The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Mark Twain once said that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.25

“A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.

It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”30

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.1 To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel—sometimes in horror—at your inability to control your own actions.

“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”2

Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. That was Hume’s project, with his philosophically sacrilegious claim that reason was nothing but the servant of the passions.

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of murdering your parents … you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC.

WHY ATHEISTS WON’T SELL THEIR SOULS

My early Jeffersonian dual-process model. Emotion and reasoning are separate paths to moral judgment, although moral judgment can sometimes lead to post hoc reasoning as well.

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. So what do you think about this? Was it wrong for them to have sex?

Jennifer works in a hospital pathology lab. She’s a vegetarian for moral reasons—she think it’s wrong to kill animals. But one night she has to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she thinks it’s a waste to throw away perfectly edible flesh. So she cuts off a piece of flesh and takes it home. Then she cooks it and eats it.

Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.

Given the judgments (themselves produced by the non-conscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.33

moral judgment is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgment. The crucial distinction is really between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning.

Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds for 500 million years, so they’re very good at what they do, like software that has been improved through thousands of product cycles. When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider (language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.

Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm.42

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog.

The first principle is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.

We have strong feelings that tell us in clear and uncertain terms that some things simply cannot be done and that other things simply must be done. But it’s not obvious how to make sense of these feelings, and so we, with the help of some especially creative philosophers, make up a rationally appealing story [about rights].

Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.

Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer?

Appearance is usually far more important than reality.

A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one’s choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choice to others, they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the “right” choice.14

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.17

Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.

Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST

4. REASONING (AND GOOGLE) CAN TAKE YOU WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO

Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that’s right for you.

As an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It’s the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the “delusion” of believing in gods (for the New Atheists).

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful, and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51

We wanted to know why the emotion of disgust—which clearly originated as an emotion that keeps us away from dirty and contaminating things—can now be triggered by some moral violations (such as betrayal or child abuse) but not by others (such as robbing a bank or cheating on one’s taxes).17

Given Hume’s concerns about the limits of reasoning, he believed that philosophers who tried to reason their way to moral truth without looking at human nature were no better than theologians who thought they could find moral truth revealed in sacred texts. Both were transcendentalists.7

Autism has bedeviled psychiatric classifiers for decades because it is not a single, discrete disease. It’s usually described as a “spectrum” disorder because people can be more or less autistic, and it’s not clear where to draw the line between those who have a serious mental illness and those who are just not very good at reading other people. At the extreme end of the spectrum, autistic people are “mind-blind.”12 They are missing the social-cognitive software that the rest of us use to guess the intentions and desires of other people.

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”22

Anyone with access to an armchair can sit down and generate what Rudyard Kipling called “just-so stories”—fantastical accounts of how the camel got a hump and the elephant got a trunk.