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

by Jonathan Haidt

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

“affective primacy.”

Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).

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 These flashes occur so rapidly that t...

1980 social psychologist Robert Zajonc (the name rhymes with “science”)

The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is a basic principle of advertising.

Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual-process

process model in which...

“feeling” is the first process.10 It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behavior). The second process—thinking—is an evolutio...

the same as Wilson’s:

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

each taste bud on the tongue—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory

Morality

There’s The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are

We humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods.