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Littler Books cover of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Summary

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Summary and Quotes

Jonathan Haidt

6.2 minutes to read • Updated August 22, 2024

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What it's about in one sentence:

An exploration of how moral intuitions, rather than rational thought, drive human behavior and ideological divisions.

Bullet Point Outline and Summary

  1. There are three theories to explain where morality comes from:
    1. Nativists see morality as innate.
    2. Empiricists see it as learned from childhood learning.
    3. Rationalists see it as constructed through reason and rational thinking from experiences with harm and fairness. For example, kids don't want to be harmed, so they ration that it's immoral to harm others.
  2. The author believed in the rationalist view until he conducted his research in Brazil and the US in which he found that morality is influenced by culture and class.
    1. Lower-class Brazillians believe that violation of social conventions is wrong (for example, not wearing a required uniform) while the upper-class Brazilians and Americans did not.
  3. In more sociocentric, non-Western cultures, morality extended far beyond harm and fairness to encompass a wide range of practices around purity, respect, and social conventions.
  4. People's moral judgments are often driven by gut feelings and intuitions about disgust and disrespect, rather than purely rational principles.
  5. Morality involves a combination of innate moral intuitions and social learning.
  6. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” - David Hume
  7. “The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant.”
  8. “If you want to change someone's mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant [feelings/intuition] first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch -- a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.”
  9. Experiments showed that moral judgments are often made intuitively and quickly, with moral reasoning serving to justify these intuitive judgments after the fact.
  10. Howard Margolis conducted a study with the Wason 4-card task, in which participants are shown cards and asked which ones need to be flipped over to verify a given rule. When asked to explain their reasoning, people offered confident justifications for both the correct and incorrect answers, even after the right answer was revealed.
  11. “The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
  12. The author discovered that he is a chronic liar after making up a quick excuse to dismiss his wife's criticism about leaving dishes out. This led him to reflect on research on moral judgments. He found that:
    1. Brains are constantly evaluating and reacting intuitively.
    2. Social and political judgments are particularly intuitive.
    3. Our bodily feelings (e.g., bad smells) influence our moral judgments.
    4. Psychopaths reason but don't feel.
    5. Babies feel but don't reason.
    6. The parts of the brain that control emotions are activated when making moral judgements.
  13. We evolved a mental architecture oriented more toward intuitions and reputation management than pure truth-seeking, as this was likely more adaptive for the survival of our ancestors.
  14. Socrates argues that a just person is happier than an unjust person, but research shows that people care more about appearance and reputation than reality.
  15. Moral reasoning seems to function more like a politician seeking justification and votes than a scientist seeking truth.
    1. “Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president.”
  16. We are prone to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and self-serving justifications, often without even realizing it.
  17. Our political opinions and beliefs are heavily influenced by group allegiance rather than self-interest or a dispassionate search for truth.
  18. Expertise in moral reasoning does not improve moral behavior, and may even make it worse by increasing justification abilities. To improve ethical behavior, it is more effective to change the environment and incentives than to rely on moral reasoning or ethics lessons.
  19. "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."
  20. "In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team."
  21. Morality is more than just harm and fairness.
  22. The author collected his dissertation research by interviewing subjects at a McDonald's in West Philadelphia about moral dilemmas. For example, he asked people if it's wrong for someone to have private sex with a dead chicken they found. He found educated people were more likely to use the "harm principle" (it's ok if it's not harming anyone) to justify moral transgressions compared to the working-class subjects.
  23. WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultures are statistical outliers in psychological research.
    1. “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).”
  24. The author discovered that in India morality was guided by a broader set of values: autonomy, community, and divinity.
  25. People's moral intuitions are shaped by the particular cultural "matrix" or worldview they are immersed in from a young age. Stepping outside of one's own moral matrix can lead to a transformative awakening where one recognizes the validity of alternative moral perspectives.
  26. Just as humans have five basic taste receptors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), humans have six "moral taste receptors" or foundations that form the basis of moral intuitions. This is the Moral Foundations Theory.
  27. The six moral receptors are:
    1. Care/harm
    2. Fairness/cheating
    3. Loyalty/betrayal
    4. Authority/subversion
    5. Sanctity or purity/degradation
    6. Liberty/oppression
  28. Just as a single-flavor restaurant would be unsatisfying, moral philosophies that reduce morality to a single principle, like utilitarianism (overall good should be maximized no matter the cost) or Kantian deontology (rights and autonomy are cardinal), are overly simplistic compared to the multifaceted nature of human morality.
  29. Republicans understand moral psychology better than Democrats, as the GOP's slogans and appeals go straight for the gut by activating a broader range of moral foundations.
    1. In his research, the author found that conservatives endorse all moral foundations more equally, while liberals prioritize care/harm and fairness/cheating.
  30. The partisan divides come from liberals focused on fighting oppression of vulnerable groups while conservatives see it as resisting government tyranny infringing on individual liberties.
  31. “Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when it is the Democratic Party that wants to redistribute money more evenly? Democrats often say that Republicans have duped these people into voting against their economic self-interest... But from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, rural and working-class voters were in fact voting for their moral interests. They don't want to eat at The True Taste [single-flavor] restaurant, and they don't want their nation to devote itself primarily to the care of victims and the pursuit of social justice.”
  32. After the 9/11 attacks, the author felt an urge to display an American flag on his car, despite being a liberal professor who was normally wary of nationalism. This reflected a primitive "team player" instinct that the author argues is part of human nature, shaped by evolution through group selection.
  33. Humans underwent a "major transition" in evolution, where selfish individuals came together to form cohesive, cooperating groups that functioned almost like single organisms. Group selection occurs when groups compete and the most cohesive, cooperative groups outcompete less cooperative groups.
  34. Cultural innovations like tools and language co-evolved with genetic changes, as more cooperative groups outcompeted less cooperative ones.
  35. Genetic evolution in humans dramatically accelerated in the last 50,000 years, contrary to the view that human biology has been static. Rapid genetic changes were likely driven by group selection pressures, especially during population bottlenecks and environmental challenges.
  36. "We humans have a dual nature -- we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee."
  37. "Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself."
  38. The ability to temporarily transcend self-interest and become part of a larger group is a group-level adaptation shaped by between-group competition.
  39. There are many ways to "flip the hive switch" and induce experiences of awe, collective effervescence, and self-transcendence, such as rituals, drugs, and music events like raves.
  40. The neurotransmitter oxytocin and the mirror neuron system are two biological mechanisms underlying the hive switch.
    1. The mirror neuron system is a brain network activated both when we move and when we observe others' actions.
  41. Corporations are an example of a successful superorganism, and leaders can leverage the hive switch to create more cohesive and productive organizations.
  42. Fascist movements have exploited the hive switch, but this does not mean that all forms of group bonding are inherently dangerous.
  43. The American founders saw fostering multiple competing groups as a way to prevent tyranny.
  44. The New Atheists argue that religion is an irrational delusion that causes harm, while others see religion as an important adaptation that helps groups cohere and cooperate.
  45. The Durkheimian (group first) view is that religion, like college football, creates a sacred community and moral matrix that binds people together and suppresses selfishness.
  46. Religion is not just a set of supernatural beliefs. Religions have bound groups together for thousands of years, using beliefs in sacred figures and principles to elicit commitment and suppress free-riding. This allowed such groups to thrive, driving the rapid growth of human civilization.
  47. “We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That's what religion is all about.”
  48. People's political ideologies are shaped by their underlying psychological predispositions, not just the ideas around them. Liberals and conservatives are drawn to different grand narratives that resonate with their characteristic cognitive and emotional tendencies.
    1. “People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals... People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right.”
  49. Once people join a political team, they become ensnared in its moral matrix, making it difficult to convince them they are wrong.
  50. Liberals and conservatives both provide important, complementary moral perspectives that are necessary for a healthy society.
  51. The increasing polarization of American politics requires changes to the election process, as well as to the institutional and environmental factors that fuel partisan conflict.
  52. Three principles of moral psychology:
    1. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
    2. There's more to morality than harm and fairness.
    3. Morality binds and blinds people into groups.
  53. “This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult -- but not impossible -- to connect with those who live in other matrices, which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations."

The Righteous Mind: Resources