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

by Jonathan Haidt

They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere,

liberals and conservatives are like yin and yang—both are “necessary elements of a healthy state of political life,” as John Stuart Mill put it.

Liberals are experts in care; they are better able to see the victims of existing social arrangements, and they continually push us to update those arrangements and invent new ones.

governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms,

some big problems really can be solved by regulation.

libertarians are right that markets are miraculous

(at least when their externalities and other failures can be addressed),

social conservatives are right that you don’t usually help the bees b...

Manic...

Morality binds and blinds.

It binds us into ideological teams

It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have som...

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.I

the social intuitionist model,

“rationalist de...

Hume

Gl...

a small rider on a very large elephant.

There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

India, and how it helped me to step out of my moral matrix

the righteous mind is like a tongue with six ...

Moral Foundation...

YourMora...

Richard S...

Emile Du...

suspicion of moral monists.

Isaiah Berlin

not a relativist; I

plurality of ideals,

There is not an infinity of [values]:

if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it

morality binds and blinds.

multilevel selection,

Homo d...

We are selfish and we are...

90 percent chimp and 10 p...

hive switch,

This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness.

We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult—but not impossible—to connect with those who live in other matrices,

When separated, the two principles are: Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship, and moral thinking is for social doing.

My conclusion at graduation was that psychology and literature would have been better fields to help a young person on an existential quest. But philosophy has gotten better since then—see Wolf 2010.

Empiricism has two different meanings.

Carol Gilligan

“ethic of care,”

Martin H...

emp...

moral dumbfounding.

Daniel Kahneman has long called these two kinds of cognition “system 1” (the elephant) and “system 2” (the rider). See Kahneman 2011 for a highly readable account of thinking and decision making from a two-system perspective.

“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing”

Susan Fiske (1993) applied James’s functionalism to social cognition, abbreviating his dictum as “thinking is for doing.”