PDF Summary:The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

This book answers the simple but essential question: Why can’t we all get along?

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why people around the world, including liberals and conservatives in the United States, have different moral frameworks. He argues that moral judgments are emotional, not logical—they are based on stories rather than reason. Consequently, liberals and conservatives lack a common language, and reason-based arguments about morality are ineffective. This leads to political polarization.

The Righteous Mind explores how our divergent moralities evolved, why morality is about more than just fairness, and how we can counter our natural self-righteousness to decrease political divides.

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1. The Care/harm foundation prioritizes the values of kindness and nurturing. Humans have innate feelings of protectiveness and understanding of distress or suffering. This helps children to survive (because their parents or even strangers feel the need to take care of them) and makes groups more tight-knit, brought together by caring for one another. In the U.S., liberals rely much more on the Care/harm foundation than conservatives. For instance, a liberal might have a bumper sticker with a message like “Save Darfur” or “Peace” or even “Save the Planet.” The Care/harm foundation is part of the conservative morality as well, but it’s not as foundational. For example, conservatives might have a bumper sticker that reads “Wounded Warrior,” which asks that we care for people who have sacrificed for the larger group.

2. The Fairness/cheating foundation prioritizes the values of rights and justice. The left and the right are both concerned about fairness in American society but in different ways. The left is often angry that the rich don’t pay their “fair share.” The right argues that Democrats are trying to take money from Americans who work hard and give it to lazy people or illegal immigrants. Fairness is utter equality on the left but proportionality on the right (people are rewarded for their contribution to society).

3. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation prioritizes the values of self-sacrifice for the good of the group and patriotism. For thousands of years, humans created groups in order to fend off rival groups. This creates an intense and innate sense of loyalty within all of us. However, the left has much more trouble using the loyalty foundation to their advantage because they often disparage nationalism and sometimes American foreign policy. Because they admonish American policy, some conservatives see liberals as disloyal.

4. The Authority/subversion foundation prioritizes the values of leadership, deference, and tradition. Cultures vary significantly in how much authority and hierarchy they demand. Authority comes with responsibility. People in a hierarchy have mutual expectations of each other—those at the top are expected to protect those at the bottom, while those at the bottom are expected to serve those at the top. Again, it is easier for the right to adopt this foundation than the left, because the left defines itself against hierarchy and the inequality and power structures that result.

5. The Sanctity/degradation foundation prioritizes the values of purity and sanctity. This foundation is based on the idea that, unlike mere animals, we have a soul. Sacredness helps us build communities around a shared principle—often that humans have a creator or creators who ask them to perform specific rituals to honor them and their creations. Certain cultures are more likely to believe immigrants will bring disease or dishonor to their society than others. Certain actions are untouchable because they are too dirty (like drinking straight from the Hudson River in New York City) and others are untouchable because they are too sacred (like a cross for Christians, or even the principle of liberty). American conservatives talk about “the sanctity of marriage” or “the sanctity of life” much more than liberals. Religious conservatives are more likely to have this foundation, as they are likely to view the body as housing a soul.

6. The Liberty/oppression foundation prioritizes the value of and right to liberty. We recognize legitimate authority, but we want our authority figures to earn our trust. We are resistant to control without purpose, which can lead to a reactance—when an authority figure tells you to do something and you decide to do the opposite. People band together to stop widespread domination, and they may resist or even sometimes kill the oppressor. Biologically, people who couldn’t recognize this kind of oppression coming were less likely to thrive. Oppression concerns both liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more worried about large systems of oppression that are helpful to the 1% but keep the poor without opportunity. Conservatives are more worried about the oppression of their own groups. They say, “Don’t tread on me with high taxes, my business with regulations, or my nation with the UN and international treaties.”

Conservatives have an advantage in persuasive arguments because they can tap into all six of these foundations. They can talk to people with each of these taste receptors, whereas liberals concentrate significantly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations, along with the Fairness/cheating foundation to a lesser extent. Their arguments are thus limited to a smaller group of people.

Principle #3: Morality “Binds and Blinds”

At this point, you might be viewing morality cynically, believing that humans are inherently selfish and that morality is primarily self-serving and blinds us to reality—we make decisions with our guts and then rationalize them so well we think we made them using reason; we cheat when we think we won’t get caught and then convince ourselves we’re honest; we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

But this portrait of morality based solely on self-interest isn’t complete. In addition to being selfish, people are also groupish. We love to join groups—teams, clubs, political parties, religions, and so on. We are so happy to work with lots of others towards a common goal that we must be built for teamwork. We can’t fully understand morality until we understand the origin and implications of our groupish behavior and how our moralities bind us together, as well as blind us.

Groupish Behavior

How did we become groupish? Darwin argued there are multiple reasons humans first banded together.

• First, we developed social instincts: Predators targeted loners more often than people who stayed close to the group.
• Second, we discovered reciprocity: People who helped others were helped in return.
• Third and most importantly, we developed a desire for social approval: People are concerned with what other people think of them and eager to find praise and avoid blame. People who lacked these traits were selected against because they couldn’t find mates or even friends.

Thus, evolution selects for people who act for the good of the group. Since Darwin’s time, researchers have found further evidence that humans do have groupish tendencies:

• Evolutionary Transitions: Biologists see eight clear examples of major evolutionary transitions in the last 4 billion years (from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, and so on). The final transition is the development of human societies. These transitions all move in the same direction—when individual units find ways to cooperate, selection begins to favor cohesive “superorganisms” or groups that can work together for success. Then these superorganisms begin to compete with one another and evolve for greater success, bringing about more groups.
• Same Interests: One of the human conditions that distinguishes us from other primates is called shared intentionality. At some point in our evolution, we learned that we would do better if we split up tasks. After this, collaborative groups got larger to defend themselves against other groups. Natural selection then favored more “group-mindedness.” Through developing a common understanding of norms and values, shared intentionality laid the groundwork for living in the societies full of moral matrices that we have today.
• Coevolution: Coevolution is the process by which species affect each other’s natural selection. Imagine two species—we’ll call them species A and species B. Species A is taking resources that both species need to survive and attacking species B. Species B then evolves to defend itself and develops an advantage over species A. In response, species A evolves to regain its original advantage. This is coevolution. Humans evolved to work together because other species were evolving to work together better as well. As part of their coevolution, humans developed shared intentionality in order to hunt together and share their resources. Humans also learned to domesticate animals in a group. Groups were forced to work together to keep cattle alive, which in turn helped them to win competitions with rival groups. A more group-friendly nature developed due to coevolution and replaced our more primal, selfish one, which has greatly influenced our ideas about what’s moral and what isn’t.
• Quick Evolution: Genetic evolution in the Holocene era, which started about 12,000 years ago, shows that humans were quickly exposed to new foods, climates, people, predators, and forms of warfare and social structures. This led to a population rise, as fewer humans died young, thanks to cooperation, and they procreated more. Along with the population rise came opportunities for much more gene mutation. If genetic evolution was this fast, it’s possible that human nature could change in a few thousand years as well. Researchers theorize that human nature changed quickly at the realization that acting in groups would be beneficial to individual success.

Remember that while groupish thinking is part of our evolution, we are still mostly selfish and individual. We’re about 90 percent chimp, who is self-interested, and only 10 percent bee, who is group-interested.

Flipping the Switch

Humans have the ability to flip a switch from being that self-interested chimp to working like a group-interested bee. We’re only hive creatures in certain surroundings. There are probably times in your own life when you flip the switch from “chimp mode” to “bee mode”—maybe when you’re walking alone in nature and you feel removed from temporal worries and connected to the universe. Or perhaps you experienced the flipped switch while you were at a rave, dancing with others together and feeling a shared exaltation. Lots of hive behavior, like dancing together, comes naturally to humans and serves to break down social class and difference.

There are appeals to the hive all over. Successful corporations will make their employees’ jobs specific and also make them feel as if they’re contributing to the output of the company, thereby reinforcing a feeling of togetherness. Politicians also frequently employ the hive. Think about JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

The most successful nations are ones with lots of little hives that cross with each other—someone can be part of a family unit, a workplace, a sports team outside of work, and on and on. In contrast, nations with no hives, or those with one huge hive, are much more likely to break down.

If we have a switch that allows us to work together in a group, and if we can be members of different hives simultaneously, it’s possible we can also flip the switch to act in certain situations according to a shared morality. This suggests that we can find common ground with one another and that our moral frameworks are not always set in stone.

The Cons (and Pros) of Groupish Behavior

In sum, we have evolved to cooperate with members of our group and prevail over members of rival groups. Given our groupish tendencies, it’s not surprising that tribal thinking is so prevalent in modern society. We were not made to love everyone equally and unconditionally—rather, we were made to feel kinship with and loyalty to those with similar traits, and our righteousness springs from this tribalism.

For some, this idea is a depressing one. But, as we’ve seen, a lot of moral good comes out of our groupish behavior. Without tribes, there would be no community and no cooperation. Our groupishness pulls us out of our self-interested individualism and, for many, provides a higher purpose.

Making Better Political Arguments

Despite their benefits, our moral frameworks are increasingly making us more blind to how others understand the world.

Largely because of gaps in moral foundations, there’s significant evidence that America is polarizing rapidly, with the gap widening between political opinions on the left and the right.

For example, liberals and conservatives in America have different foundational stories about the country:

• Liberals argue that there used to be dictatorial, oppressive regimes that governed the world, which virtuous people through time and effort overthrew. They then founded democracies and started fighting for equal rights for all, creating laws and government programs that could lift all boats.
• Conservatives since the Reagan era say that America used to be a beacon of liberty, but liberals have attempted to ruin it by creating bureaucracy and tax burdens that stunt growth while also opposing faith and God. They took money from good, hard-working people and gave it to lazy people living on welfare while lionizing evil promiscuity and a “gay lifestyle.”

There is significant value to the liberal understanding—it promotes a narrative of heroic triumph over the powerful through the weak banding together. In doing so it often is in a better position to secure rights and material gains for the less fortunate in society.

Nevertheless, liberals have more trouble understanding the concept of moral capital, defined as the resources that are necessary to sustain and grow a moral community. Conservatives argue that people need outside constraints to behave properly and thrive. Without them, people will cheat, and social capital, or trust, will begin to decline. Moral capital is what promotes these constraints. If we don’t promote constraints like laws, traditions, and religions, society will come apart at the seams.

A lot of left-wing policies fail because they don’t seriously consider these constraints and the quick changes to them that their legislation brings. As a nation, we must find a way to understand moral capital while also promoting ideas and laws that benefit all sectors of society. This will only happen if we can productively talk across party lines.

Finding Civility

Haidt offers three recommendations for improving bipartisan collaboration in government:

1. Change how we run primary elections.
2. Change how we draw electoral districts.
3. Change how candidates can raise money.

However, Haidt primarily focuses on how individuals who disagree can find civility and common ground. We live in more polarized areas than we used to—in 1976, only around a quarter of Americans lived in a county that voted overwhelmingly (by a margin of 20% or over) for one presidential candidate. By 2008, that number was almost half. These counties maintain distinct cultural differences. In the 2008 election, 89% of counties with a Whole Foods voted for Obama, while 62% of counties with a Cracker Barrel voted for McCain.

It’s easier to live with people who share our moral matrices, and as we’ve discovered people with the same moral matrices regularly have the same political beliefs. Even if we can’t find like-minded people in our communities, we can now easily find them online. We think increasingly that the other group is blind when talking about politics, but truthfully, everyone is blind when discussing “sacred objects” like political candidates or policies. If we can remember our own blindness, though, we may be less inclined to judge the blindness of others. When you disagree with someone else on a moral or political issue, first consider which of the six moral foundations are at the heart of the issue. Then, try to practice empathy. If you have a friendly interaction with someone with different moral matrices, you’re much more likely to understand them better. You might not always change your mind, but you will respect their opinion more.