The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: My Takeaways and Summary

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share some of my summary and takeaways from the paradigm shifting book The Righteous Mind by moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. 

Very occasionally, I read a book that changes the way I view the world.  I read quite a bit and am highly influenceable, but there are only a handful of books that have changed the filter through which I see things — these are some of those books (Egoscue, Attachment, Paradox of Choice).  Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is one of those paradigm shifting books for me. 

It helps that I read it at a time when I was puzzling over the polarization our political discourse.  I’m a dyed in the wool liberal, but I enjoy talking to people with different views. And not just to yell at them that they are wrong — I like to hear WHY people think what they think.  I grew up in a very conservative town and have lots of friends of very different political persuasions.  Some of my very favorite people vote differently than I do. Underneath it all, we seem to love our families, care about our friends, value hard work, and want to make our country better.  Why do we seem to have such different solutions?  Why do some people’s  solutions seem unkind and oppressive to me when I don’t think of them as unkind people?  And why do we seem to be talking in different languages or sometimes having completely different conversations?  

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: the controversy over NFL players kneeling during the anthem.  One side is talking about police brutality, the other about honoring our veterans.  How can we possibly come to any shared conclusions when we seem to be having totally different conversations and arguing about completely different things? And how is it that two people can take such different meanings away from the same action?

The Righteous Mind answers this question for me, but let’s come back to this example later.  If i haven’t made it clear yet, i highly recommend this book.  It’s interesting, has great examples, and is well-argued and structured.  His book is split into 3 parts — Haidt presents a different theory in each part. 

The first part of the book presents the theory that, when it comes to moral decision making — that is, matters of right or wrong — we tend to make decisions based on gut instinct and then we rationalize those decisions after the fact.  In fact, Haidt argues that our entire reasoning process evolved not to find truth, but to convince others that we are right.  He uses the metaphor of an rider on an elephant. The elephant is our intuitive reasoning — that is the mostly subconscious automatic processes that drive most of our behavior. The rider is our reasoning and, basically, is just along for the ride.  When you feel a flash of negative feeling — that is your elephant. Sometimes your rider can wrest decision making away from the elephant, but rarely. Mostly our reasoning just rationalizes the decisions the elephant has already made.  Kind of like a spokesperson frantically explaining the mouthing off of an erratic politician.  And sometimes we can’t even think of any explanations, but we still stand by our intuitive choices — this is called moral dumbfounding and is quite common once you start looking for it.  Apparently, the higher your IQ, the more arguments you can generate on the side your elephant is already leaning towards.  But higher IQ doesn’t necessarily mean you get any closer to the truth.  For the purposes of this video, I’d like you to notice any flashes of negativity — if you are a liberal, you may feel some while watching!  And continue listening to see if your rider can ultimately influence your elephant. 

The second part of the book is the meatyist part.  It talks about Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory.  

The first important point that he makes is that based on personality, people are predisposed to be either conservative or liberal.  It has to do with the trait of openness. Liberals tend to be more taken with variety, diversity, and new experiences. Conservatives tend to prefer order, routine, and tradition.  It’s not a given, but political preference is driven at least in part by personality. 

He identifies 6 cross-cultural moral foundations.  You could also call them moral values or categories.  Liberals tend to see 2 or 3 of these — conservatives see all 6. In fact, when conservatives were asked to fill out a questionnaire as though they were liberal, they did pretty well.  When liberals were asked the same thing, they totally bombed. They can’t even pretend to understand how conservatives think.  If you are liberal — did your elephant just wake up and give you a flash of negative emotion?  Well, hear me out.  

Haidt’s view is that these foundations are like moral taste buds — some people have a wide palate, some have a more narrow palate.  I like to think of them as controls on the equalizer of an old audio system — some are turned way up, some turned down. Here are the three moral foundations that liberals can see in order of importance:

• The care/harm foundation. This is basic liberal doctrine. Be kind to others, be altruistic, The Golden Rule, reduce suffering. When we see kids suffering, we feel a flash of moral anger and revulsion. The next one is
• Liberty/oppression. This is our natural reaction against bullies and tyrants. It’s equality, but against those who would dominate or oppress you or others. When we see people in shackles or enslaved, this moral instinct kicks in. And the third is
• Fairness/Cheating - this foundation is about reaping what you sow. It’s the guard against free loaders and cheaters. It’s not straight egalitarianism — but what Haidt calls Proportionate Fairness. In other words, the moral sense that people should be rewarded for their good deeds and cheaters should be punished. Karma and just world stuff.

Okay — so those are 3 moral foundations that everyone can see. Here are the ones that only conservatives see:

• Loyalty/betrayal - this is the degree to which you can trust others. It’s our response to people who might not be considered team players. We want to reward those who honor the group and ostracize those who don’t. Breaches in loyalty are met with moral outrage. Next,
• Authority/subversion - this is the response to those who step outside of understood social hierarchies. Living in a social group usually means adhering to some kind of social structure. We can be morally sensitive to people who behave in ways that conflict with their rank or status. And finally,
• Sanctity/degradation - this is anything that triggers a purity or sacred reflex. This comes from our species’ evolutionary need to avoid pathogens or contaminated foods and is generalized in modern life to special Items that can be considered sacred or worthy of reverence like the nation’s flag or certain monuments, buildings, or documents. This is the tendency to feel moral outrage when those sacred items are desecrated or pure things are made impure.

Those last 3 generally strike liberals as not just not moral categories, but actually not desirable at all!  After all, in the name of loyalty, authority, and sanctity, people have oppressed and harmed others for millennia.  But here is the thing — we are WEIRD. And I mean that as an acronym — most folks watching this are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic countries.  WEIRD.  Most moral studies have been done in WEIRD countries, but if you do cross cultural investigations, WEIRD countries are statistical outliers. And here is why — those countries tend to value individual contributions, whereas many other countries value the contributions of the collective.

The three moral foundations held by most liberals — care, liberty, and fairness — are based on individual rights that have been held up as sacred since the Enlightenment and French Revolution. They are important to protect individuals from harm and oppression and are enshrined in our nation’s Declaration of Independence as inalienable rights. 

The last three moral foundations — loyalty, authority, and sanctity — are collective binding tools.  They help create and maintain tight cohesion within a group. And they help to ensure that if your group faces attack, that you will be able to fend it off. All you need to do is remember how we all felt after 9/11 — fiercely American, groupish, flying our country’s symbols with gusto, and ready to follow orders into battle.  We were also ready to give up some individual rights in order to protect our group — and did so with the Patriot Act.  In fact, people tend to feel more strongly about loyalty, authority, and sanctity when their group is under threat since cohesion is particularly important in those times.

Which brings us to Haidt’s last point, which is that humans are 90% Chimp and 10% Bee. What he means by this is that humans are mostly selfish.  They have evolved to procure and protect resources for themselves and their progeny — the Chimp analogy.  But he argues on behalf of multi-layer or Group selection as well, which must be a controversial position considering the amount of time and evidence he expends on this.  He convinced me.   Human groups needed to survive and succeed in an environment of competition with other groups for limited resources.  The groups who were the most cohesive were more successful in obtaining life preserving resources and then passed those groupish traits down to future generations.  This is the bee analogy.  Bees are hierarchical, have division of labor and are cooperative and altruistic within the context of their hive.  Our 10% bee behavior accounts for Group-based altruism and cooperation.  

So, why was this book so eye-opening for me?  It helps me to understand WHY people think what they think.  For example, why do some conservatives want to limit access to birth control?  Using only the 3 moral foundations that I am used to seeing, this seems oppressive and harmful.  But -- if you consider that conservatives are trying to preserve a way of life where the family was main social unit and the roles of each person within that unit were well defined, then limiting birth control makes sense in the context of preserving the hierarchy and order of the family unit.  It's hell for individual women in many ways, but that is considered justifiable collateral damage to protect the collective family unit.  I’m not arguing this is right — but the logic makes a little more sense.  

Or how about gun control?  Liberals argue the care/harm principle -- it's gut wrenching to see people dying in our schools, public places, and in the context of domestic violence.  But conservatives are arguing from a liberty/oppression standpoint.  These are 2 different moral arguments -- just a matter of which matters more to you.  You basically can do this for any issue where the parties seem to be talking against each other -- kneeling during the flag is police brutality (care/harm) vs. disrespecting our troops and the sanctity of the anthem (the authority, sanctity, loyalty triumvirate).  Immigration is care/harm vs. sanctity and proportionate fairness.

Now, I'm not saying these are all equally defensible positions.  I'm just saying it helps me to understand why people come to the conclusions they do and why, evolutionary, these moral foundations exist within us as humans.  It helps as a liberal to know that too much emphasis on individuality tends to tear at the fabric of group cohesiveness.  And from a conservative perspective, too much emphasis on collective morality tends to oppress and harm some individuals for the potential benefit of the group as a whole.

I loved this book.  Please read it!  Maybe we'll all be able to understand each other's moral languages a bit better and work together to widen our understanding of who is worthy of cooperation and altruism.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!