avoid disease or other harm
Universal Triggers When a child shows signs of pain or distress A cheater or someone who works well with a group An external conflict that the group has to deal with together Someone claiming authority or submitting to another People or animals carrying disease
Modern-Day Triggers A cute video, an animal at a rescue shelter Being faithful to your partner, shoplifting Any sort of organized team Respect in the workplace for superiors Concepts like fascism
Typical Emotions Empathy Frustration, thankfulness Pride, anger at a betrayal Esteem, terror Revulsion
Virtues Associated Generosity, sympathy Objectivity Allegiance to a group Acquiescence Restraint, faith

Haidt didn’t discover the sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, until later—we’ll explain it fully in Chapter 8.

To understand how the foundations work in practice, we’ll use an example of the Care/harm principle: You take your four-year-old to a hospital to have his appendix removed. You can watch through a glass wall, and you see him lying on the operating table unconscious while the surgeon punctures his abdomen. You might feel both relief knowing the doctor is saving his life and pain watching him get punctured. From Bentham’s utilitarian point of view, it would be irrational if you looked away in fear because you know the doctor is not harming your child. But from the point of view of Haidt’s “taste receptor” theory, it makes sense, because you have an emotional response to watching your child bleed, even though you know rationally the doctor is not committing violence on him. This shows that you are caring and empathetic and that the Care/harm principle is a powerful “taste receptor” for you.

The Moral Grounding of Our Politics

This section will move through each of the principles and explain how they work in the context of American politics.

1. The Care/harm foundation prioritizes the values of kindness and nurturing. Mothers spend so much time with their child inside of them, and their children need so much help to survive in their first few months (which leads mothers to spend a lot of time with their baby), that of course they’ll have some innate feelings towards their child. This is evolutionary—mothers who have an innate feeling of protectiveness and an understanding of distress or suffering in their child can better help their child survive. Evolution favors mothers in this respect, but the suffering of anyone’s own kin can create this same sort of foundation. People can feel attached to lots of creatures or objects that aren’t their biological children as well, such as animals or people in faraway countries.

2. The Fairness/cheating foundation prioritizes the values of rights and justice. We play “tit for tat”: We are nice to people who are nice to us. Many types of situations encourage this sort of cooperation. Coworkers will cover each other’s shifts or neighbors watch each other’s houses. They’re doing so because they’re happy that people trust them, and also because they believe they’ll get the same treatment back. When our kindness is not returned we become angry at the lack of reciprocity and feel cheated.

3. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation prioritizes the values of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the good of the group. For thousands of years, humans created groups in order to fend off rival groups. This trait still exists within us strongly, especially within men, who are predisposed to create groups that can go to battle with others (men are just more likely to express their teamwork on a baseball diamond than at war these days). This creates an intense and innate sense of loyalty within all of us and a hatred of traitors, who are worse than enemies that are honorable, because they have given up the principle of loyalty.

4. The Authority/subversion foundation prioritizes the values of leadership, deference, and tradition. Authority given to people at the top of a hierarchy, like a king, also comes with responsibility. People in a hierarchy have mutual expectations of each other—we expect those at the top to protect those at the bottom while we expect those at the bottom to serve those at the top. The authority foundation looks up and down at the same time and helps people form good relationships with people above and below them in a hierarchy.

5. The Sanctity/degradation foundation prioritizes the values of purity and sanctity. This foundation is based on the idea that, unlike mere animals, we have a soul. Sacredness helps us build communities around a shared principle—often that humans have a creator or creators who ask them to perform specific rituals to maintain honor. The cultures that rely on this foundation may be more likely to believe immigrants will bring disease or dishonor into their society. Certain actions are unacceptable because they are too dirty (like drinking straight from the Hudson River in New York City) and others are untouchable because they are too sacred (like a cross for Christians, or even the principle of liberty for Americans).

From the time we are born, the foundations of our morality are in place. Think of the human brain like a book that had its first draft written while you were in the womb. None of it is complete, but there’s an outline in place. As you grow into adulthood, you start writing your book—you can change the outline, as you go, but most people don’t.

Exercise: Find Your Foundations

Given that everyone has different proportions of the “taste receptors” of morality and thus different foundations, it’s useful to understand what yours are so you can better understand what you care about and how your morality differs from others.

Chapter 8: The Sixth Taste Receptor and Conservative Morality

As Haidt began to conduct experiments and write opinions based on his five principles, he realized that liberals and conservatives understood the second principle, Fairness/cheating, differently. Liberals argued that conservatives don’t care about fairness because they don’t care about equal outcomes—for example, they don’t care whether every school district is equally well-funded. However, conservatives also argued that liberals don’t care about fairness in this case because they don’t care about proportional outcomes—for example, they don’t care that successful people have to pay a lot of their hard-earned money in taxes. Haidt realized that he needed a better definition of fairness, and with it a better definition of equality. This led him to create a sixth taste receptor.

The Sixth Taste Receptor: Liberty/Oppression

The Fairness foundation is rooted in the wish to protect communities from cheaters, while the new foundation, Liberty/oppression, is about protecting society from cheaters. Fairness/cheating is about reciprocity, while Liberty/oppression is about a broader definition of equality.

The Liberty/oppression foundation rests on human nature. There are wide differences between philosophers’ understanding of basic human nature, but it’s clear that in every “state of nature,” some humans want to dominate others. When humans band together, it’s to protect each other from tyranny and also to select away from the people who would choose to dominate or bully others.

The original trigger of the Liberty/oppression matrix is domination and tyranny. People get angry when they feel controlled, which can lead to a reactance—when an authority figure tells you to do something and you become interested in doing the opposite. People band together to stop this domination and can resist or even sometimes kill the oppressor. Biologically, people who couldn’t recognize this kind of oppression coming were less likely to thrive.

The Liberty foundation exists in some tension with the Authority foundation. We do recognize authority as sometimes legitimate (the Authority foundation), but we’re vigilant about authority and want our authority figures to earn our trust (the Liberty foundation). Read any declaration of independence from a colonial state, including America’s, and you’ll see signs of this foundation. It lists oppressive events and enumerates rights that a revolution will secure.

Oppression concerns both liberals and conservatives, and they express this concern in unique ways.

Karma and the Tea Party

The founding of the Tea Party also explains the different ways Democrats and Republicans understand the Liberty/oppression and Fairness/cheating principles: It began with a man named Rick Santelli, who went to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2009 and suggested that we shouldn’t be paying for our neighbors’ bad mortgages or giving anyone government handouts. Commentators on the left didn’t take Santelli seriously because his argument was to the right of the mainstream Republican party. They didn’t understand that he was arguing for the law of karma. Karma relates directly to the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression principles. As Santelli argued, when people manage their finances poorly, it is only karmically fair that they have less money. Similarly, when a group of people feel oppressed, and rise up successfully against their oppressor, they are delivering karmic justice on behalf of liberty.

A Karmic Experiment

One experiment on cooperation makes the link between karma and liberty and fairness clear. Economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächeter asked students to play a game of “public goods” that consists of 12 rounds. In this game, you’re placed in a group of four and you each get 20 money tokens for each round. You can keep your tokens or “invest” in a communal pot. After every round, the tokens in the communal pot are multiplied by 1.6 and distributed evenly among the four players.

If everyone contributes all their tokens to the pot every round, everyone makes money. However, you make the most money if you hold all of your tokens but everyone else invests. On the other hand, if you contribute but no one else does, you lose a lot of money.

No one knows who is in their group, and after every round, the groups are scrambled. The right choice is clear—everyone should just hold their tokens, as there’s much more risk to putting the tokens in. At the beginning of the game, people contributed an average of about 10 tokens. However, as the game wore on and some people got burned for contributing more than others in their group, contributions went steadily down. Cooperation declined.

However, after the sixth round of the game, players found out that they could punish other players. They could pay one token to take three away from another. The right answer in this case is even more obvious—don’t pay to punish, because after every round Fehr and Gächeter mix the players up, meaning you don’t get the benefit of dissuading your partners from acting selfishly in future rounds and you may well lose tokens yourself. However, 84% of participants paid to punish. Additionally, cooperation skyrocketed for fear of punishment. After 12 rounds, the average contribution was 15 tokens.

This experiment prompts questions—why did people pay to punish? Why did cooperation go up?

We can conclude from this data that egalitarianism exists in society more because of fear and hatred of domination and punishment than appreciation for equality. This proved to Haidt that he needed to add a receptor about liberty and fear of domination.

Fairness and Proportionality

The Fairness foundation supports both anger at people who cheat you out of money or possessions directly and anger at people who are leeches on society as a whole. In a large, industrialized society, “cheats” and “leeches” are mostly people who consistently rely on the social safety net, or the people who Santelli argued deserved to be punished.

The Fairness/cheating principle is thus based on proportionality and karma rather than equality, and it’s mostly conservatives’ domain. Everyone cares about proportionality to an extent, but conservatives care much more. Liberals are concerned about the retributive aspect of karma much more than conservatives, and, for example, feel uncomfortable with long jail sentences for non-violent crimes. This is because this sort of punishment interferes with the Care/harm principle.

The Conservative Advantage

Conservatives have an advantage in persuasive arguments because they can tap into all six of these foundations. They can talk to people with each of these taste receptors, whereas liberals concentrate significantly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations, along with the Fairness/cheating foundation to a lesser extent. Their arguments are thus limited to a smaller group of people.

Republicans understand—and use to their advantage—moral psychology in a way that Democrats do not. They know that the elephant is in charge, and they know how elephants work. In contrast, Democrats aim their appeals at the rider.

Some Democrats claim that Republicans aim only to stoke fear. What Republicans are actually doing is triggering all of the intuitions described in the last two chapters.

Republicans talk about innocent victims and fairness just like Democrats. But Republicans have also essentially had a monopoly on loyalty, authority, and sanctity since they became the party of “family values” during the Reagan Administration. While Democrats direct almost all of their political appeals towards helping the less fortunate in society, Republicans direct pleas to Americans who are religious, are nationalistic, care about authority, and believe that these values are imperiled thanks to the movement towards more socially liberal policies.

Testing the Conservative Advantage

Haidt, working with graduate students, created a questionnaire to test this theory. They asked, on a scale from 0 to 5, “When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?” They then listed three statements for each of the receptors, such as “whether or not someone was cruel” (Care foundation). After creating a website and getting some press, they tested this theory with tens of thousands of participants.

As measured through brain waves, liberals and conservatives react immediately to statements they’re concerned about. Your political ideology determines how your elephant—or intuition—will react differently to different sorts of stimuli.

The Limits of Liberal Thinking

Haidt’s experiments proved that liberals rely on the Care/harm and the Liberty/oppression principles. These foundations support social justice on a broad scale and an attempt to find political equality between subcultures. They also rely on solidarity to fight elites.

Liberals suggest that it is the government’s responsibility to provide for the rights of the weak in society, where conservatives resent when the government infringes on what they believe are their liberties.

Ultimately, liberals are using Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating (although they’ll trade away the latter when it conflicts with the first two) to make their arguments, and conservatives use all six principles to make their arguments, although they’re much more willing to sacrifice Care/harm to reach their other moral objectives based around the other five foundations.

Why Do People Vote for Republicans?

Democrats often use psychology to explain conservatism—they say people are Republicans because they’ve been raised in strict households or are afraid of change. They use Republicans’ inferior upbringing or perceived personality issues to wave away conservative ideas as the dominion of the misguided and don’t take them seriously.

Haidt argues that Democrats would win more votes if they believed that conservatives are as sincere as liberals.

If Democrats approached conservatives sincerely, they might be able to convince more Republicans that their way of setting up society is superior. Democrats and Republicans want to set up society differently:

American liberals believe the Durkheimian version of society is a moral disaster. They argue it’s punitive, too religious, and too hierarchical. Democrats have become the party of “many”: They consider themselves citizens of the world, support immigration without much assimilation, and don’t want to make English America’s national language. This isn’t always a recipe for success in American presidential races, though, because part of the job of president is to be head of the “American civil religion” and glorify its traditions. This understanding of the president’s role lines up much better with Republicans who believe in the Durkheim model of society.

Exercise: Build a Good Political Advertisement

As Haidt describes, sometimes politicians have trouble connecting with potential voters. We’ll endeavor to build a political advertisement that can connect better with voters.

Part 3: Morality “Binds and Blinds” Us | Chapter 9: Altruism vs. Selfishness

At this point, you might believe that morality is primarily self-serving and blinds us to reality—we make decisions with our guts and then rationalize them so well we think we made them using reason; we cheat when we think no one will catch us and then convince ourselves we’re honest; we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

But this portrait of morality based solely on self-interest isn’t complete. In addition to being selfish, people are also groupish. We love to join groups—teams, clubs, political parties, religions, and so on. We are so happy to work with lots of others towards a common goal that we must be built for teamwork. We can’t fully understand morality until we understand the origin and implications of our groupish behavior and how our moralities bind us together, as well as blind us. The principle that morality both “binds and blinds” us is the focus of Part 3, and this chapter will explain how we’ve evolved to work together for the betterment of the whole.

Tribal Mentality

Our minds work to protect our own interests (selfish) but also the interests of a group that competes with other groups (groupish). Human nature is largely selfish, but it has some groupish tendencies as well. Individuals can compete at the same time that groups are competing. The former competition rewards selfishness but the latter rewards teamwork, so we’ve evolved to maintain a mix of the two.

When two tribes compete with each other, and one tribe’s members trust each other while the other’s do not, the former tribe will be victorious because of its organization. These cohesive tribes function more like one individual than many.

The problem is, it appears that selfish people within a tribe are more likely to have kids because they’ll be more likely to survive, as they won’t lay their lives down for others. Darwin called this multilevel selection: The cohesive group wins, but within that group, the selfish individuals succeed. However, when we examine how and why humans actually started to work together, it’s clear that selfishness is actually a trait that is selected against.

Darwin argued there are multiple reasons why humans first banded together.

  1. First, we developed social instincts: Predators targeted loners more often than people who stayed close to the group.
  2. Second, we discovered reciprocity: People who helped others were helped in return.
  3. Third and most importantly, we developed a desire for social approval: People are concerned with what other people think of them and eager to find praise and avoid blame. People who lacked these traits were selected against because they couldn’t find mates or even friends.

It’s clear based on the way that we evolved that in practice in actual armies, the coward will not be the one most likely to return home, he’ll be the one most likely to be left behind and picked off. If he does manage to make it back, his traits will be repulsive to finding a mate. This builds on itself, so every time a group selects for people who are loyal, the next generation will share that trait even more widely.

(Shortform note: For more on the evolutionary basis of selfishness and groupishness, read our summary of The Selfish Gene.)

How Groupishness Helps Humans

Some people took this Darwinian logic and applied it everywhere and to all species of animals until the mid-1960s when biologist George Williams questioned these applications.

Think about deer: Some people argued that herds of deer evolved to become faster over time because fast herds were better at evading predators. Clearly, this is not true: It was individual deer who became increasingly capable of evasion because the ones that survived from the herd were the faster ones.

Williams spent most of his book, though, incorrectly arguing that group evolution doesn’t exist at all. That, along with Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which argued a similar point (while admitting that it’s possible that group evolution could exist), made the Darwinian argument for group evolution in humans fall entirely out of style. Instead, whole disciplines in the social sciences sprung up around the idea that humans will always do the action that maximizes their own self-interest, and everything that looks like cooperation is actually still somehow self-interest.

Evidence of Groupishness

Clearly, it’s not true that self-interest is the source of every behavior. People donate anonymously to charities or put themselves in harm's way to save people they don’t know. Humans are not like most other animals: We can occasionally act as selfless as a bee.

Consider the response in America to the 9/11 attacks: People drove hundreds of miles to New York in the days following to see if they could help dig people out of the wreckage. Many donated blood or signed up for military service. An event spurred most people in the country to think in a groupish manner.

Experts are still divided on whether actions like rallying around the flag after a national tragedy are groupish activities or are selfish ones that just manifest differently than usual. Here are four examples that prove the former point right:

  1. Evolutionary Transitions: Biologists see eight clear examples of major evolutionary transitions in the last 4 billion years (from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, and so on). The final transition is the development of human societies. These eight transitions are probably the most important events in history. And they all move in the same direction—when individual units find ways to cooperate, selection at the higher level becomes more important and favors cohesive “superorganisms,” or groups that can work together for success. Then these superorganisms begin to compete with one another and evolve for greater success, bringing about more groups.
    1. Think about wasps that realized that they could function with one queen laying all of the eggs and then workers doing the rest of the work to function properly. They had created a new sort of superorganism: a group that could function as if it were one. These insects quickly became dominant.
    2. Humans actually went through similar evolutionary processes. Over time, some humans became “ultrasocial”: living in large groups with a structure to them. This made it easier to feed offspring and defend themselves from predators, because the group could both hunt together and defend one another.
  2. Same Interests: One of the human conditions that distinguishes us from other primates is called shared intentionality. At some point in our evolution, we learned that we would do better if we split up tasks: One person holds a branch of a tree down, another picks the fruit, and the two eat the fruit together. People in these groups then felt negativity if someone violated this contract and tried to take all the spoils from them. This was a significant Rubicon crossing for human (and group) development. After this, collaborative groups got larger due to the threat from other groups. Natural selection then favored more “group-mindedness.”
  3. Coevolution: Coevolution is the process by which species affect each other’s natural selection. Imagine two species—we’ll call them species A and species B. Species A is taking resources that both species need to survive and attacking species B. Species B then evolves to defend itself and develops an advantage over species A. In response, species A evolves to regain its original advantage. This is coevolution. Humans evolved to work together because other species were evolving to work together better as well. As part of their coevolution, humans developed shared intentionality in order to hunt together and share their resources. Humans also learned to domesticate animals in a group. Groups were forced to work together to keep cattle alive, which in turn helped them to win competitions with rival groups. A more group-friendly nature developed due to coevolution and replaced our more primal, selfish one, which has greatly influenced our ideas about what’s moral and what isn’t.
  4. Quick Evolution: While we’re often thinking in hundreds of thousands or millions of years when we discuss evolution, it can happen quickly. It’s clear that we can domesticate species of animals, for example, in generations’ time, rather than hundreds of thousands of years. We have data from the Human Genome Project that genetic evolution in humans has accelerated significantly in the last 50,000 years. Genetic evolution in the Holocene era, which started about 12,000 years ago, shows that humans were suddenly exposed to new foods, climates, people, predators, and forms of warfare and social structures. This led to a population rise and much more gene mutation. If genetic evolution can be this fast, it’s possible that human nature can change in a few thousand years as well.

A note on all of this: When two groups “compete,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re engaged in combat. “Competing” just means they’re fighting with one another to better accumulate resources. Essentially, whatever group is more efficient at gaining resources and then turning the resources at their disposal into offspring will be the most successful. War can hinder this, but groupthink is not usually about how to harm the outside—mostly, it’s about how to be more successful on the inside.

It’s also important to remember that while groupish thinking is part of our evolution, we are still mostly selfish and individual. We’re about 90 percent chimp, who is only self-interested, and only 10 percent bee, who is group-interested.

Chapter 10: The Group’s Influence on Morality

What situations bring out the 10% of us that’s bee rather than chimp? This section will help to answer that question and explain how “hives” of people coalesce. It will also give examples of specific situations in which we might be more likely to feel groupish.

So, in what ways can we be groupish in practice? Thousands of years of recorded history show that men at war are more willing to risk their lives for their comrades in the army than for any country or ideal. In the heat of battle, the “I” turns into a “we,” and if an individual dies, he lives on in the form of his comrades who survived.

We are hive creatures, but only in certain situations. Our hivemind tendencies are conditional on our surroundings. There’s a “switch” that will turn this tendency on and off—when it’s on, we’ll transcend self-interest.

Interpersonal and Inter-Social Relationships

In order to flip that switch from off to on to off again, we must be programmed to be able to put the group first. Émile Durkheim argued that humans have a group of sentiments that allow us to exist as an individual and another group of sentiments that allow us to exist as part of a group. These two groups of sentiments allow humans to exist on two different levels.

Interpersonal Relationships

The first level of sentiments allows us as individuals to coexist with other individuals. They include respect for others or frustration with others. These sentiments, which we’ll call interpersonal relationships, concern the self. They are present when our switch is flipped towards thinking selfishly.

Inter-Social Relationships

The second level of sentiments are bonds between individuals and society. They allow individuals to not only exist within a group but also abandon the idea of the self in favor of the needs of the group. When we’re on the second level, we exist more like a cog in a machine. We’ll call these sentiments inter-social relationships, and they are present when our switch is flipped towards thinking about the group, or the hive.

How to Flip the Switch

There are certain strategies that can help humans move from self-interested chimp to group-interested bee.

  1. Find Awe in Nature: Maybe, while walking in nature by yourself, you’ve felt that your daily worries melt away and you feel only awe at what’s around you. This can make you think about new directions for your life or new values to practice. Ralph Waldo Emerson described being in nature alone as a spiritual experience that allows you to get in touch with a higher self and feel as if you’re part of something larger.
  2. Take “Durkheimogens”: An Aztec practice involved taking hallucinogens to unlock this sacred realm and leave the gross, stressful world behind. These drugs, like ayahuasca or LSD, can help us have a transformative experience where we abandon our idea of the self and our daily concerns—for this, we could call them “Durkheimogens.” Many societies use hallucinogens as part of rituals that officially turn boys and girls into men and women—they are supposed to help connect participants with ancestors or gods. Studies show that hallucinogens can create unity between individuals that take them together and a feeling of unity towards the world, along with many other effects. Participants said these experiences changed their lives and their relationship to spirituality.
  3. Attend Raves: Beginning in the West in the 1980s, large groups gathered together for raves, which included a combination of loud techno and trance music, youths mixing together and dancing communally to the music, and MDMA (the aptly street-named ecstasy), a drug that gives people more sustained energy along with more feelings of love. Tony Hsieh, the creator of Zappos, explained that when he attended his first rave, he felt swept up into a spiritual experience that made him feel a connection with everyone at the event as well as everyone in the universe. It also made him lose his self-consciousness. His “I” shut down and he found the “we.”

Of course, people flip the switch in lots of other ways as well. Anything from attending a political rally to meditating can do it. Usually, the effects last a few hours or days, but people do report life-changing experiences from these switch flips.

Students in particular are often doing things that flip the switch and allow them to find greater meaning than individualism. These activities include competing on teams, putting on a play, and volunteering.

The Switch’s Biology

One biological mechanism that binds us to others is oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that prepares women for motherhood and provides other ways to motivate people into large groups. If you put a squirt of oxytocin spray into someone’s nose before a game, they’ll be more trusting. Additionally, our oxytocin levels rise when someone else shows us that they are trustworthy by keeping a promise. We are then more likely to repay their trustworthiness with trustworthiness of our own.

Levels of oxytocin also rise when people watch others suffering, feel empathy, and want to help. Oxytocin, though, only makes us want to protect our group. It doesn’t increase trust in any out-group.

Another biological mechanism that binds us is mirror neurons, or neurons that fire when we see an action performed by someone else. Studies show that if we develop empathy for someone, we can literally feel their pain. For example, in one study, three people played a game: The subject, a player who was kind during the game, and a player who was selfish. Then, each of the players including the subject put their hands on the table, where they were shocked at random. Brain scans showed that the subject’s brain responded to observing the nice player being shocked the same way it responded to the experience of being shocked himself. However, when the selfish player was shocked, the subject showed much less empathy. This shows that we don’t “mirror” others indiscriminately. Rather, we mirror, and therefore empathize with, only those who share our values—in other words, those in our “hive.”

Hives in the World

A modern corporation is the perfect example of a hive. It’s a superorganism where tasks are split up so that everyone is doing the action that contributes the most to create a greater whole. Corporations, according to the law, can act as individuals.

The benefits of corporations include the ability to scale up their production and pay their employees more while charging less for their products than smaller businesses (or “organisms”).

Some companies use various and complex carrot-and-stick approaches in an attempt to control their employees. This in turn makes them act in a Glauconian manner—they care much more about a promotion or looking good in front of the boss than actually doing work that helps the group. Companies should abandon this strategy and instead use the naturally hive-minded part of humans to their benefit.

To tap into employees’ hiving tendencies and create a cohesive organization:

The bottom line is, people should think of their employment as membership in a hive.

Hives in Politics

To Americans, the most famous political moment that activated their belief in the hive is probably John F. Kennedy’s inaugural appeal to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

The appeal to the hive, though, is certainly not limited to liberal politicians, or even ones who believe in democracy. It’s a natural fit for fascism—Mussolini used hivish appeals frequently to success in Italy. Fascists appeal to the nation as a superorganism in itself, where the individual becomes unimportant in service to national goals.

This might make you afraid of hivish philosophies. But lots of hive behavior, like dancing together and exalting each other, comes naturally to humans and actually serves to break down social class and difference. Fascist rallies were more spectacles than anything natural like this, and they excluded many citizens from the hive because they served to reinforce class and difference.

The most successful nations are ones with lots of little hives that cross with each other—someone can be part of a family unit, a workplace, a sports team outside of work, and on and on. Nations with no hives, or those with one huge hive, are much more likely to break down, because they’ll either have no connections between their citizens or one huge connection that is tenuous.

Having some competing hives, America’s founders argued, actually helps to prevent tyranny. By existing in many small hives that compete with one another, we make sure that no hive gets too powerful. And the social capital that we get from participating in civil society—bowling leagues, church groups, and many other organizations—makes us smarter and generally more successful.

The Pros (and Cons) of Groupish Behavior

In sum, we have evolved to cooperate with members of our group and prevail over members of rival groups. Given our groupish tendencies, it’s not surprising that tribal thinking is so prevalent in modern society. We were not made to love everyone equally and unconditionally—rather, we were made to feel kinship with and loyalty to those with similar traits, and our righteousness springs from this tribalism.

For some, this idea is a depressing one. But, as we’ve seen, a lot of moral good comes out of our groupish behavior. Without tribes, there would be no community and no cooperation. Our groupishness pulls us out of our self-interested individualism and, for many, provides a higher purpose.

Chapter 11: Religion and Morality

So far, we’ve discussed the importance of community in finding our foundations and our hives. One of the strongest communities—that’s sometimes dismissed as an unthinking cult by many on the left—is a religious community. Religion doesn’t exist only in churches or mosques—it’s all around us and doesn’t always have a traditional “God” at its head.

This chapter will explain that religion doesn’t always have that much to do with explaining the universe, as many people think. Rather, it provides the social fabric that binds people together.

A college football game is analogous to the community that’s built around religion. Students and alumni dress up and participate in rituals that have been around for decades if not a century. From the outside, it looks costly and purposeless if not dangerous. But thinking about it from a sociological perspective, it brings people into a hive where they’re worshiping something greater than themselves. It changes people’s experience with a school, which in turn leads to more donations and a better experience for everyone in the community.

Many people don’t understand religion because they focus on the spiritual and supernatural beliefs that come along with it. They have difficulty describing it or understanding it as a primarily social driver that brings people into a community around a belief.

The Left’s Misinterpretation of the Purpose of Religion

After the 9/11 attacks, many Americans, mostly on the right, blamed Islam as a religion that encouraged violence. In contrast, many Americans on the left maintained that Islam itself is a peaceful set of beliefs, and fundamentalism was the problem.

However, certain commentators on the left took the opportunity to attack all religious institutions, a movement that became known as “the New Atheism.” Scientists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett (along with journalist Christopher Hitchens) were the leaders of this movement. Each of them studied religion as a group of supernatural beliefs. Each argued that religion essentially took over the minds of its practitioners, duping them into rejecting facts. They based these beliefs on the assumption that the rider (reason) is in charge of the elephant (emotion).

Dennett and Dawkins both describe religions as viruses, forcing their hosts to spread them around, implying that science should root out religions like it does viruses.

Religion’s Durkheimian Model

The New Atheists are incorrect that religion is a virus. In fact, religion regularly helps society become more communal. We’ll call this the “Durkheimian Model,” because it follows Durkheim’s logic (discussed in Chapter 10) that certain beliefs and practices create community.

Religion is a self-sustaining practice that can help increase community through believing, doing, and belonging. Each sustains the other two. When you believe in a Christian God, for example, you’re more likely to join a church. This leads you to both feel a greater sense of belonging in your community and have a stronger belief in God. A sense of belonging may lead you to volunteer work with a church group and also a greater belief in both God and the institution of the church. The table below illustrates this phenomenon:

the-righteous-mind-durkheimian.png

This table flies in the face of the New Atheist understanding of religion. However, we can accept part of the New Atheists’ definition without understanding religion as a virus. Scientists who see religion as an adaptation agree with the first point of the New Atheists’ model: Religion grew as a result of the growth of cognitive abilities that led groups of humans to misinterpret the natural as supernatural.

However, in the cultural evolution period, the religions that succeeded were not necessarily the most persuasive, but the ones that made groups more cooperative. Anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich believe that religion grew because of the group competition that we’ve already discussed. Having something that binds your group together will make your group more successful, so groups with less effective religions would develop or adopt more effective ones.

Gods also helped to create moral societies: They punished bad behavior and rewarded good behavior. If people think someone can always see and judge them, as we’ve learned, they’ll be much more likely to act in a morally upstanding way.

Anthropologist Richard Sosis studied communes in the 19th century to prove the point that religion binds: Of those based around a religious concept, 39 percent were functioning after 20 years. Of those that weren’t religious, only 6 percent functioned after 20 years. The sacrifices that the communes demanded were much more successful when they were sacralized.

To put it another way: All of the practices that the New Atheists wanted to root out actually helped solve the problem of cooperation without kinship.

Example: Bali Rice Farming

Biologist David Sloan Wilson used the example of rice farming in Bali to explain this concept. Rice farming requires hundreds of people to operate a complicated and large irrigation system that has to be drained and filled at just the right time.

In part of Bali, the rainwater comes down a volcano through the soft volcanic rock. The Balinese, over a period of centuries, carved lots of pools into the mountain and created irrigation systems out of them. And then at the top of the volcano, they built a huge temple to worship the “Goddess of the Waters.” They had a high priest and 24 others staff the temple.

Their social organization was something called a subak, which was a group of families that practiced democracy. There were a lot of small subaks within the larger system, so at every fork in the irrigation system, they built a temple. All the subaks downstream of these forks would worship the god in that temple (ultimately, this totaled hundreds of different gods and temples). This created a shared community amongst the Balinese and allowed them to share water and other resources more equitably and resolve disputes.

We can understand each of the gods in this system as a “maypole.” If there was only one person dancing around a maypole, they’d probably look ridiculous. But add in many more, and the maypole dance becomes a social function—people can achieve more together than they can alone, and religion provides the social fabric to keep people together.

50,000 years is more than long enough for gene mutations and evolution. And evidence shows that 50,000 years ago, humans were performing some sort of religious rituals. In that time, group selection worked in favor of religion because religion helped with group cooperation. As such, our groups, our brain chemistry, and our religions have evolved to be bound together tightly.

If humans have been evolving alongside religion for thousands of years, it’s hard to ask them to forsake it immediately, even when it becomes clear that the supernatural principles don’t have any basis in fact.

Religious Altruism

The New Atheists say religion is the root of a lot of evil in the world. A lot of religious believers say that atheists are immoral. Surveys show that religious people give more money to charity, but are no more likely to actually help strangers when presented the chance.

What religion does do, and what we should expect from the hive mentality, is that it makes people more generous within their own communities. They’ll volunteer or give a lot of their income through their religious organizations.

The question is whether religions create bonds that allow people to turn their back on, or even prey on, people who aren’t in their group. Studies from Putnam and David Campbell show that actually, religious people are more likely to give money to any sort of charity and are more generous with their time. Referring back to the ideas of belief, belonging, and doing, they are more likely to “do” because of their belief and their sense of belonging.

In Putnam and Campbell’s study, they asked various questions about religious beliefs, like “do you believe in hell?” Or “how often do you pray?” How respondents answered these questions didn’t change how much or little they cared for others. In other words, being more committed to religious beliefs does not change how generous religious people are. The only association that they found between religious people and being more community-oriented was how comfortable religious believers felt in their religious communities. The group activities that people who are religious—no matter their religion—engage in, and the friendships that religion helps to foster, promote selfless behavior.

Demonization

Religion thus goes hand in hand with groupishness. And of course, certain kinds of extreme groupishness, like fascism, are morally wrong. However, much of what secular people blame religion for is not the fault of belief. For example, religion does not lead directly to suicide bombing. Rather, it is an occupying force destroying sacred bonds or principles that lead to these bombings. People with intense loyalty to principles they see destroyed agree to give up their lives for what they consider to be the good of the hive. Agreeing to give up one’s life will only happen when the individual has been subsumed by the hive. Religion doesn’t have to be the leading ideology—think of the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka—but it often is, because religion can create the kind of sticky bonds and total attachment to the hive that are necessary for this sort of violent action. In this way, religion can become a sort of accessory to violence.

On the whole, though, religions provide frameworks for moral behavior. People who are atheists rely a bit more on the rider than the elephant because they don’t have these strong frameworks. Relying on our own rider can sound appealing, but we have evolved to work best in shared moral matrices. When we follow our own riders rather than shared morals, it can be harder to maintain the norms of society, and everyone’s happiness is likely to decrease.

Defining Morality

Based on all of the information we’ve learned, we can finally define morality.

Haidt argues that moral systems work to advance the interests of the group over the self and make society possible. They use established practices, societal norms, and agreed-upon values and virtues to succeed.

This definition is complex, but you can see how what we’ve discussed already add up to this definition. It’s also important to note that this is functionalist: Morality is defined here by what it does rather than what is moral.

In contrast, when thinking about definitions of morality, a lot of philosophers are more concerned with a normative definition than a descriptive one. They want to know what is moral, not what people think is moral. Consider deontology or utilitarianism. This book, though, has been descriptive, and thus so is the definition.

Utilitarian societies use this definition, or something like it, to build society. It’s an impossible task to decide how people should live in the privacy of their homes from a normative perspective. But when considering how governments make and implement laws, especially in Western democracies, utilitarianism is the most just system. All laws should aim towards producing the most total good.

Chapter 12: How to Make Disagreements Respectful and Productive

People’s groupish behavior, along with their commitment to their moral matrices, can lead them into a blind defense of an ideology or a political party. This chapter is about how we can make better arguments and have more productive conversations with one another.

There’s significant evidence that we are understanding each other worse than ever. America is polarizing rapidly, with the gap widening between political opinions on the left and the right. There’s been a decline in the number of people who self-identify as centrist and a corresponding rise in those who identify as liberal and conservative. So, how can we learn to talk to one another better?

A Note on Political Diversity: This chapter will focus on the liberal to conservative scale and the psychology of “liberals” and “conservatives.” Many people in the U.S. don’t characterize themselves as a member of either major party and don’t reduce ideology to one dimension. Most people, though, are able to place themselves on the liberal to conservative axis, even if they don’t identify as a Republican or a Democrat.

Finding Our Preferred Moral Matrix

Before we can understand how liberals and conservatives can talk to one another more productively, we need to explore how liberals and conservatives develop their ideology (or their understanding of how we should order society).

Political scientists thought for a long time that it was mostly your upbringing that determined your political ideology. But twins brought up in two different households are more likely to develop a similar ideology than unrelated siblings brought up in the same household. So, political ideology is at least partially innate.

There are three big steps in understanding how we form our ideology:

1. Genes create brain chemistry: Scientists have found that liberals and conservatives have some different genes in their brains: These are mostly related to neurotransmitters that monitor and determine our response to fear or threat. Conservatives respond more strongly to threats of danger than liberals, whereas liberals are more interested in new experiences or novelty. This is one way that we move from genes to politics: Genes develop brains that respond differently to sensors in the world. In turn, these genes help to determine politics.

2. Different traits move children in different directions: Personality and ideology develop based on innate and learned traits. We’ll discuss two here.

3. We create our own stories: To make sense of our lives, we construct narratives. Even though these narratives are post hoc, they still shape people’s lives and the decisions that they make. Consider this story from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards’ biography. He describes how when he was young, he was well-behaved and part of a choir. The choir, run by the school, frequently took him out of his classes to go to various recitals and competitions. But once he hit puberty, the choir director was no longer interested in the kids, and the kids in choir were all told they’d have to repeat a year of school, because they had missed so much. He told himself that he’d spend as long as it took trying to burn that ridiculous system to the ground. He told himself a story based on his experience that resulted in never voting for a Tory (a British conservative) who stood for that sort of authority without rebellion.

Liberal and Conservative Stories

Conservatives and liberals in America also have different foundational stories about the country.

Conservatives since the Reagan era argue that America used to be a beacon of liberty, but liberals have attempted to ruin it by creating bureaucracy and tax burdens that stunt growth while also opposing faith and God. They took money from good, hard-working people and gave it to lazy people living on welfare while lionizing evil promiscuity and a “gay lifestyle.”

Liberals argue that there used to be dictatorial, oppressive regimes that governed the world, which virtuous people—through time and effort—overthrew. They then founded democracies and started fighting for equal rights for all, creating laws and government programs that could benefit everyone.

The conservative narrative is the heroic beating back of hordes attempting to overrun their lifestyle and the liberal narrative is the heroic triumph over those more powerful.

The conservative narrative relies on a little bit of the care foundation and a lot of all five of the other moral foundations. The liberal narrative relies on only the care, fairness, and liberty foundations.

Conservatives can more easily understand the liberal narrative because all of the foundations that the liberals rely on they rely on as well.

Liberals have a harder time understanding the conservative narrative because they can’t understand the foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. They believe that these foundations are often immoral: Liberals argue loyalty to country leads to exclusion of immigrants and many non-white Americans. Belief in authority is congruous with belief in oppression. And sanctity is a religious argument that often provides the foundation for homophobia.

Blind Spots

Liberals, though, have significant blind spots when it comes to understanding conservatives. Just like liberals, conservatives are interested in creating the best possible society.

Haidt realized this while reading a volume of Conservatism, a compendium of conservative thought. The conservative intellectuals in Conservatism (who Haidt believes are different from the modern Republican Party) argued much of what this book argues: Humans are imperfect and overconfident, and so we create theories of the world and morality based on reason rather than an understanding of history and humans’ intuition.

Conservatives argue that people need outside constraints to behave properly and thrive. Without them, people will cheat, and social capital, or trust, will begin to decline.

Conservatives understand the value of moral capital, or the resources necessary to sustain and grow a moral community. Think about a commune without the religious aspect: Communes that promote self-expression and tolerance more than loyalty might attract more new members, but they would have a harder time surviving than those that live by strict regulations that better suppress selfishness.

Moral capital is a mixed bag. It leads to suppressing selfishness, but it also leads to suppressing dissent. You can often find it in fascist nations or cults.

However, when considering changes to society, always consider how they will change a society's moral capital. This is a blind spot for the left: It is why communist revolution often ends in despotism and why liberal reforms are often ineffective. Liberalism changes too much too quickly in the goal of bringing about freedom and equal opportunity. Conservatism can better preserve moral capital, but they fail to see the need for changes to our society to move with the times or protect the vulnerable.

Yin/Yang Politics

Sometimes, each side has points that the other can learn from. For the purpose of considering some of these points in modern American society, we’ll split up conservatives into social conservatives and libertarians, who have different ideologies and goals from one another.

First, we’ll identify the most sacred principle of liberals: caring for and freeing victims of oppression.

Libertarian counterpoint: Markets work. Imagine if we had the sort of multileveled, partially government subsidized and controlled system for buying groceries that we have for health care in the U.S. Premiums for buying groceries would go up, and there would be no way of properly regulating prices from the store. Some people wouldn’t be able to afford groceries, the store would have no reason not to charge absurd markups to the government, and before you know it, a can of peas would cost $30 for the government, with our tax dollars, to buy. It is only working markets that could provide healthcare at the lowest possible price, just as they do with groceries. There’s an open market for LASIK surgery, for example, which has driven prices down by 80 percent since the surgery debuted. We should listen better when libertarians talk about the “spontaneous order” of allowing people to choose. Liberals sometimes prefer the design of socialist economies, which can lead to utilitarian disaster, as people don’t cooperate in large groups when they think others are free riding.

Social conservative counterpoint: Don’t destroy the hive to help the bees. Large scale societies are already miraculous achievements. We’re products of multilevel selection, and we need groups to continue to succeed, even if some groups are exclusionary. If we destroy all groups, we destroy all moral capital. In one study, Robert Putnam found that ethnic diversity in communities leads to a reduction in social capital. Ethnic diversity reduces bridging capital, or trust between groups, as well as bonding capital, or trust within groups. Liberals’ wish to help those least fortunate often leads to changes that can weaken groups, traditions, and moral capital. As an example, allowing students to sue their teachers and schools has led to an erosion of authority in schools that harms the poor most.

Finding Civility

Haidt offers three recommendations for improving bipartisan collaboration in government:

  1. Change how we run primary elections.
  2. Change how we draw electoral districts.
  3. Change how candidates can raise money.

However, Haidt primarily focuses on how individuals who disagree can find civility and common ground. We live in more polarized areas than we used to—in 1976, only around a quarter of Americans lived in a county that voted overwhelmingly (by a margin of 20% or over) for one presidential candidate. By 2008, that number was almost half. These counties maintain distinct cultural differences. In the 2008 election, 89% of counties with a Whole Foods voted for Obama, while 62% of counties with a Cracker Barrel voted for McCain.

It’s easier to live with people who share our moral matrices, and as we’ve discovered people with the same moral matrices regularly have the same political beliefs. Even if we can’t find like-minded people in our communities, we can now easily find them online. We think increasingly that the other group is blind when talking about politics, but truthfully, everyone is blind when discussing “sacred objects” like political candidates or policies. If we can remember our own blindness, though, we may be less inclined to judge the blindness of others. When you disagree with someone else on a moral or political issue, first consider which of the six moral foundations are at the heart of the issue. Then, try to practice empathy. If you have a friendly interaction with someone with different moral matrices, you’re much more likely to understand them better. You might not always change your mind, but you will respect their opinion more.