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

by Jonathan Haidt

• The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. • You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment. • The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win

friends and influence people. That’s why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You’ll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth. • Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.

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

Thalia hypnotized people to feel a flash of disgust whenever they saw a

certain word (take for half of the subjects; often for the others).

Half of our subjects read that Dan “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion.” The other half read the same story except that Dan “often picks topics” that appeal to professors and students.

We predicted that subjects who felt a flash of disgust while reading this story would have to overrule their gut feelings. To condemn Dan would be bizarre.

Most of our subjects did indeed say that Dan’s actions were fine. But a third of the subjects who had found their code word in the story still follo...

“Dan is a popularity-seeking snob” and “I don’t know, it just seems like he’s up to something.”

I disliked being criticized, and I had felt a flash of negativity by the time Jayne had gotten to her third word (“Can you not …”). Even before I knew why she was criticizing me, I knew I disagreed with her (because intuitions come first).

It’s true that I had eaten breakfast, given Max his first bottle, and let Andy out for his first walk, but these events had all happened at separate times. Only when my wife criticized me did I merge them into a composite image of a harried father with too few hands, and I created this

fabrication by the time she had completed her one-sentence criticism (“… counter where I make baby food?”). I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.

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.5

Jesus and Buddha were right, and in this chapter and the next one I’ll show you how our automatic self-righteousness works. It begins with rapid and compelling intuitions (that’s link 1 in the social intuitionist model), and it continues on with post hoc reasoning, done for socially strategic purposes (links 2 and 3).

Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit to the self, and then adjust behavior to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad.

all in order to optimize the brain’s answer to the fundamental question of animal life: Approach or avoid?

Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something.

Wundt said that 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

may seem odd to ask people to rate how much they like foreign words and meaningless squiggles, but people can do it because almost everything we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect.

More important, Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is a basic principle of advertising.

The second process—thinking—is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation.

thinking is the rider; affect is the elephant.

The thinking system is not equipped to lead—it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen—bu...

The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans even slightly to the left, as though preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and starts preparing to assist the elephant on its imminent leftward journey. The rider loses interest in everything off to the right.

flower–happiness hate–sunshine love–cancer cockroach–lonely It’s absurdly easy, but imagine if I asked you to do it on a computer, where I can flash the first word in each pair for 250 milliseconds (a quarter of a second, just long enough to read it) and then I immediately display the second word. In that case we’d find that it takes you longer to make your value judgment for sunshine and cancer than for happiness and lonely.

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.

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.

Would it affect your response speed if I used photographs of black people and white people as the primes?

Most people turn out to have negative implicit associations with many social groups,

such as black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly.

Juries are more likely to acquit

attractive defendants, and when beautiful people are convicted, judges give them lighter sentences, on average.

He found that the candidate that people judged more competent was the one who actually won the race about two-thirds of the time.

People’s snap judgments of the candidates’ physical attractiveness and overall likability were not as good predictors of victory, so these competence judgments were not just based on an overall feeling of positivity.

And strangely, when Todorov forced people to make their competence judgments after flashing the pair of pictures on the screen for just a tenth of a second—not long enough to let their eyes fixate on each image—their snap judgments of competence predicted the real outcomes just as well.

One way to reach the elephant is through its trunk.

Alex Jordan, a grad student at Stanford, came up with the idea of asking people to make moral judgments while he secretly tripped their disgust alarms.

people made harsher judgments when they were breathing in foul air.

Other researchers have found the same effect by asking subjects to fill out questionnaires after drinking bitter versus sweet drinks.

When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it.

subjects who are asked to wash their hands with soap before filling out questionnaires become more moralistic about issues related to moral purity (such as pornography and drug use).

immorality makes people want to get clean.

People who are asked to recall their own moral

transgressions, or merely to copy by hand an account of someone else’s moral transgression, find themselves thinking about cleanliness more often, and wa...

Immorality makes us feel physically dirty, and cleansing ourselves can sometimes make us more concerned about guarding our moral purity.

Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.

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.

Psychopaths do have some emotions. When Hare asked one man if he ever felt his heart pound or stomach churn, he responded: “Of course! I’m not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight.”29

The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous. Psychopaths learn to say whatever gets them what they want.