Why Do They Vote That Way?: from The Righteous Mind (A Vintage Short)

by Jonathan Haidt

All political movements and parties are morally motivated. (That doesn’t mean that they are all morally right or equally right; it just means that their motives are, in part, to improve society as they understand it.)

You can’t understand complicated social or political issues until you have listened to people who do not share your own preconceptions. (Each side or “team” has pre-structured the issue for its members in ways that guarantee that they will be blind to some aspects of the problem.)

Principle #1: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning comes second.

People typically make moral judgments quickly—often immediately (as you can tell if you attend to your own reactions while you listen to your friends gossiping).

We then make up reasons slowly and laboriously, in order to justify our initial intuitive judgment.

This is why moral and political arguments can be so frustrating. The people you are arguing with put out a reason in support of their side, you utterly refute that reason, and yet they never say “hey, you’re right!”—they just move on and make up another reason. The reasoning was an ...

A person's mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider (controlled processing, including reasoning) sitting on top of a very large elephant (automatic processing, ...

Each of us may think that our “rider” is in charge; we think that we come to our views by carefully weighing the evidence on all sides. Yet when we argue with others, it often seem...

Others seem to be emotionally committed to a position, working hard to generate post-hoc reasons to justify that position. Of course,...

The key to understanding politics, partisanship, and voting is to understand the elephant. It is very hard to change someone’s mind by hitting them with arguments, logic, and data, if the...

The key to persuasion is to speak to the ...

if you look closely at the greatest and most persuasive speeches in history, they all speak directly to the elephant, while also making good and fair arguments.

To be socially or politically influential, you must understand and acknowledge people’s values.

Principle #2: The moral mind is like a tongue with si...

What makes something a moral issue? What makes something morally right or wrong? Many philosophers have tried to offer definitions of the moral domain. An influential one in psychology is that morality concerns issues of harm, rights, and fairness. If an action doesn’t hurt someo...

morality in many societies covered far more than just matters of harm, rights and justice. It seemed to involve a very wide and variable set of virtues. Yet at the same time, the issues that came up and the underlying logics of hierarchy, reciprocity, purification, and other psychological constructs were often surprisingly similar across different nations, religions, and political parties.

There was clearly something innate or pan-human about morality, and something learned and culturally constructed. (Note that “innate” doesn’t mean that something is “hardwired” or unchangeable. Innate means “structured in advance of experience.”

The human mind is not a blank slate, and evolution gave us a “first draft” of the moral mind, but culture and l...

Here is the tentative conclusion we came to in the first draft of Moral Foundations Theory: there are five strong candidates for being the basic and universal foundations of human morality. The five original foundations were:

Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of “reciprocal altruism” described by the biologist Robert Trivers in 1971. People are strongly motivated to play “tit for tat.” This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of pat...

Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority, resp...

Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temp...

we all knew how easy it is for people to reach their desired conclusions).

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

the standard explanations that psychologists had offered for decades: Conservatives are conservative because they were raised by overly strict parents, or because they are inordinately afraid of change, novelty, and complexity, or because they suffer from existential fears and therefore cling to a simple worldview with no shades of gray.17 These approaches all had one feature in common: they used psychology to explain away conservatism. They made it unnecessary for liberals to take conservative ideas seriously because these ideas are caused by bad childhoods or ugly personality traits.

I suggested a very different approach: start by assuming that conservatives are just as sincere as liberals,

All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.”

A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expres...

If your moral matrix rests entirely on the Care and Fairness foundations, then it’s hard to hear the sacred overtones in America’s unofficial motto: E pluribus unum (from many, one). By “sacred” I mean the concept at the heart of the Sanctity foundation, which you can see operating in nearly all religions. It’s the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events with infinite value, particularly those ideas, objects, and events that bind a group together into a single entity. It's the ability to make something holy, and then feel anger when someone desecrates what you and your group revere. The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth.20 Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the “American civil religion.”22 The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America’s heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum.

In the remainder of the essay I advised Democrats to stop dismissing conservatism as a pathology and start thinking about morality beyond care and fairness. I urged them to close the sacredness gap between the two parties by making greater use of the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, not just in their “messaging,” but in how they think about public policy and the best interests of the nation.

Is the passionate anger people feel toward bullies and oppressors the same as the anger they feel toward cheaters?

The desire for equality seems to be more closely related to the psychology of liberty and oppression than to the psychology of reciprocity and exchange.

we added a provisional sixth foundation—Liberty/oppression.

Humans are, like our primate ancestors, innately equipped to live in dominance hierarchies that can be quite brutal.

Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary.

“innate” refers to the first draft of the mind.

American conservatives, therefore, sacralize the word liberty, not the word equality.

Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. When the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.

We hate to see people take without giving. We want to see cheaters and slackers “get what’s coming to them.” We want the law of karma to run its course, and we’re willing to help enforce it.

But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.

The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.

People often want equality of outcomes, but that is because it is so often the case that people’s inputs were equal. When people divide up money, or any other kind of reward, equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality. When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others—or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing—most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.

The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations.

These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society.

Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more.