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

by Jonathan Haidt

Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Liberty/oppression, but each political faction cares in a different way.

liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g., racial minorities, children, animals), and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong.

Conservatives, in contrast, hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order...

The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma.

Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily—once fairness is restricted to proportionality.

A recent study even found that liberal professors give out a narrower range of grades than do conservative professors.

The remaining three foundations—Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation—show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them.

Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six.

We added the Liberty/oppression foundation, which makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination. It triggers an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants. This foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as the don’t-tread-on-me and give-me-liberty antigovernment anger of libertarians and some conservatives. • We modified the Fairness foundation to make it focus more strongly on proportionality. The Fairness foundation begins with the psychology of reciprocal altruism, but its duties expanded once humans created gossiping and punitive moral communities. Most people have a deep intuitive concern for the law of karma—they want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to their deeds.

Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when it is the Democratic Party that wants to redistribute money more evenly?

rural and working-class voters were in fact voting for their moral interests.

In Part I of this book I presented the first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. In Part II, I described those intuitions in detail while presenting the second principle: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

But I was a professor, and professors don’t do such things. Flag waving and nationalism are for conservatives. Professors are liberal globetrotting universalists, reflexively wary of saying that their nation is better than other nations.

I’ve argued that Glaucon was right and that we care more about looking good than about truly being good.2 Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others.

Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic.

Our righteous minds were shaped by kin selection plus reciprocal altruism augmented by gossip and reputation management.

But it’s also true that people are groupish. We love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities.

When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups.4

In this chapter I’ll argue that group selection was falsely convicted and unfairly banished.

This new evidence leads us directly to the third and final principle of moral psychology: Morality binds and blinds. I will suggest that human nature is mostly selfish, but with a groupish overlay that resulted from the fact that natural selection works at multiple levels simultaneously.

at the same time, groups compete with groups, and that competition favors groups composed of true team players—those who are willing to cooperate and work for the good of the group, even when they could do better by slacking, cheating, or leaving the group.

But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised? It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those who were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater numbers than the children of selfish and treacherous parents belonging to the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.

Darwin grasped the basic logic of what is now known as multilevel selection.

When groups compete, the cohesive, cooperative group usually wins. But within each group, selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead.

A gene for suicidal self-sacrifice would be favored by group-level selection (it would help the team win), but it would be so strongly opposed by selection at the individual level that such a trait could evolve only in species such as bees, where competition within the hive has been nearly eliminated and almost all selection is group selection.

Darwin proposed a series of “probable steps” by which humans evolved to the point where there could be groups of team players in the first place.

The first step was the “social instincts.”

The second step was

reciprocity.

But the most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.”

Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious nature.

In a real army, which sacralizes honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children. He’s the most likely to get beaten up, left behind, or shot in the back for committing sacrilege. And if he does make it home alive, his reputation will repel women and potential employers.

Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.

In 1966, this loose thinking was brought to a halt, along with almost all thinking about group selection.

In Adaptation and Natural Selection (published in 1966), Williams told biologists how to think clearly about adaptation. He saw natural selection as a design process.

Richard Dawkins did the same thing in his 1976 best seller The Selfish Gene, granting that group selection is possible but then debunking apparent cases of group-related adaptations.

In social psychology, for example, the leading explanation of fairness (known as “equity theory”) was based on four axioms, the first of which was “Individuals will try to maximize their outcomes.”

All acts of apparent altruism, cooperation, and even simple fairness had to be explained, ultimately, as covert forms of self-interest.

Morality, said Williams, is “an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability.”

I disagree. Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We’re one-of-a-kind freaks of nature who occasionally—even if rarely—can be as selfless and team-spirited as bees.

The 9/11 attacks activated several of these group-related adaptations in my mind. The attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and, yes, supporting the leader.

The rally-round-the-flag reflex is just one example of a groupish mechanism.32 It is exactly the sort of mental mechanism you’d expect to find if we humans were shaped by group selection in the way that Darwin described.

They think that anything that looks like a group-related adaptation will—if you look closely enough—turn out to be an adaptation for helping individuals outcompete their neighbors within the same group, not an adaptation for helping groups outcompete other groups.

For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself.

But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.

A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes.

Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share.

The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors

to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).