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

by Jonathan Haidt

I had to produce a string of publications in top journals within five years or I’d be turned down for tenure and forced to leave UVA.

it’s obvious that people were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally. Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

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

the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.36

Emotions are a kind of information processing.

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.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”).41 I chose an elephant rather than a horse because elephants are so much bigger—and smarter—than horses. 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. The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefore it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new technologies, which can be deployed to help the elephant reach its goals and sidestep disasters. And, most important, the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify ...

Intuitions come first and reasoning is usually produced after a judgment is made, in order to influence other people.

intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use links 3 and 4 of the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions, not new rationales. Dale Carnegie was one of the greatest elephant-whisperers of all time. In his classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie repeatedly urged readers to avoid direct confrontations. Instead he advised people to “begin in a friendly way,” to “smile,” to “be a good listener,” and to “never say ‘you’re wrong.’ ” The persuader’s goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one’s own case. Carnegie was urging readers to use link 3, the social persuasion link, to prepare the ground before attempting to use link 4, the reasoned persuasion link.

“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.”50

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.

then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me. I had long teased my wife for altering stories to make them more dramatic when she told them to friends, but it took twenty years of studying moral psychology to see that I altered my stories too.

Intuitions Come First.

Strategic Reasoning Second).

the fundamental question of animal life: Approach or avoid?

affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is.8 These flashes occur so rapidly that they precede all other thoughts about the thing we’re looking at. You can feel affective primacy in action the next time you run into someone you haven’t seen in many years. You’ll usually know within a second or two whether you liked or disliked the person, but it can take much longer to remember who the person is or how you know each other.

This effect is called “affective priming” because the first word triggers a flash of affect that primes the mind to go one way or the other.12 It’s like getting the elephant to lean slightly to the right or the left, in anticipation of walking to the right or the left. The flash kicks in within 200 milliseconds, and it lasts for about a second beyond that if there’s no other jolt to back it up.13 If you see the second word within that brief window of time, and if the second word has the same valence, then you’ll be able to respond extra quickly because your mind is already leaning that way. But if the first word primes your mind for a negative evaluation (hate) and I then show you a positive word (sunshine), it’ll take you about 250 milliseconds longer to respond because you have to undo the lean toward negativity.

The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next. Intuitions come first.20

subjects who are asked to wash their hands with soap before filling out questionnaires become more moralistic about issues related to moral purity

Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths. Most are not violent, but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes, such as serial murder, serial rape, and the killing of police officers.

There’s the unusual stuff that psychopaths do—impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood—and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals.

psychopaths don’t show emotions that indicate that they care about other people. Psychopaths seem to live in a world of objects, some of which happen to walk around on two legs.

brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.32 The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice. The rider is perfectly normal—he does strategic reasoning quite well. But the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.

I have argued that the Humean model (reason is a servant) fits the facts better than the Platonic model (reason could and should rule) or the Jeffersonian model (head and heart are co-emperors). But when Hume said that reason is the “slave” of the passions, I think he went too far.

The rider evolved to serve the elephant, but it’s a dignified partnership, more like a lawyer serving a client than a slave serving a master. Good lawyers do what they can to help their clients, but they sometimes refuse to go along with requests. Perhaps the request is impossible (such as finding a reason to condemn Dan, the student council president—at least for most of the people in my hypnosis experiment). Perhaps the request is self-destructive (as when the elephant wants a third piece of cake, and the rider refuses to go along and find an excuse). The elephant is far more powerful than the rider, but it is not an absolute dictator.

The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.

When discussions are hostile, the odds of cha...

But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments.

people who were forced to reflect on the good argument for two minutes actually did become substantially more tolerant

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Plato’s Republic—one of the most influential works in the Western canon—is an extended argument that you should pick heads, for your own good. It is better to be than to seem virtuous.

reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth.

Glaucon was right: people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.

Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability.

When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.

when left to their own devices, people show the usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that has been documented in so much decision-making research.12 But when people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically.

conscious reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery. But Tetlock adds that we are also trying to persuade ourselves.

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

Few of us will ever run for office, yet most of the people we meet belong to one or more constituencies that we want to win over.

“the sociometer operates at a nonconscious and preattentive level to scan the social environment for any and all indications that one’s relational value is low or declining.”16 The sociometer is part of the elephant.

The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.17

If you want to see post hoc reasoning in action, just watch the press secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it.

that’s one of the rider’s main jobs: to be the full-time in-house press secretary for the elephant.

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

IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side.

Being asked directly removes plausible deniability; it would take a direct lie to keep the money. As a result, people are three times more likely to be honest.

Predictably Irrational,

When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.26 People didn’t try to get away with as much as they could. Rather, when Ariely gave them anything like the invisibility of the ring of Gyges, they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty. The bottom line is that in lab experiments that give people invisibility combined with plausible deniability, most people cheat.

The difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning.