The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Part I: Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second
“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.”
Chapter 1: Where Does Morality Come From?
Different cultures include different concerns under the umbrella of morality. Take the following story: A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a frozen chicken. Before cooking the chicken, he has sex with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. In this story, there is no harm to the chicken. When Jonathan Haidt asks well-educated people studying at universities in Western countries, they often feel a flash of disgust, but hesitate to say the family had done anything morally wrong. This is especially true of politically liberal Westerners. But when Haidt asks people from non-Western countries, which comprises most of the world, people find the chicken story morally wrong. This shows that for different groups of people, morality can encompass a wider range of behaviors than just those actions that harm another person or being.
Our sense of morality begins developing as kids. Elliot Turiel studied the development of moral views in kids by telling them stories about other kids breaking rules. He’d then ask if what the kid in the story did was okay. Some of the stories go as follows:A boy goes to school that requires uniforms. One day he doesn’t wear his uniform. Did he do something wrong? What if his teacher said it was okay? Turiel found that kids as young as five usually say it is wrong for the boy to break the rule, but okay if the teacher gave him permission. That is, kids recognize that rules about many things in life (like clothing, food, etc.) are social conventions—arbitrary and changeable.
But kids recognize that some rules are not social conventions. If you ask kids about actions that hurt other people (for example, tell them a story about a girl pushing a boy off a swing) nearly all kids say the girl was wrong. Even if you tell them that the teacher said it is okay, they’ll still say the action was wrong. This shows that kids recognize rules which prevent harm aremoral rules—special, important, unalterable, and universal. Studies like these led Western psychologists to conclude that harm was the basis of all morality.
This was wrong—or at least, it was only correct in (some) Western cultures. Other cultures have a far wider range of actions and behaviors that, to them, are part of the moral matrix. For example, the Azande believe in witches (which can be men or women). The Azande are careful not to make neighbors angry or envious, because that will get them pegged as a witch by neighbors. Their belief in witches, tied as it is to asocial behavior, shows morality helps order human society.
Another example is the Ilongot, a society where young men can gain honor by cutting off people’s heads. Some killings are made in revenge, but many are against strangers who the murderers never knew. Small groups of men channel resentment and in-group frictions through a group-strengthening “hunting party” that, after the killing is done, ends in a long night of communal celebratory singing. The Ilongot’s use of honor killings shows how morality helps address and ease tension within the group and competition between groups.
A third example is the Hua of New Guinea. The Hua have an elaborate network of food taboos that govern what men and women can eat. Men can’t eat any food resembling a vagina if they want to become men. The Hua know these are social conventions—they don’t believe other tribes have to follow them. This is an example of how taboos can govern duties and relationships to others in your society.
The idea here is that if morality is just about harm, then it makes no sense thatmost non-Western cultures moralize about so many practices—from sex, to food, witchcraft—that have nothing to do with harm. In fact, even in the West, not all subcultures limit morality to the domain of harm. Liberals tease religious conservatives for being sexually prude, given their taboos over non-missionary sex positions; meanwhile, conservatives tease liberals for having ample taboos about food—be that fair-trade coffee, Paleo, or whatever the new fad toxin one should avoid.
Richard Shweder argued that these moral strictures come from a broader human need than just avoiding harm—humans need to figure out how to_organize_ society. Specifically, they need to sort out how to balance the needs of individuals versus groups. Most societies have chosen a sociocentric answer. They put the needs of the group and institutions first, and individuals’ needs second. Other societies have chosen an individualistic approach. The needs of individuals come first; society serves the individual.
The sociocentric approach dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment era in Europe, and has since surpassed the sociocentric approach since the 1900s.
To show how society’s decision between sociocentric versus individualistic moral culture can lead to wildly different moral views, Richard Shweder conducted a study on Indians and Americans. He asked 180 Americans (kids and adults) and 180 Indians (kids and adults) whether a series of scenarios were morally right or wrong. Stories would go as follows: (A)While walking, a man saw a sleeping dog. He approaches it and kicks it. (B) A young married woman goes alone to see a movie without telling her husband. When she returns, he said if she does it again he will beat her. She does it again, and he beats her. (C) A widow in your community eats fish two to three times per week.
Schweder came away from this study with two interesting findings. First, kids answered almost exactly as adults of their own culture did. Second, Americans and Indians did not agree on many scenarios. While vast majorities of both groups agreed it was morally wrong for the man to kick the dog, Americans thought the husband was morally wrong to beat his wife, while Indians thought it was okay. Meanwhile, Indians thought the widow was morally wrong to eat so much fish, while Americans thought it was okay.
Interestingly, the Americans even went further, often arguing that it was morally wrong to tell the widow she couldn’t have fish. This implies that when Americans distinguish between what is a universal moral rule and what is a mere social convention, they take an individualistic approach. When a rule binds the individual unfairly, it is an immoral rule. But people from other studies don’t share this view. Turiel’s studies on Western kids distinguishing between harm and social convention were misguided because they only looked at the morality of Western cultures. Broadening the sampled cultures revealed that morality encompasses much more than the norm against harming others.
Haidt did his own study composed of 360 interviews of participants from Porto Alegre, Philadelphia, and Recife. The participants in each city were either high class or low class, and either children or adults. He read them stories like the “chicken sex story,” then asked if there was anything morally wrong with the action, taking care to point out that no one was harmed. Most participants felt that violating harmless was universally wrong. But there were some nuances. People from Philadelphia were more likely to distinguish between moral rules and social conventions than were people from Porto Alegre and Recife. Upper-class people in Philadelphia judged the harmless taboos as violation of social conventions; lower-class people from Recife found them to be violations of universal moral rules. Porto Alegreans were mixed. Social class turned out to be a stronger predictor than geographic location of whether people saw the taboos as social conventions or moral violations.
Haidt also observed that participants condemned the action instantly, then took time to try to invent victims for the stories. This was despite that Haidt had written the stories to carefully remove all conceivable harm to others. About 38% of participants tried to find someone who was harmed. This was true of participants across all regions and ages. Participants would often offer a possible victim half-heartedly, almost apologetically. Many of these possible victims were implausible—one child trying to reason why flushing the American flag down the toilet argued that the clutter might clog the toilet, causing it to overflow, which would require an adult to fix it. Even after the interviewer gently corrected the participant, pointing out there was no victim in the story, they would still keep searching for another victim. They’d often say things like, ‘I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.”
This was Haidt’s first big piece of evidence that people use moral reasoning to justify moral emotions.
Chapter 2: The Intuitive Dog and its Rational Tail
“When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it.Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal.” So explains Haidt the phenomenon of moral sanctification by human tribes.
Moral feelings are different than moral reasoning. Antonio Damasio studied patients who had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). They had no emotionality. They could look at joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They still retained their full IQ, though, and could distinguish between morally right and morally wrong actions. They just couldn’t make decisions in their personal lives and at work. Their lives fell apart.
Damasio concluded that gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally. To these patients, every option_felt_ equally good, so they couldn’t make decisions without weighing every pro and con with conscious, verbal reasoning. However, human short-term memory quickly becomes over-taxed once options reach 6 or 7 in number. Emotions help us choose when options get complicated. Hence why the patients couldn’t make decisions—they needed emotional passions in order to function properly.
Haidt did his own study to test if people’s moral judgments used the rational part of the brain or the emotional part. He would ask participants to hold either (a) a string of numbers, such as 7250475, in their mind, or (b) just one number, such as 7. He then asked them to simultaneously perform another task. If they did worse at the second task when trying to remember 7250475 than when they were trying to remember 7, Haidt concluded that they were using their rational brain for the second task. Hence why they did worse with the long string of numbers.
Interestingly, it turns out that people were able to answer moral questions when they were remembering long strings of numbers just as easily as when they were trying to remember one digit. This suggests that people don’t use rational thinking to answer moral questions—they use moral emotions and feelings.
Haidt investigated this further in a study with Scott Murphy. They interviewed 30 subjects on their reactions to several scenarios. One scenario asked whether people would eat a sterilized cockroach. (This pits rational thinking against our sense of purity—the roach is sterile (harmless) but gross (impure). A third scenario asked if participants would sign a piece of paper selling their soul for $2. Below the signature line, though, was written, “This form is part of a psychology experiment. It is NOT a legal or binding contract in any way.”
Only 37% would each the cockroach and only 17% would sign the paper. Murphy asked the participants who refused why they wouldn’t do so. He tried to convince them to do it. Still, most people clung to their original positions, even though some who refused to sign their souls away were atheists! Haidt summarizes the findings thusly: “People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.”
People are very good at offering justifications for their immediate reactions to moral scenarios. Howard Margolis performed a study that asked people to solve a simple task. He laid out four cards. The first card had an E on it, the second K, the third a 4, and the fourth a 7. The task was to choose the smallest number of cards that you must turn over to decide whether the following rule was true: “If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side.” The answer is two—the E and the 7 cards.
But most people thought they had to turn over the E and the 4 cards. They didn’t realize that turning over the 4 card could produce a finding that would not invalidate the rule. When Margolis asked people why they chose their answer, mostly everyone was able to offer an explanation. And mostly everyone was just as confident in their reasoning whether they got the answer right or wrong. Margolis concluded that judgment and justification are two separate mental processes. In his words, “Given judgments, human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales are only ex-post rationalizations.”
Margolis called the two processes “Seeing That” and “Reasoning Why.” “Seeing That” is the process of pattern matching. It is rapid, automatic, and effortless. It drives our perceptions of real world objects. All animals do this as they move around the Earth. “Reasoning Why” is our human brain’s process of describing how we think once we’ve reached a judgment. This is only seen in animals with language and who thus have a need to explain themselves to others. It is conscious, not automatic, and is easily disrupted when the brain it also working on other cognitive tasks.
Margolis’ theory easily explains the Haidt’s findings. People “see” that eating a cockroach is the wrong pattern or behavior, but can’t easily justify why those are the right actions after the fact. Haidt concludes, “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 judgments.”
Underlying these moral intuitions is a broader phenomenon that applies to all our emotions. When we form emotional reactions, we begin by appraising something that just happened to us based on whether it advanced or hindered our goals. These appraisals are a kind of information processing. Emotions aren’t dumb—Damasios patients made_worse_ decisions when they were lacked emotions. Moral judgment, then, is as much a rational process as conscious thinking, albeit an automatic one.
These automatic processes are the basic hardware of the brain—the conscious thinking is just an add-on. The human mind evolved from the same software that ran animal brains for 500 million years. When human brains evolved language 1 million years ago, the brain did not reinvent itself. Rather, the new language-based part of the brain just added itself on to the rest of the brain that already existed.
Haidt calls our language-processing part of the brain the “rider.” He calls the ancient part of the brain the “elephant.” The rider can do several useful things to serve the elephant. It can see further into the future by considering alternative possible scenarios and choosing the optimal one. It can learn new skills and master new technologies to help the elephant reach its goals and avoid disasters. It can be a spokesperson for the elephant, coming up with post-hoc explanations defending whatever the elephant just did.
Post-hoc justifications are, by the way, extremely valuable. Once humans created language, they used it to gossip about each other. Gossip prevents free-riding and amoral acts by damaging the bad actor’s reputation when he’s not around. He pays the price for a bad act today through others’ disapproval later. Given this, it became extremely valuable for individuals to be able to quickly justify their actions to others. As Haidt describes it, the elephant needs a “full-time public relations firm.” The part of the brain that processes language thus also keeps itself busy managing your reputation, building alliances, and recruiting bystanders to support your side in our common daily disputes.
This process means, however, that humans are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm our initial judgments. Sometimes friends can help us see our blind spots or appreciate different perspectives. They can challenge our viewpoints, give us reasons and arguments that trigger new intuitions, and make it possible that we change our minds on things. But even friends rarely change an individual’s mind. Rather, the most common cause for people to change their mind is when we desire to join the opinion of someone popular.
If moral and political arguments seem frustrating, it is because moral reasoning is just a made-up justification for our emotional intuitions. If you want to change people’s minds, you shouldn’t try to reason with their rational rider, but with their intuitive elephant.
Chapter 3: Elephants Rule
Brains evaluate instantly and constantly. They evaluate everything in terms of “potential threat” or “benefit to the self.” They then adjust behavior to get more good stuff out of life and less bad stuff. To coordinate behavior, the brain stimulates an “affect,” which is a small flash of positive or negative feeling that prepares us to approach or avoid something.
Affective reactions can be simplistic mechanisms. Robert Zajonc showed that people will prefer something simply because they’ve seen it before several times. He showed people arbitrary things like Japanese pictograms, words in a made-up language, and geometric shapes. He asked participants how much they liked these things. People liked those objects and words that they had seen a few times before. This is, you’ll notice, a basic principle of advertising.
Social and political judgments are particularly intuitive. A study looked at people’s ability to determine if the second word in the following pairs was “good” or “bad”:
- Flower—Happiness
- Hate—Sunshine
- Love—Cancer
It took people, on average, 250 milliseconds longer to recognize that ‘sunshine’ was a good word than it took them for ‘happiness,’ simply because sunshine was preceded by ‘hate,’ while ‘happiness’ was preceded by ‘flower.’ That is to say, “hate’ primed people’s minds for a negative evaluation, causing their brains to lean that direction. They then needed an extra 250 milliseconds to undo the priming.
Another study found that this same phenomenon applies to political groups. The study replaced the first word in the two-word pairs with a political word. For example, ‘flower’ might be replaced by ‘Clinton’; ‘love’ by ‘pro-life.’ Liberals were able to categorize the good words (like ‘sunshine’) faster than conservatives if the preceding word was ‘Clinton” and ‘pro-choice.’ The conservatives were better when the preceding word was “Bush’ or ‘pro-life.’
This behavior applies to our judgments of social and political groups. The Implicit Association test flashes photographs of people of different races and then asks participants to categorize a word as good or bad. Just like the study above, people take longer to categorize a word like ‘sunshine’ as good after seeing pictures of certain racial groups. The IAT has found that most people have a negative implicit association with many social groups like blacks, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly.
Another study looked at how fast people form impressions of others. Alex Todorov gathered photos of the winners and runners-up in hundreds of US Senate and House of Representative races. He showed participants just the photographs of the two political contenders and asked them to pick who seemed more competent. Two-thirds of the time, people chose the photo of the candidate who actually won! Todorov then ran another experiment where he showed people the photograph for only one-tenth of a second. Amazingly, people were_just_ as accurate. Haidt writes, “Whatever the brain is doing, it is doing it instantly.”
Even babies show signs that they come with innate abilities to understand their social world. Psychologists Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom put on puppet shows for 6-month and 11—month babies. One puppet would try to “climb” a hill. Sometimes a second puppet came to “help” the first one up the hill. Other times a third puppet would try to “bash” the puppet down the hill. After the show, babies were presented with the “nice” and “mean” puppets on a tray. Babies consistently reached out to touch the nice puppet. This shows that babies watch how people behave toward other people and develop preferences for those who are nice, not mean.
If we slow down the brain’s immediate emotional reaction to a moral dilemma, sometimes the brain will process more logical arguments. Joe Paxton and Joshua Greene asked college students about the following story: Two siblings, a brother and sister, want to have sex. They use perfect contraception, no one finds out, and no one is harmed. The researchers gave half of participants a “weak” justification for this conduct: “If Julie and Mark make love, then there is more love in the world.” They gave the other half of their participants a “strong” justification: “Aversion to incest is really caused by an ancient evolutionary adaptation for avoiding birth defects in a world without contraception, but because Julie and Mark use contraception, that concern is not relevant.” The subjects in both groups condemned the incest nonetheless, and did so in equal proportions. However, when researchers required some subjects to wait 2 minutes before they declared their judgment, these people were substantially more tolerant toward Julie and Mark’s intercourse.
Chapter 4: Vote for Me (Here’s Why)
If 400 insects are working toward a common goal, you can bet they are all siblings. When 100 people work together on a construction site or march off to war, you wouldn’t expect them to be part of one family. That’s weird. Human beings are extremely unique in our ability to cooperate with other humans to whom we are not biologically related. We do this by forming formal and informal systems of accountability. As Haidt writes, “We are really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.”
Phil Tetlock is a researcher in accountability. He describes us all as “intuitive politicians” striving to maintain “appealing moral identities” in front of multiple “constituencies.” Tetlock has done studies giving people information about a legal case and asked them to infer guilt or innocence. Some subjects are told they’ll have to explain their decision to someone else; others are told they won’t have to explain their decisions. When people know their decisions won’t be reviewed by someone else, they display the usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that have been documented in decision-making research. When people know they’ll have to explain themselves, though, they think more systematically and critically.
Tetlock found two different kinds of careful reasoning. First, there is Exploratory thought, which is an evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view. Second is Confirmatory thought, which is a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view. Tetlock believe people will take an exploratory approach only when three conditions hold: 1) Decision makers learn before they form any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience; (2) The audience’s views are unknown, AND (3) The decision maker believes the audience is well-informed and interested in accuracy.
The problem is that people are very good at coming up with reasons to support positions they_want_ to be true. When subjects are told that an IQ test gave them a low score, they chose to read articles criticizing the validity of IQ tests. When subjects are told that an IQ test gave them a high score, they chose to read articles supporting the validity of the tests. When people read a fictitious scientific study that reports a link between caffeine and breast cancer, women who are heavy coffee drinkers find more flaws in the study than do men and more than women who drink less caffeine. When participants are asked to lick a strip of paper to determine whether they have a serious enzyme deficiency, they’ll wait longer for the paper to change color when the color change is desirable than when the color change indicates a problem. Essentially, the brain is playing one of two games: Either the position is one the brain wants to believe, in which case the brain asks itself, “Is there any evidence justifying my belief?” Or, the position is one the brain wants to be false, in which case it asks itself, “Is there any reason I don’t have to believe this?”
Slightly related to this motivated reasoning, the brain will try to cheat_to the degree it can justify_ cheating. To illustrate, researchers performed a series of studies where participants could get more money by solving math problems. The study was designed to allow participants to cheat without getting caught. Researchers found that the majority of people cheated, but only a little bit.
Our need to validate our beliefs bleeds right into our political views, but, interestingly, not in the service of the self. Rather, our cognitive biases apply to our_group_. Decades of research on public opinion show that self-interest doesn’t predict well which public policies voters prefer. Parents of kids in school are not necessarily more supportive of government aid for schools than other citizens. Young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted. People without health insurance aren’t more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people who are covered.
Rather, what people care about are their racial, regional, religious, or political tribes. Political opinions serve as “badges of membership.” Drew Westen used fMRI scanners to watch participants’ brains while presenting them statements from either President George Bush or his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. All the participants had described themselves as either strongly Republican or strongly Democratic. When the statements challenged their preferred candidate, the participants’ brains showed activity near the brain areas associated with negative emotion and responses to punishment. It was as if the challenge to their group’s leader actually caused them physical pain.
Meanwhile, there was no activation of the dlPFC, which is the brain area for thinking coolly rationally. That is to say, people were not evaluating these statements objectively.
Westen finished his study by asking participants to justify why the original, threatening statement wasn’t so bad. At this point, the part of the brain associated with_pleasure_ activated. This shows that hearing good things about one’s candidate give you a hit of happiness.
A running theme in Western thought has been that thinking more logically about ethics will cause people to act better. But expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior. Eric Schwitzgebel measured how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to emails from students. In none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or other professors. In fact, Schwitzgebel found that academic books on ethics (presumably borrowed by ethicists) are more likely to be stolen or never returned.
Part II: There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
“The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.”
Chapter 5: Beyond WEIRD Morality
When Haidt performed his studies on people’s reactions to the chicken sex story and other morally queer tales, he found that his University of Pennsylvania students were outliers. Working class Americans and rich and poor Brazilians all reacted differently than Haidt’s college students.
Haidt found his UPenn students were uniquely devoted to the harm principal—that the only justification for preventing someone from doing something was to prevent harm, and nothing else. They were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said an action which bothered them was morally permissible. They were the only group in which a majority (73%) were able to tolerate the chicken story.
In 2010, cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ar Norenzayan reviewed dozens of studies showing that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (i.e. W.E.I.R.D.) countries were morally peculiar from other human societies. They are the least typical, least representative people to study when learning about human nature. Even within WEIRD cultures of Europe and the US, educated, upper-middle-class people (like Haidt’s UPenn students) were the most unusual of all. They are_highly_ individualistic.
Citizens of WEIRD societies are more likely to see the world as full of separate objects, rather than relationships. One example of this: Westerners are more likely to finish the sentence, “I am…” with a list of their internal psychological characteristics (e.g. ‘happy,’ ‘outgoing,’ etc.). East Asians are more likely to finish with their roles and relationships (e.g. ‘husband,’ ‘son,’ etc.). This carries into our perception of the physical world: Westerner are better able to remember the objective length of a line on a piece of paper than are East Asians; East Asians are better at remembering the relative size of a line to a square. Westerns are also more likely to think analytically (i.e. separating an object from its context, assigning it a category, and assuming what’s true about the category is true about the object). People from most other societies are better at thinking holistically about an object and its context together.
This all spills over into morality. If you live in a WEIRD culture, you think more about individuals and their individual rights. If you live in a non-WEIRD culture, you think more about the needs of groups and institutions. For holistic societies, a morality based simply on harm and fairness will not be sufficient; people in those societies believe there is far more to morality than harm or fairness.
Getting back to Richard Shweder, he analyzed 600 interviews on morality between Indians and Americans to understand the moral foundations of each culture. He concluded that Western culture is based largely on the ethic of_autonomy_: people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People therefore should be free to satisfy these as they see fit. Autonomous societies develop moral concepts like rights, liberty, and justice.
Non-Western cultures, meanwhile, value_community_ and divinity alongside autonomy. Community is based on the idea that people are members of larger entities like families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These groups are larger than the sum of their parts; they matter and must be protected. People have assigned roles and obligations to uphold the group. These societies have moral concepts like duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. Too much individualism (i.e. people pursuing their own personal goals) could weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions upon which everyone depends. Divinity is based on the idea that people are temporary vessels for a divine soul. We should behave accordingly. This is why the chicken sex story, involving no harm and violating no rights, seems so degrading. Too much individualism can become degrading hedonism.
Haidt applies this framework to America. America is made up of sub-groups, each of whom have their own moral combination of autonomy, community, and divinity. For example, Conservatives believe that a red, white, and blue cloth is a “flag” that represents the American community in a special way. Liberals, meanwhile, take the image of Martin Luther King Jr. as sacred, and would probably react strongly to submerging his likeness in a jar of urine, as was done to the Virgin Mary by an artist in NYC. Haidt concludes that many moral matrices coexist even within a single nation. “Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.”
Chapter 6: Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
Haidt identifies six different “taste buds” in the human mind. Just like the human tongue can taste sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, humans have a taste bud for Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.
Similar to taste buds, our cultures can shape what tastes we prefer. But it isn’t “anything goes.” You won’t see a culture basing its entire cuisine on tree bark or bitter taste. Nor will you see a certain culture base its moral matrix on, say, authority alone.
Haidt argues that we developed these “moral taste buds” to serve an evolutionary need. For example, our aversion to_harm_ and our preference for care (remember the babies watching the puppet shows?) evolved to encourage us to protect and care for children. The original evolutionary trigger was suffering, distress, or neediness in one’s own child. Today, however, even cute animals can trigger our desire to care and detestation of harm.
Our obsession with_fairness_ and fury at cheating come from our need to build cooperative partnerships. The original trigger was cheating and deception by those we trust, maybe during a hunt or during hungry winters. But today, even a broken vending machine can set off our fury at being “cheated.”
Loyalty and betrayal evolved from our need to form cohesive coalitions. The original trigger was threat to our group from hostile neighboring tribes. Today, sports teams and nation-states trigger the same moral emotions.
Authority and subversion help us forge beneficial relationships within hierarchies. The original need was to maintain stable hierarchies in tribal bands. Now we do the same within corporations, inventing things like bosses and respected professionals.
Finally,sanctity and degradation emotions exist to avoid contamination. The original triggers were waste products and diseased people, among others. Today though, even “toxic ideas” like communism and racism trigger our feelings of sanctity and degradation.
Chapter 7: The Moral Foundations of Politics
The Care-Harm Foundation
Mammals have few offspring. Each one becomes a high-stake bet that requires a lot of investment. Mammals must care for and nurture their offspring for a long time. Humans, which produce children with such large brains that they must be birthed before even being able to walk, have the fewest children and require pairs to help the mother during pregnancy, delivery, and caring for the child for years. Evolution thus favored men and women who had automatic reactions to the signs need and suffering from their children. (Hence why parents react so quickly to their baby’s crying). These reactive parents were the most likely to successfully raise their fragile children to adulthood.
This is no “just-so” story. It is Attachment Theory, a well-supported theory that describes the system by which mothers and children regulate each other’s behavior so that the child gets a good mix of protection and opportunities for independence.
Both major political tribes in America (conservatives and liberals) have Care woven into their moral matrices. For example, liberals take on concerns like animal welfare and genocide in Darfur. Conservatives, meanwhile, are concerned about the welfare of veterans and offer support through groups like the Wounded Warrior Project. There are differences, though. Liberal Care is often more universal (for all humans, for all species) compared to conservative Care (for those who were injured serving the group loyally).
The Fairness-Cheating Foundation
Robert Trivers was one of the first researchers of reciprocal altruism. He began by observing that evolution can create altruistic behavior in certain special situations: When individuals could remember their prior interactions with others and limit their niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor. In these rare situations, the individual who survived best was the one who could correctly identify others who were most likely to cooperate without cheating.
Humans do this all the time. Hunters work together to hunt large prey no one can catch alone. Neighbors watch each other’s houses and loan each other tools. People who play tit-for-tat reap benefits from cooperation more than those who never form those relationships with others. To maintain the cooperation, people have moral emotions like pleasure, affection, and friendliness toward those who can be trusted, and anger, contempt, and disgust at those who cheat.
Today, this manifests itself in many political ways. Liberals distrust groups that are perceived as wealthy and powerful because those groups exploit the weak and don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Conservatives distrust “Big Government,” which takes money form hardworking Americans and gives it to lazy people and unauthorized immigrants.
In a strictly political context, on the left, fairness often means equality. On the right, fairness often means proportionality (i.e. people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute).
In normal life, fairness usually means proportionality. When people work together on a task, studies show they are more concerned about equality of outcome if they know that everyone gave equal effort. If they think that some people contributed more than others, people generally believe those big contributors deserve more gains. This comes from people’s strong desire to protect their communities from cheaters, slackers, and free riders who would cause others to stop cooperating and cause society to unravel if not stopped from doing so. Hence much of the right’s obsession with the social safety night, which might allow some to mooch off government’s assistance.
The Loyalty-Betrayal Foundation
Humans are not the only species that wages war or kills its own kind. Chimpanzees guard their territory, raid the territory of rivals, and kill off males of the neighboring group to steal their territory or their females. Warfare among humans has been a constant feature of human life for millions of years—long before agriculture and private property.
Many psychological systems contribute to effective tribalism and success when groups are locked in inter-group competition. The loyalty foundation is just one part of our innate ability to form cohesive coalitions. The trigger for the loyalty foundation is anything that tells you who is a team player and who is a traitor.
The Authority-Subversion Foundation
The desire to show respect is common across animal species. There are dominance hierarchies in chickens, dogs, chimpanzees, and many others. Physical displays are made by low-ranking individuals to higher ones. They usually involve similar gestures, like appearing small and non-threatening.
Human cultures vary enormously by how much respect they demand for parents, teachers, and others in positions of authority. The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep, many languages encode it directly into their grammar structures. For example, French speakers must choose between the respectful form (vous) and or the familiar form (tu) when speaking to another person. English speakers don’t use this construction, but you may have felt a pang of awkwardness when an older person you have long revered asks you to call her by her first name.
The authority foundation helps individuals forge beneficial relationships within their tribe’s hierarchy. Individuals best able to rise in status while cultivating the protection of superiors and allegiance of subordinates survive best, and are best able to pass on their genes.
Like chimps, humans track and remember who is above whom in the tribe’s hierarchy. When people within a hierarchy do things that upend that order, we notice it instantly. Since authority is (in part) about protecting order and fending off chaos, everyone has a stake in upholding that order. That means holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their place in the hierarchy.
Authority is not the same as power or control. Even among chimps, the authority is usually an alpha male who performs some socially useful functions, like resolving disputes and suppression much of the violence that erupts without a clear leader. Among humans, authority figures take on responsibility for maintaining order and justice. (They also may exploit that power for their own benefit).
The current triggers of the authority foundation include anything that can be seen as an act of obedience or disobedience, respect or disrespect, submission or rebelling, when the authorities are perceived to be legitimate. This includes metaphorical authorities like traditions, institutions, or values that people believe provide stability.
The Sanctity-Degradation Foundation
Most animals are born knowing what they should eat. For example, the koala bear has an instinct to only eat eucalyptus leaves. Humans, though, don’t have this instinct because we are omnivores—we eat a very wide variety of things. While this gives us flexibility, it can cause us to eat toxic food, diseased food, or food with parasites.
For this reason, omnivores go through life loving new foods and being afraid of new foods. Individuals will fall somewhere on a spectrum between loving novelty (which benefits ones survival) and fearing novelty (which also benefits survival).
Humanity’s tolerance (or intolerance, depending on the person) for novelty carries over into political views. Liberals, for example, score higher on psychology measures of their openness to experience new food, music, and ideas. Conservatives score higher on the opposite, which is why they care more about guarding borders and traditions.
It makes evolutionary sense why openness to new foods would carry over into views on how to order the social world around us. When early humans began to live in larger groups, they greatly increased their risk of infection from each other. They developed hat Mark Schaller has called the “behavioral immune system”—a set of predispositions that are triggered by signs of infection, disease and parasites, which make us want to avoid touching the person or thing carrying the disease. Key triggers are smells, sights, or other sensory patterns that predict the presence of dangerous pathogens (such as human corpses, excrement, vultures, and people with sores). Current triggers of the Sanctity foundation are extraordinarily variable. For example, immigrants (who might bring new plagues, epidemics, and diseases) are more favorable when disease is less common.
The Sanctity foundation explains why people treat objects (e.g. flags, crosses), places (e.g. Mecca, a battlefield), people (e.g. saints, heroes), and principles (e.g. liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they had infinite value. When someone desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is swift, collective, and punitive. Philosopher Leon Kass believes that the Sanctity foundation can help humans avoid going too far when transgressing long-held taboos, even when we cannot rationally justify the old taboos by pointing to victims. As he once wrote, “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
Today, the Sanctification foundation is more apparent among the religious right. But the spiritual left also has its New Age grocery stores stocked with products that cleanse your “toxins.” The Left also has the environmentalists, who revile industrialism, capitalism, and cars for both their real pollution and their symbolic degradation of nature.
Chapter 8: The Conservative Advantage
Haidt, along with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, created the first Moral Foundations Questionnaire to understand how American liberals and conservatives’ moral foundations differed. They asked people 15 questions—three of which related to each of the five foundations. For example, Care questions would be along the lines of, “Whether or not someone was cruel”; Authority questions would ask “Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority.” Every participant, regardless of their political views, said that concerns about compassion, cruelty, fairness, and injustice are relevant to their judgments about right and wrong.
But liberals say these issues are more relevant to their judgments about right and wrong. Conservatives care much more about the other foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—than do liberals (who largely reject them as relevant to morality). Conservatives don’t dismiss Care and Fairness, they just tend to think these values are roughly equally important as Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Liberals are almost exclusively concerned with Care and Fairness.
Haidt and his colleagues’ findings were replicated even when the researchers asked people about the traits of their preferred dog breeds. Liberals were more interested in Caring breeds and breeds that treated their owners as equals. Conservatives were more interested in breeds with traits that balances all five moral foundations.
These findings were replicated in people’s church affiliations. The researchers applied a word processing program to Unitarian (i.e. liberal) church sermons and Southern Baptist (i.e. conservative) church sermons to detect words that relate to each moral foundation. For example, peace, care, and compassion are related to Care; obey, duty, and honor are related to Authority. They found that the Unitarian preachers used Care and Fairness words more than Baptist preachers, while Baptist preachers used words relating to Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity more.
These findings were replicated in brain scans. Liberals and conservatives were asked to read certain sentences that either supported a moral foundation or opposed it. Liberals showed more brain activity related to shock and surprise when they read sentences that rejected the Care and Fairness foundations, or that supported the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity concerns.
The Liberty-Oppression Foundation
Haidt and colleagues added a 6th foundation to make sense of data on people’s reaction to Fairness questions. Liberals seemed to think of fairness as equality. Conservatives seemed to think of fairness as proportionality. Why?
Haidt’s explanation is that humans evolved in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes that were highly egalitarian and had no hierarchies. The norms of the group actively encouraged sharing. Hierarchy only became widespread when groups began to start farming and domesticating animals. This economic change created “private property” for the first time. Human groups also go much larger. Equality ended.
Christopher Boehm has researched hierarchies in chimps and humans and found that humans are innately hierarchical, but not as much as chimps. Chimp authority figures, for example, provide few useful social functions beyond mitigating violence among the troop. Rather, chimp authorities usually just act like bullies, taking food and females from weaker chimps. Sometimes chimps band together to assassinate the alpha male if he goes too far. Chimp leaders, therefore, have to balance their power and know how far they can go.
Boehm concludes that humans became less hierarchical in the last one million years once invented weapons for hunting and language. This gave the non-alpha males the ability to gossip about the alpha male (i.e. rally against him) and kill him (with their new weapons) even if they were weaker than him. Humans could unite to shame, ostracize, or kill the bully alpha male, whose behavior threatened or annoyed the rest of the group. Hierarchies collapsed and human tribes became much more egalitarian.
In this new world, people were quick to develop richer moral matrices of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate these new cultures advanced socially; those who couldn’t were punished or exiled. Such is how humanity became more cooperative and sociable—what Boehm calls “self-domestication.”
All this history gave humans an inborn sensitivity to individuals who, if given the Chance, would dominate, bully, and constraint others. One person’s signs of domination would trigger righteous anger in others. If groups didn’t react this way, they would be exploited by one domineering alpha figure and would be less cooperative, and less successful, as a tribal unit. Hence why people have a moral inclination for “freedom.”
The moral foundation for Liberty has bifurcated into two expressions. Liberals sacralize equality, which is pursued by fighting for equal civil and human rights and for equal outcomes. Conservatives sacralize negative liberty, freedom from the nanny state and high taxes, from oppressive regulations, and from the United Nations and other sovereignty-reducing international treaties. Notice again that conservatives interpret their moral matrix in terms of how it protects their group, whereas liberals interpret the foundation more universally.
Part III: Morality Binds and Blinds
“We are 90% Chimp and 10% Bee.”
Chapter 9: Why Are We So Groupish?
People are “groupish.” We love teams, club, leagues, and fraternities. People are great at promoting our group’s interests when competing against other groups. People, though, are also selfish, which means we are good at promoting our own individual interest when that conflicts with the interests of our peers. Haidt believes human nature is mostly selfish, but with a groupish overlay.
For a long time, scientists didn’t believe groupish-ness was possible among groups that weren’t genetically related. For example, the bravest army wins, but the soldiers most likely to survive the battle and go home to have children are the cowards that hung back and avoided the most dangerous fighting. In the words of evolutionary biology, a gene for suicidal self-sacrifice would be favored by the group-level natural selection but be strongly opposed by individual-level selection.
But it is possible to develop groupish instincts through a multi-step evolutionary process. Step 1: Individuals with social instincts to stay close to other humans would become more likely to avoid being eaten by predators. Step 2: People who helped others were more likely to get help when they needed it most. Step 3: Language gave people the power to share information about others (i.e. gossip) which created reputations. Step 4: Groups treated duties to the group and principles as sacred, enforcing observance of these duties through gossip and social sanction.
Once these four steps take hold, then the free riding soldier could not go to battle and hide in the back. Stories of his cowardice would make it back to the tribe, and he would be beaten up by his fellow survivors, become repellent toward women at home, and be generally shunned.
Finding a way to suppress free riders has been the central theme of evolution. In the beginning of life one billion years ago, there were only one-celled bacteria. When two bacteria combined, they became a cooperative unit that could divide labor, be more efficient, and outcompete other bacteria cells. Then, bacteria grouped together into multi-celled bacteria; division of labor increased even more, and multi-celled organisms easily outcompeted their one-celled competitors. Multi-celled organisms developed complex, inter-dependent systems, creating plants, animals and fungi. When humans formed cohesive groups, it was another example of individual entities coming together to form a super-entity. Haidt explains: “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 higher level becomes more powerful, and that… favors the most cohesive superorganism.”
Many animals are social, but only a few are _ultra_social. This select group includes humans, ants, bees, among a few others. These ultrasocial animals tend to have similar characteristics that lead to their ultrasociality. They often share a nest, which must be protected from predators, parasites, or competitors; the need to feed offspring over an extended period; and they often face lots of conflict with other groups of the same species. For example, wasps have nests (that is, holes in trees) and have to compete with other wasp colonies nearby.
Humans also exemplify these traits. As hunter-gatherers, we were once territorial creatures with defensible nests, like caves. We gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care. And when the tribe was under threat by another group of humans, there was an intense need to bind together. Agriculture made our homes more permanent and more valuable, which only ratcheted up the need to band together to defend the farmland and other tribal resources. Soon, competitive pressures led to city-states, walled cities and armies, and eventually empires.
Among ultrasocial creatures, only humans have gone this far. For example, even out closest cousin—the chimp—will never cooperate with another chimp to carry a log, despite being the second-smartest species on the planet (they are able to make tools, learn sign language, predict the intentions of other chimps, and deceive others to get what they want).
Michael Tomasello has done experiments to tease out what sets humans apart from chimps. He compared chimps to two-year-olds, asking them to perform simple tasks like use a stick to pull in a treat that was out of reach. At these tasks, chimps were as good as any two-year-old human. The difference between the chimps and humans, though, was that humans have what Tomasello calls “shared intentionality.” Humans can imagine what the other person is thinking and use that awareness to coordinate our behavior. When everyone in a group begins to share a common understanding of how things are supposed to be done, they can cooperate on incredible complex tasks. Once we gain this ability, humans can learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and ultimately create social institutions like religion. This unlocked the next level of evolution—competition between groups of ultrasocial, cooperating animals.
Once humans started competing at the group level, we imposed a new evolutionary pressure on ourselves which started to change us. We developed an obsession with symbolic markers to show our group memberships. For example, today we can see people tattoo and pierce their face to show which Amazonian tribe they belong to; we see Jews circumcise their males; we see tattoos and facial piercings by punks in the UK. These symbols tell us who we can trust and cooperate with easily, because just by looking at them we know they share our values and norms. We then developed more psychological traits, like an expectation that life is structured by moral norms. We developed new emotions to internalize those norms, like shame, guilt, and righteous anger. As humans continued to select friends and partners based on their ability to live within a tribe’s moral matrix, these characteristics became stronger and stronger over time. Like other domesticated animals, this process of “self-domestication” led us to have smaller teeth, smaller bodies, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness (even into adulthood).
Genetic evolution as outlined above can happened relatively quickly when the pressure is just right. Dmitri Belyaiv showed that with individual selection for the most docile and social fox, foxes can be completely domesticated within about 9 generations. William Muir showed that using group selection to breed hens (i.e. breed the group of hens that collectively produced the most eggs, as opposed to the individual hen that produced the most eggs) required 6 generations to reach a 260% increase in egg production.
Humans might have taken more than 6 to 9 generations to respond to their new group level selection, but they sure changed a lot genetically in a short period. The human genome project, for instance, shows that genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. High rates of climatic fluctuation (from hot to cold, dry to wet, and back again) correlates with the fastest period of genetic change in humans. Between 70,000 and 20,000 years ago, there were several periods where almost all humans were killed. During these phases, those groups facing imminent death but who could cooperate in sophisticated ways to monopolize, hide, and share scarce food supplies were the ones that survived. Their offspring would become our modern day, ultrasocial, ultra-cooperative selves.
Chapter 10: The Hive Switch
Haidt believes that humans can be “hive” creatures under some conditions. That is, humans transcend their self-interest and lose themselves temporarily and ecstatically in the larger group—if their hive nature is activated. Haidt offers three common examples of hive emotionality that you might identify with (or know someone who identifies with): 1) Awe in nature; (2) Hallucinogens like mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and LSD, all of which can shut down people’s experience of themselves and give them a “religious” or “transformative” experience; and (3) Raves, where electronic music with hypnotic melodies, trance-inspiring light shows, and heavy basses create a communal feeling among dancers.
The neurochemical that binds people together, oxytocin, creates a powerful motivation to touch and care for one’s children. In species in which males stick by their maters or protect their offspring, it is because their brains are more responsive to oxytocin. If you squirt oxytocin into someone’s nose, he will be more trusting in a game that involves temporarily transferring money to an anonymous partner. Oxytocin levels rise in people who are treated with trust by others.
Several studies have shown, though, that oxytocin only binds people of the same group, not humanity in general. A study on Dutch men, for example, found that when the men played a variety of economic games while sitting alone in cubicles, those who had oxytocin sprayed in their noses made less selfish decisions and more beneficial decisions for their group. They showed no concern at all, however, for improving the outcomes of men in other groups. In a follow-up study, oxytocin made participants like those with Dutch-sounding names more and value saving Dutch lives more. This line of research has never shown oxytocin increases out-group hate—it simple makes people love the in-group more than they did before.
Mirror neurons also help bind people together. Mirror neurons light up when we watch someone else do something. Watching a hand pick up a cup, for example, triggers a mirror neuron for eating. Seeing someone else smile triggers a mirror neuron to smile. Our mirror neurons light up more when we observe people we like. In one experiment Tania Singer had participants play an economic game with two strangers, one who played nice and the other who played selfishly. In Phase two of the study, participants watched the nice player and the selfish play receive electrical shocks. Subjects’ brains showed evidence of pain when the nice player was shocked, but no evidence of pain when the selfish player got shocked (some even showed pleasure). As Haidt writes, “We are more likely… to empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.”
All of this kicks out some basic advice for leaders who want to create more hive-like super-organizations. First, they can construct a moral matrix that emphasizes certain oft-forgotten values. The organization’s culture should legitimize the authority of the leader in order to appeal to the Authority moral foundation. The culture should make sure subordinates don’t feel oppressed by appealing the Liberty foundation. And it should appeal to the Loyalty foundation.
Second, leaders should emphasize similarity—not diversity. Don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences. A great deal of research shows that people are warmer to and more trusting of people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday. Drawing attention to these similarities will foster cooperation more than appealing to differences.
Third, leaders should exploit synchrony. If you ask people to sing together, march in step together, or just snap out some beats together, this will make them more trusting of each other and more likely to help each other out.
Finally, leaders should create healthy competition among teams. Studies show that intergroup competition increases love for the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group. So group vs. group competition is a net positive for the whole. However, pitting individuals against individuals in a competition for scarce resources (like bonuses) will destroy hive-ishness, trust, and morale.
Chapter 11: Religion is a Team Sport
One theory of religion is that it is a cultural innovation that makes groups more cohesive and cooperative. Groups with “less effective” religions don’t necessarily get wiped out. But they often just adopt the more effective variation. In this way, religions spread like technology.
This theory comes from the observation that religions seemingly “evolve” over time. For instance, hunter-gatherers often had religions where the gods were capricious and malevolent. The gods sometimes punished bad heavier, but would also cause the righteous to suffer, too. Agricultural societies, on the other hand, tended to have far more moralistic gods. Their religions were focused on condemning murder, adultery, lying, and breaking promises. Their gods administered collective punishment, such as disease, pestilence, or drought, on a whole village for the adultery of two people. Beliefs like this would make villagers much more vigilant and gossipy about any of their neighbor’s slightest deviation from the community’s moral matrix.
Evidence shows that moralistic religions, such as those that originated during humanity’s agricultural revolution, help groups cohere, solve free rider problems, and win out against other groups with whom they compete. Richard Sosis examined the history of 200 communes in the US during the 1800s. Communes are usually colonies in the wilderness founded by a committed group of believers who reject society’s moral matrix and go off to form their own society. He compared communes that were religious to ones that were secular. Just 6% of secular communes lasted longer than 20 years. Meanwhile, 29% of religious communes lasted longer than 20 years. Sosis quantified everything he could about those communes to find out why the religious ones were doing better. He found that the religious communes were more likely to expect costly sacrifices from members, like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code, cutting ties with outsiders. The correlation was perfectly linear—the more sacrifice a religious commune demanded, the longer it lasted. Interestingly, the more sacrifices demanded by the secular communes did not increase their odds of survival. Sosis explains that this is because in secular communes, members would be more willing to question why the group demanded the sacrifice than the religious commune members would. They might even refuse to adopt a sacrifice that “didn’t make sense.” The religious communes were better at binding people together because they used the pretense of sacredness to blind the members to the arbitrariness of the “sacred” practice.
In another example of religion fostering cooperative societies through strict moral rules, John Sloan Wilson has showed how John Calvin developed a strict, demanding form of Christianity that suppressed free riding and facilitated trust and commerce in Geneva in the 1500s. He’s also shown how medieval Judaism created a “cultural fortress” that kept outsiders out and insiders in.” he’s shown how Balinese rice farmers solved a very difficult free rider problem related to scarce water supplies by placing small temples at the fork in the irrigation system. The god of each temple united all the rice farmers together in a community worshipping that god, helping them solve their disputes more amicably and minimizing cheating and deception. As Haidt explains, “Gods are tools that let people bind themselves together in a community by circling around them.”
People belonging to religious societies are more likely to survive and reproduce, meaning the next generation will be more religious than the last. Such is how religion became an indelible feature of humanity. Gods and religions are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust.
We can see this in laboratory studies. Studies show that people who find out you are religious will trust you more with money. And those who are religious will share back more money to a person who trusted them than non-religious people will (regardless of whether the religious person knew they were returning money to a religious or non-religious other).
We can also see this in history. Jews and Muslims long excelled in long-distance trade, in part because their religions helped to create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts. Even today, markets that require a high deal of trust (like diamond markets) are dominated by ethnic groups (like ultra-Orthodox Jews) who have lower transaction and monitoring costs than their secular competitors.
Sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell summarize religion’s effect on society like this: “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.” When Putnam and Campbell peered deeper into what it was about religion that made people act better, they found it was not belief in hell, or daily prayer, or belonging to a certain Christian sect. it was the fact that religion bound people into relationships with their fellow worshippers. They concluded, “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”
Chapter 12: Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?
Political theorists long thought that people chose political ideologies that benefit their self-interest. For example, the rich would want to preserve the existing order and the peasants would want to change everything. But in modern times, political scientists have found that self-interest does a remarkably poor jo of predicting political attitudes.
The next theory political scientists cooked up was that people soak up political ideologies from their parents or the TV programs they watched growing up.
But studies of twins found that political ideologies can be largely linked to genetics. Identical twins, for instance, share 1005 of their DNA, while fraternal twins share 50% of their DNA. This means that twins are far more similar in terms of IQ, mental illness, basic personality traits, tastes in music and food, their propensity to get divorced as adults, their likelihood of dying in a car crash, their degree of religiousness, than are fraternal twins. And when it comes to political views, they are also more similar to each other than fraternal twins are to each other. This suggests that DNA shapes political views.
This finding is strong enough to explain between one-third to one-half of the variation among people’s political views. Being raised by conservative or liberal parents explains far less.
Genes influence your political ideology in two steps—(1) brain biochemistry and (2) personality development. First, the genetic difference between political liberals and conservatives seems rooted in their neurotransmitters—specifically, glutamate, serotonin, and dopamine. Glutamate and serotonin neurotransmitter are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear. This aligns neatly with other findings that conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger, like germs or loud noises. Dopamine, meanwhile, is related to people’s sensation-seeking and openness to new experiences, which are behavioral taste correlating strongly with politically liberal attitudes.
Second, personality has levels. Per Dan McAdams, there are three levels. Our lowest level includes our “dispositional traits” that generate our general characteristics—are we thrill-seeking or nervous about threats, extraverted or introverted, conscientious or easy-going? These are determined by the neurotransmitters describe above. Then, there’s the second level, our “characteristic adaptions,” which we learn along the way to help us fit into certain environments. If our genes steer us toward difference experiences as we grow up, these experiences then reinforce and tailor our original genetic dispositions. For example, the cautious brother remains close to his hometown and gets involved in church, while his sister moves to New York City and becomes an advocated for unauthorized immigrants. Both find themselves in different social environments, and mature in ways that help them navigate those environments. Our third level is our “life narrative,” which is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves to help make sense of our life trajectory. Narratives don’t have to be literally true—they are selective and simplified, often for the sake of creating an idealized vision of the future. They are saturated with morality. Although these narratives can be after-the-fact fabrications, they still influence people’s behavior, relationships, and mental health. Life narratives fuse our identity to the moral matrix of our society, which we gravitated toward because of our low-level influences (genes) and second-level influences (acclimation to our social niche).
It’s worth elaborating on how individual narratives blend into larger group narratives, which we’ll call “Grand Narratives.” Each society (i.e. group of people regularly interacting with each other), puts at the core of its Grand narrative a sacred something or other. Then society constructs a story with a beginning, a middle (where the “threat” arises) and an end (in which a resolution is achieved). The narratives orient listeners morally, drawing their attention to a set of virtues and vices, good and evil forces, to impart lessons about what must be done now to protect, recover, or attain the sacred core of their vision.
Christian Smith has cataloged many Grand Narratives of moral tribes living in modern America. For example, he offers the following Liberal Progress Narrative:
“Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism… But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for a good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”
Then there’s the Reagan Republican Narrative of the 1980 election:
“Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way… Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals… Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, the preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle… and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles… Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism… Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”
If the stories are so different, can each side even understand the other? Haidt, along with Jesse graham and Brian Nosek, tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. They asked over 2,000 Americans to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. They specifically asked one-third of participants to answer the questionnaire as they normally would; they asked one-third to answer like a “typical conservative” would; and they asked one-third to answer as a “typical liberal” would. This allowed Haidt, Graham, and Nosek to test how accurate participants were in guessing their political opponents’ views by comparing people’s expectations about the “typical” partisan view to the actual responses from conservative and liberal partisans.
They found that moderates and conservatives were more accurate in their predictions of what the typical liberal or typical conservative believed. Liberals were the least accurate—especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors came when liberals tried to guess what the typical conservative thinks about care and Fairness questions. They assumed conservatives would disagree with the following statements:
- “One of the worth things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” (Care foundation)
- “Justice is the most important requirement for a society” (Fairness foundation)
Haidt believes liberals in American politics have another blind spot: They miss the importance of social capital and moral capital. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed. But through institutions, we can account for this weakness through moral capital. Moral capital (i.e. the general commitment by everyone to do the right thing and not be selfish when no one’s looking) is generated among communities with strong social capital (i.e. the number and strength of relationships between individuals, and people’s commitment to reciprocity and trustworthiness to those they have a relationship with). Social capital could take the form of formal membership to institutions, like university or church. Or it could be the informal ties of shared culture, traditions, and identities that make people similar to each other. Social capital encourages people to adopt similar norms of good behavior and reinforces those norms with formal laws and religions as well as informal customs and traditions.
Liberals build their moral matrix on Care, Fairness, and Liberty (where Liberty refers to equality of outcomes, which maintains parity, which prevents domination). These three-prong foundation helps them see the value of restraining super-organisms like corporations that threaten the weak with their awesome accumulation of power. This helps liberals address large-scale regulatory problems, like lead gasoline (which Democrats phased out through regulation in the 1970s), and whose effects require collective effort and fall disproportionately on the vulnerable.
Libertarians build their moral matrix almost exclusively on Liberty (where Liberty here means freedom from coercion). This helps libertarians see the value of unrestrained free markets, which provide the enormous plenty that freed humanity from subsistence-level poverty that trapped us and limited our potential for almost all of human history.
Conservatives build their moral matrix on all 6 foundations, which means they are the only major political ideology to emphasize Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. These extra foundations help conservatives appreciate the value of social capital and moral capital for uniting us against collective social problems. Robert Putnam, for instance, has found that American communities with high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seemed to cause a reduction in social capital. Was it because people are racist, such that they withdrew from their diversifying community? No, says Putnam. Instead, he found evidence that trust between groups and trust within groups deteriorated. That is to say, instead of binding groups to their own racial compatriots and alienating them from their new, diverse neighbors, what actually happened was that everyone distanced themselves from everyone, even their own ilk. Individuals just retreated from social life altogether. The threat diversity brings to social capital is something overlooked by liberals and libertarians, who failed to appreciate the ties that bind people together, and the good that those ties between people (i.e. social capital) then go on to create for society.