The Righteous Mind

WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION

BY JONATHAN HAIDT

• Below you can find my top highlights from the book (it is not meant to be a summary)
• Quotes are edited for readability when context is required, and bolded to help structure the notes.
• Skim… then slow down on the paragraphs that catch your interest. Reflection requires pause.
• If it resonates, you can purchase the full book here.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

Conscious reasoning is the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

The most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. We have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups. Religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don’t hurt anyone. (Note: they would hurt the perpretator at the very least, eg. his own dignity)

If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate? As with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as where you’re visiting.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

Indian practices related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions, and there were few differences between the adults and children within each city. In other words, Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking

Many Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next to godliness”.

The divide between rich and poor is so vast in Brazil that it’s as though people live in different countries. well-educated people in all three cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class neighbors.

The ultimate rationalist fantasy: that the passions are and ought only to be the servants of reason. (In reality most reasoning is not in search of truth but in support of our emotional reactions).

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

Essay from Thomas Jefferson: When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.

Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers.

The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. So Hume’s model fit these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.

Judgment and justification are separate processes. Given the judgments (themselves produced by the nonconscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.

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.

It’s not about cognition OR emotion: Emotions are a kind of information processing. Moral judgment is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgment. The crucial distinction is really between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. Intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition. They’re just not a kind of reasoning.

Most of your day you don’t need reasoning. Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day. Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in full-blown emotions.

The rider (reason) acts as the spokesman for the elephant (intuition), even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done,

If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to … elicit new intuitions, not new rationales. As reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

“Never say ‘you’re wrong.” The persuader’s goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one’s own case.

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. (Your performance of logic) may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too.  And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. 

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight.

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. You’ll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth.

It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.

When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it. The fundamental question of animal life: Approach or avoid?

Once you’re clean, you want to keep dirty things far away. Subjects who are asked to wash their hands with soap before filling out questionnaires become more moralistic about issues related to moral purity (such as pornography and drug use). 

Moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant. Moral judgment is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It’s a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things. 

Which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation. Reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth.

The most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. (Note: similar to N.N.Taleb’s “Skin in the game”)

On accountability: When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.

When people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.

People are trying harder to look right than to be right. Two very different kinds of careful reasoning: Exploratory thought is an “evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.” Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.” Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience’s views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth, because that’s what the audience wants to hear. But the rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. 

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. (Note: which probably requires empathy, EQ)

When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit. They cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty (called “plausible deniability”).

When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then, we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks.

When we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must. The difference between a mind asking “Must I believe it?” versus “Can I believe it?” is so profound.

Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. 

The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It’s also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.

On human reason not being optimized for truth-seeking: most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

The confirmation bias is so powerful. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it. It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind).

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.

In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills

The WEIRD bias: 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 (forming the acronym WEIRD). The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.

West vs East bias: “I am … ,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu). Westerners, and particularly Americans, excel at the absolute task, because they saw the line as an independent object in the first place and stored it separately in memory. East Asians, in contrast, outperform Americans at the relative task, because they automatically perceived and remembered the relationship among the parts.

If WEIRD and non-WEIRD people think differently and see the world differently, then it stands to reason that they’d have different moral concerns.

As you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in … additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends.

On his life in India: when you’re grateful to people, it’s easier to adopt their perspective. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.

Hindu notions of reincarnation could not be more explicit: Our souls reincarnate into higher or lower creatures in the next life, based on the virtue of our conduct during this life. You do find the idea that high = good = pure = God whereas low = bad = dirty = animal quite widely. 

It felt right to me to treat certain books with reverence—not leaving them on the floor or taking them into the bathroom.

The dark side of this ethic: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority (such as homosexuals or obese people) can be ostracized and treated cruelly. The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.

We can understand long-standing laments about the spiritual emptiness of a consumer society in which everyone’s mission is to satisfy their personal desires.

It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.

The conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality … and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start.

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. (And if in if you grow up in other societies) you become so well educated in the ethics of community and divinity that you can detect disrespect and degradation even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.

Moral pluralism is true descriptively. As a simple matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures. The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e., moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader—including the ethics of community and divinity—in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

The attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.

Morality is like cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes. You can’t have a cuisine based on tree bark, nor can you have one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors. Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors.

Moral judgment is a kind of perception, and moral science should begin with a careful study of the moral taste receptors. You can’t possibly deduce the list of five taste receptors by pure reasoning, nor should you search for it in scripture. There’s nothing transcendental about them. You’ve got to examine tongues.

The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing. If you prefer fiction to nonfiction, or if you often enjoy conversations about people you don’t know, you are probably above average on empathizing. Systemizing is “the drive to analyse the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of the system.” If you are good at reading maps and instruction manuals, or if you enjoy figuring out how machines work, you are probably above average on systemizing.

Be careful about evolutionary explanations, which are sometimes reductionist (because they ignore the shared meanings that are the focus of cultural anthropology) and naively functionalist (because they are too quick to assume that every behavior evolved to serve a function). The classic mistake of amateur evolutionary theorists, which is to pick a trait and then ask: “Can I think of a story about how this trait might once have been adaptive?” The answer to that question is almost always yes because reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. … “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience”. It is just not conceivable that the chapter on mothering in the book of human nature is entirely blank, leaving it for mothers to learn everything by cultural instruction or trial and error.

Five good candidates for being taste receptors of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

(For politicians to) get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.

On selective altruism: Evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor.

We’re usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us. Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share. Those whose moral emotions compelled them to play “tit for tat” reaped more of these benefits than those who played any other strategy, such as “help anyone who needs it” (which invites exploitation), or “take but don’t give” (which can work just once with each person; pretty soon nobody’s willing to share pie with you).

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

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.

If we want to understand how human civilizations … covered the Earth in just a few thousand years, we’ll have to look closely at the role of authority in creating moral order. Human authority is not just raw power backed by the threat of force. Human authorities take on responsibility for maintaining order and justice. We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game—to rise in status while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates.

I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil. (But) if authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station.

Cultures differ in their attitudes toward immigrants, and there is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and places where disease risks are lower. Plagues, epidemics, and new diseases are usually brought in by foreigners—as are many new ideas, goods, and technologies—so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred. Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities. Conservatives—particularly religious conservatives—are more likely to view the body as a temple, housing a soul within, rather than as a machine to be optimized, or as a playground to be used for fun.

You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. The message of my talk to the Charlottesville Democrats was simple: Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t.

The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle. The ability to endow ideas, objects, and events with infinite value, particularly those ideas, objects, and events that bind a group together into a single entity.

Conservative notions of fairness focused on proportionality, not equality.

Our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers. Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary. These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes. They also put an end to equality.

Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. Revolutionaries had to call for fraternité and égalité if they were going to entice commoners to join them in their regicidal quest for liberté. 

Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.

Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. People’s strong desires to protect their communities from cheaters, slackers, and free riders, who, if allowed to continue their ways without harassment, would cause others to stop cooperating, which would cause society to unravel.

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades.

Life is a hierarchy of nested levels, like Russian dolls: genes within chromosomes within cells within individual organisms within hives, societies, and other groups. There can be competition at any level of the hierarchy, but for our purposes (studying morality) the only two levels that matter are those of the individual organism and the group.

Bees (and ants and termites) are the ultimate team players: one for all, all for one, all the time, even if that means dying to protect the hive from invaders.

Darwin (shared the view that) people are obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that drive this obsession were acquired by natural selection acting at the individual level: those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely to attract friends and mates. Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious nature.

Our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.

Animals are not going to die to benefit others, except in very special circumstances such as those that prevail in a termite nest (where all are sisters). In every case that what looks like altruism or self-sacrifice to a naive biologist (such as that termite specialist) turns out to be either individual selfishness or kin selection (whereby costly actions make sense because they benefit other copies of the same genes in closely related individuals, as happens with termites).

Morality is the key to understanding humanity. I’ll take you on a brief tour of humanity’s origins in which we’ll see how groupishness helped us transcend selfishness. I’ll show that our groupishness—despite all of the ugly and tribal things it makes us do—is one of the magic ingredients that made it possible for civilizations to burst forth, cover the Earth, and live ever more peacefully in just a few thousand years.

The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators). Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth.

Only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultrasocials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. We are the only ultrasocial primate. “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth—the city-state, able to raise walls and armies.

Human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. Everyone on the team now had a mental representation of the task, knew that his or her partners shared the same representation, knew when a partner had acted in a way that impeded success or that hogged the spoils, and reacted negatively to such violations.

Natural selection favored increasing levels of  … “group-mindedness”—the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social institutions, including religion.

A word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world.

We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us. We expect them to share our values and norms.

We humans are domesticated: our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood. The reason is that domestication generally takes traits that disappear at the end of childhood and keeps them turned on for life.

Just a few generations suffice to change a species: After nine generations, novel traits began to appear in a few of the pups, and they were largely the same ones that distinguish dogs from wolves. For example, patches of white fur appeared on the head and chest; jaws and teeth shrank; and tails formerly straight began to curl. After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.