Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind

  • [[Moral foundations]]
  • [[Understanding people]]

Kindle Highlights: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Highlights

Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. — location: 64

human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental. — location: 73

an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. — location: 83

Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. — location: 93

intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. — location: 95

there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. — location: 108

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. — location: 180

If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate? Whatever — location: 201

rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves. — location: 204

Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences. — location: 215

Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development. — location: 230

reasoning about the social world, and this progression matched up well with the stages Piaget had found in children’s reasoning about the physical world. — location: 239

the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. — location: 259

it was inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secular, questioning, and egalitarian. — location: 272

Children recognize that rules about clothing, food, and many other aspects of life are social conventions, which are arbitrary and changeable to some extent.12 — location: 283

Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as rules related to “justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” — location: 288

They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. — location: 292

groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies. — location: 316

morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups. — location: 323

There must be something beyond rationalism. — location: 353

societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. — location: 365

Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the — location: 366

Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom. — location: 412

distinction between morals and mere conventions is not a tool that children everywhere use — location: 413

it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It — location: 540

I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach — location: 543

Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. — location: 562

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings? — location: 657

you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC. But Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With — location: 687

reasoning requires the passions. — location: 698

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind. — location: 799

you cant change minds thriugh logic, only changing emotion

judgment and justification are separate processes. — location: 830

“seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” “Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. — location: 835

harmless-taboo stories were like Muller-Lyer illusions: they still felt wrong, even after you had measured the amount of harm involved and agreed that the stories were harmless. — location: 852

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. — location: 861

Emotions are a kind of information processing. — location: 876

The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, — location: 896

Reason is the servant of the intuitions. — location: 904

We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.43 Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments — location: 913

Henry Ford to express it: “If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.” — location: 946

moral and political arguments because — location: 948

these two argument types arer special

done for socially strategic purposes — location: 1025

they “reduce the universe of alternatives” available to later thinking. — location: 1055

and as your elephant sways back and forth throughout the day, you find yourself liking and trusting the people around you who sway in sync with you. — location: 1092

we use “affect as information.” — location: 1130

Moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant. — location: 1148

But the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass. — location: 1172

The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. — location: 1260

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. — location: 1262

affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, — location: 1263

quick affective flashes don’t last — location: 1285

people who were forced to reflect on the good argument for two minutes actually did become substantially more tolerant — location: 1287

street. — location: 1293

make forcing self to question initial judgement a habit

the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, — location: 1350

conscious reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery. — location: 1397

IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. — location: 1478

“people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.” — location: 1480

the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit. — location: 1511

self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. — location: 1558

Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive. — location: 1607

expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps — location: 1626

if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. — location: 1646

only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. — location: 1702

that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic — location: 1707

WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. — location: 1709

The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. — location: 1712

Most people think holistically (seeing the whole context and the relationships among parts), but WEIRD people think more analytically — location: 1724

There’s more to morality than harm and fairness — location: 1740

autonomy, community, and divinity. — location: 1762

many moral matrices coexist within each nation. — location: 1899

We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism — location: 1913

time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start. — location: 1936

Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. — location: 1939

become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. — location: 1941

Hume believed that “moral science” had to begin with careful inquiry into what humans are really like. — location: 2014

If one person has different moral sentiments from another, does she have different moral obligations? — location: 2083

individual vs communal vs religious

The five foundations of morality — location: 2181

Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other. — location: 2182

such a module should detect. (Note that the — location: 2190

We respond even when we know consciously that it’s not really violence and he’s not really suffering. — location: 2202

Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”3 — location: 2256

The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives, — location: 2305

The original triggers of the Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. — location: 2336

sports competitions and camping skills. From that point forward, Sherif says, “performance in all activities which might now become competitive (tent pitching, baseball, etc.) was entered into with more zest and also with more efficiency.”19 Tribal behavior increased dramatically. Both sides created flags and hung them in contested territory. They destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons (socks filled with rocks), and would often have come to blows had the counselors not intervened. We all recognize this portrait of boyhood. The male mind appears to be innately tribal—that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare).20 The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.21 Despite some claims by anthropologists in the 1970s, human beings are not the only species that — location: 2369

We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins. — location: 2383

Much of the psychology of sports is about expanding the current triggers of the Loyalty — location: 2388

The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism,26 so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation. — location: 2405

Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). — location: 2507

Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.38 — location: 2509

disgust is part of what he calls the “behavioral immune system”—a — location: 2516

evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and places where disease risks are lower. — location: 2526

When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. — location: 2538

our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims: — location: 2581

Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. — location: 2622

imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, — location: 2778

that — location: 2796

What I am finding here is an organization rife with individualism and infighting, at the expense of larger goals. In the military, I was always impressed with the great deeds that could be accomplished by a small number of dedicated people with limited resources. In my new group, I am impressed when we can accomplish anything at all.24 — location: 2818

The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. — location: 2946

Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity. — location: 2951

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43 — location: 2987

Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. — location: 3015

egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality — location: 3021

equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality. — location: 3030

liberals are often uncomfortable with the negative side of karma—retribution—as shown on the bumper sticker in figure 8.7. After all, retribution causes harm, and harm activates the Care/harm foundation. — location: 3082

Millian society has difficulty binding pluribus into unum. — location: 3103

rural and working-class voters were in fact voting for their moral interests. — location: 3117

Morality binds and blinds. — location: 3124

thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue. — location: 3146

anytime a group finds a way to suppress selfishness, it changes the balance of forces in a multilevel analysis: individual-level selection becomes less important, and group-level selection becomes more powerful. — location: 3227

Whenever a way is found to suppress free riding so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms. — location: 3344

In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. — location: 3376

City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today. — location: 3393

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams. — location: 3399

“It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” — location: 3408

human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. — location: 3423

When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born. — location: 3436

Shared intentionality is Exhibit B in the retrial of group selection. — location: 3448

language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality. — location: 3450

Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement — location: 3450

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend. — location: 3454

Homo heidelbergensis is therefore our best candidate for Rubicon crosser.64 These people had cumulative culture, teamwork, and a division of labor. They must have had shared intentionality, including at least some rudimentary moral matrix that helped them work together and then share the fruits of their labor. By crossing over, they transformed not just the course of human evolution but the very nature of the evolutionary process. — location: 3486

domestication generally takes traits that disappear at the end of childhood and keeps them turned on for life. Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors. — location: 3530

tribal minds make it easy to divide us, but without our long period of tribal living there’d be nothing to divide in the first place. — location: 3534

human evolution has been so different since the arrival of shared intentionality and gene-culture coevolution that humans may well be a special case. — location: 3543

contrast to the battered, beaten-up, and partially — location: 3582

The results are astonishing, and they are exactly the opposite of Gould’s claim: genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. — location: 3590

genetic evolution kicked into overdrive in the Holocene era, pulling along mutations such as the lactose tolerance gene, or a gene that changed the blood of Tibetans so that they could live at high altitudes. — location: 3598

and widespread starvation was probably common. A catastrophic volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago from the Toba volcano in Indonesia — location: 3615

Every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through — location: 3618

We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. — location: 3668

the key innovation of Greek, Roman, and later European armies was the sort of synchronous drilling and marching the army had forced him to do years before. — location: 3679

creating a temporary superorganism. — location: 3682

Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups. — location: 3682

human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. — location: 3703

collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for binding groups together. — location: 3719

the WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. — location: 3727

collective emotions pull humans fully but temporarily into the higher of our two realms, the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. — location: 3760

why sport are great even for fans. collective energy. more selfish people not interested.

nagged by the sense that there is, somewhere, something higher and nobler. — location: 3763

believed that our movements back and forth between these two realms gave rise to our ideas about gods, spirits, heavens, and the very notion of an objective moral order. — location: 3763

I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body. — location: 3781

(that is, our experience is not easily assimilated into our existing mental structures; we must “accommodate” — location: 3786

Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life. — location: 3789

People describe nature in spiritual terms—as both Emerson and Darwin did—precisely because nature can trigger the hive switch and shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole. — location: 3790

“These states were induced to heighten learning and to create a bonding among members of the cohort group, when appropriate, so that individual psychic needs would be subsumed to the needs of the social group.” — location: 3808

psilocybin had produced statistically significant effects on nine kinds of experiences: — location: 3821

“all psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.” — location: 3826

one massive, united tribe of thousands of people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group.… The steady wordless electronic beats were the unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd. It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.25 — location: 3851

searching for a calling, which they can only find as part of a larger group. — location: 3865

In one of these studies, oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner’s dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group. — location: 3893

The monkeys have neural systems that infer the intentions of others—which is clearly a prerequisite for Tomasello’s shared intentionality — location: 3912

The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn — location: 3920

Mirror neurons are perfectly suited for Durkheim’s collective sentiments, particularly the emotional “electricity” of collective effervescence. — location: 3921

people don’t just blindly empathize; they don’t sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.40 — location: 3929

argue that leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership.45 Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand. They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it’s no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow. — location: 3958

this is an amazing point

strangers will spontaneously organize themselves into leaders and followers when natural disasters strike. — location: 3965

Transformational leaders do this by modeling collective commitment (e.g., — location: 3998

followership in a hivish organization is better described as membership. — location: 4002

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. — location: 4115

Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore this principle and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices. — location: 4118

Supernatural agents do of course play a central role in religion, just as the actual football is at the center of the whirl of activity on game day at UVA. — location: 4156

either you have to grant that religiosity is (or at least, used to be) beneficial or you have to construct a complicated, multistep explanation of how humans in all known cultures came to swim against the tide of adaptation and do so much self-destructive religious stuff. — location: 4180

religions are sets of memes that have undergone Darwinian selection. — location: 4223

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking. — location: 4260

very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. — location: 4285

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”43 — location: 4354

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. — location: 4384

John Locke, one of the leading lights of the Enlightenment, wrote that “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.” — location: 4402

religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations. — location: 4414

By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life. — location: 4446

only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. — location: 4453

bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power. — location: 4467

Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity. — location: 4474

When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. — location: 4485

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. — location: 4488

the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of — location: 4489

a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. — location: 4530

genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. — location: 4627

neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear. — location: 4638

the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. — location: 4647

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. — location: 4691

Reagan narrative, they have a harder time. When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. — location: 4773

Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” — location: 4784

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of — location: 4821

They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital. — location: 4838

conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. People who hold this “constrained”41 view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay. — location: 4862

moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible. — location: 4882

if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. — location: 4902

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” — location: 4912

mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. — location: 4919

think liberals are right that a major function of government is to stand up for the public interest against corporations and their tendency to distort markets and impose externalities on others, particularly on those least able to stand up for themselves in court (such as the poor, or immigrants, or farm animals). Efficient markets require government regulation. — location: 4978

libertarians look more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures of personality — location: 5036

You Can’t Help the Bees by Destroying the Hive — location: 5115

too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would “be as one.” It’s a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell. I think conservatives are on to something. — location: 5125

high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital. — location: 5147

Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 — location: 5163

Intuitions come first, so anything we can do to cultivate more positive social connections will alter intuitions and, thus, downstream reasoning and behavior. — location: 5196

We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. — location: 5208

liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community. — location: 5224

if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, — location: 5270