The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion in EconTalk

Feb 05, 2014 Pete rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, science

The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt is a fascinating account of how people think and feel about politics. This book will help you understand why people who disagree with you are clearly demented. Actually, it will do the opposite, Haidt builds a solid picture of how people’s morals and attitudes shape their politics.
Haidt describes how our emotions and instincts guide our politics. He strongly believes in David Hume’s dictum that reason is like a rider on an elephant, it can guide the el The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt is a fascinating account of how people think and feel about politics. This book will help you understand why people who disagree with you are clearly demented. Actually, it will do the opposite, Haidt builds a solid picture of how people’s morals and attitudes shape their politics.
Haidt describes how our emotions and instincts guide our politics. He strongly believes in David Hume’s dictum that reason is like a rider on an elephant, it can guide the elephant but the elephant goes where it chooses. We often use our reason not to find the truth but to justify our actions.
Haidt groups our morals into 6 areas, care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. He suggest that democrats believe in looking at the first two and the third somewhat but neglect the other values and that this is why there had been only 1 Democrat re-elected to a second term since FDR. Haidt also includes praise for President Obama and suggests that he addresses all five issues as did President Clinton.
As with many categorizations the grouping is questionable and his assertion that the US left only addresses some of the concerns is even more questionable. Anyone who leaves a political group experiences how they feel about loyalty and betrayal and the Left behaves in similar way. Disrespecting a Democratic President also happily fires feelings of authority and subversion.
However, as with many good books the journey is more interesting than the destination. The way that Haidt builds up his case by describing how his psychological tests are used to build a picture of morality in different areas is fascinating.
Haidt also looks at religion and echoes the ideas of David Solan Wilson on group selection. Wilson’s ideas have been strongly criticized by numerous biologists but Haidt things they are wrong about people because people are so much more intelligent than other animals.
The book is a really interesting read and Haidt writes well. His summaries at the end of chapters and the structure of the book really help the reader to comprehend the book. The anecdotes and quotes in the book are well chosen.
...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Sep 20, 2012 Brian rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, religious, politics-current-events

This was a tough, but good book to get through. It deals with the divides in politics and religion, and why people seem to be so dogmatic in their beliefs, and unable to see the other side’s point of view. The author is a college professor, and the writing style shows. I felt like I had finished a course in evolutionary theory, psychology and statistics by the time I was done. The latter chapters that deal directly with religious beliefs, and the differences between liberals and conservatives (a This was a tough, but good book to get through. It deals with the divides in politics and religion, and why people seem to be so dogmatic in their beliefs, and unable to see the other side’s point of view. The author is a college professor, and the writing style shows. I felt like I had finished a course in evolutionary theory, psychology and statistics by the time I was done. The latter chapters that deal directly with religious beliefs, and the differences between liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) were extremely interesting and the payoff for the earlier, more foundational chapters. A bonus, for me, was the professor is decidedly in the liberal thinker camp – a perspective I’ve tried to understand better lately.

The most believable hypothesis (my term) in this book is that the reason we’re divided so often is that we are groupish by nature. We split ourselves into groups and root rabidly for good outcomes for our team. Think: national pride, pride for a sports team, or pride for your city. His belief is this is a natural outcome of evolutionary behavior. This resonated and made sense to me. My first connection to Natalie came when I mentioned I was also from Seattle. It made relating to one another easier. I hassle Ohio State fans for their inability to use words with more than five letters, even though I’ve never been to Columbus. Etc. The same principle applies to politics and religion. Catholicism (or whatever church) is ‘our team’ and so we defend them to the point of suspending rational thought at times.

His second hypothesis is that humans have 6 moral foundations, much like taste receptors on a tongue. When you object to someone else’s point of view with the response, “but that’s just not RIGHT!” you are likely talking past each other. The six are: Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. He has lots and lots of data to show how differently liberals, conservatives and libertarians experience those different moral flavors. Liberals feel mostly in the Care category, with small amounts of Liberty and Fairness. They don’t ‘taste’ loyalty, authority and sanctity – and thus their most sacred value is “care for victims of oppression.” Libertarians taste only Liberty to the exclusion of all other moral flavors. Their most sacred value is “individual liberty”. Conservatives, interestingly, taste all 6 of the moral flavors evenly. Sanctity, Authority and Loyalty are just as important as Care and Liberty. Their most sacred value is “Sustain a Moral Community.”

Personally, I found this second section of the book interesting, illuminating, but the most likely to be flawed as it rested on a number of different assumptions, studies and ‘most accepted’ versions of philosophy and psychology by today’s social scientists. I got the feeling that if a more accurate, more finely tuned, or better-in-some-way foundational principle was re-examined, the “6 moral tastes” hypothesis would change.

If you’re ready for a in-depth and meaty look at why the ‘other side’ thinks the way they do, written by a liberal guy who tries his hardest to be fair, I recommend this book.
...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 04, 2012 Jon Gauthier rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mind-tickling, psychology, politics, life-toolbox, rationality-or-lack-thereof

This one goes in the life toolbox: books which have given me new ways to think about my identity and my rationality.

Useful concepts which make this toolbox-worthy:
— Elephant-and-rider metaphor for cognition (think lizard-brain)
— Religion as a group-evolved mechanism for coordinating moral systems and lowering social and economic transaction costs
— "Moral matrices" and the different foundations from which different parties reason (reminds me of The Three Languages of Politics) ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 08, 2018 Paul rated it it was ok

Shelves: nonfiction, science

Given how frequently Haidt mentions working with Brian Nosek, it's interesting that he does not in any way acknowledge the ongoing reproducibility crisis in social science. This is a pop social science book, and as such it's got the lowest prior probability of being reliable, and yet no mention of pre-registration or anything other than credulity when it comes to the scientific basis of the content.

I was most suspicious when Haidt describes one experiment that used hypnosis to prove his point. U Given how frequently Haidt mentions working with Brian Nosek, it's interesting that he does not in any way acknowledge the ongoing reproducibility crisis in social science. This is a pop social science book, and as such it's got the lowest prior probability of being reliable, and yet no mention of pre-registration or anything other than credulity when it comes to the scientific basis of the content.

I was most suspicious when Haidt describes one experiment that used hypnosis to prove his point. Using hypnosis in this way is, to my mind, essentially like a placebo. If he can make that work to favor his conclusions, the methodology is almost certainly entirely flawed.

He also goes off on a weird tangent against the "new atheists", which felt entirely unnecessary to me. I frankly think the "new atheists" are weird to talk about as a group considering they have very varying views among themselves, and honestly they get a lot more airtime than they deserve; not really a judgement on their content, it's just that they are not so interesting in serious scientific discussions, their public role is a lot more about building an audience for their content. The fact that Haidt spends so much time discussing them makes me take his book much less seriously.

One reason that Haidt brings up the new atheists is, presumably, because Dawkins' selfish gene model is currently the best way to explain the evolution of cooperative behaviors without group selection, which is Haidt's preferred model. I am not reflexively opposed to group selection (it is the more intuitive model), but I really don't think Haidt makes a particularly compelling case against selfish genes, his objections seem very shallow.

Haidt also wanted to address the idea of religion as a "thought virus", where he is almost certainly on firmer ground. Still, I think there is plenty of room for religion to both be a specific memetic parasite and also for it to be based on legitimately valuable adaptations. Both make some assumptions about the substrate, and it seems not unreasonable to imagine that the reason religious memes can propagate is because they are taking advantage of features of our mind adapted for group behavior; there will always be something akin to religiosity for cohesion purposes, but the specific religions that exist are the ones that are most likely to propagate.

While I have many disagreements with the premises of this book and the reasoning therein, I am broadly sympathetic to Haidt's concerns. To some extent I believe he is using science (such as it is done in the world of the social sciences) to justify what I think is a largely intuitive idea. Many of the features of humanity he discusses, such as our tribal instincts and how we position ourselves in society, are not so far off from what is readily observable in our day-to-day lives that I think they are not a bad starting point to take into account when trying to accomplish things. Some of his advice would be well-heeded when considering how your arguments are going to be received and, more importantly for those of us who are interested in philosophical humility, when receiving the arguments of others.

It would be interesting to see if some of these experiments can be reproduced with modern methods and whether this changes the conclusions of the book or not.

Oh, also, the elephant metaphor just.. doesn't work, which is very sad because he makes a big deal out of it, like it was the insight that helped him finally get his concepts across. Ah well.

2.5 of 5 stars ...more

Like · see review