This is a summary of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. The author seeks to understand how people determine morality. Please note that there is no judgment by the author or by myself for people's different moral positions, no moral position is superior to another.
"We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about."
Morality is most often characterized by the ideas of harm and fairness but there are other conceptualizations of morality including cultural learning and ideas around disgust and disrespect. These reactions often bypass logic with logic doing very little to quell initial reactions of disgust and disrespect. In a study conducted by the author people ascribed post hoc reasoning based on their intuitive reactions. In other words, they made emotional and reactive decisions and then fabricated "logical" reasons to back their intuitive knowledge. Most of the examples given were of social faux-pas. Here are a few:
A completely sterilized cockroach is presented while the participant has a drink in front of them. They are asked if they would still drink the drink after the sterilized cockroach was briefly dipped into the drink.
A document was presented in which the participants were asked to sell their soul for $2 to the researcher. It was stated that the contract was legally non-binding and could be destroyed whenever they pleased.
A person has sex with a dead chicken alone in their house and no one ever finds out. Is it wrong?
A brother and sister have sex without anyone knowing. She is on birth control, he is wearing a condom. They never have sex again nor do they conceive from it. Is it wrong?
In these examples the majority of the participants of the study said that these situations were wrong but floundered in providing reasons as to why they were wrong. The cockroach was sterilized, the contract was essentially null and void, the chicken was dead and no one saw, and the siblings didn't conceive or have sex again. Why would people be so staunchly opposed to the ideas and refuse to change opinions even when it was clear that no harm or lack of fairness occurred?
There are two kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. The author uses a metaphor of an elephant and rider to portray the relationship between the two. The elephant is intuition and the rider is reasoning. The elephant is larger and more powerful while the rider has some control, but not as much as he thinks. Here are the authors arguments for how intuition comes first.
Exposure Effect - Many studies have been done to show that familiarity is equated to goodness. The more you are exposed to something, the more likely you are to think that it's a good thing. Marketing is based on this principle.
We are subconsciously impacted by intuitive judgments all the time. The implicit bias test is a test to measure your subconscious bias and it shows that we make slightly slower judgments when we have biases. The author also lists several studies such as attractiveness being a determinant of lighter legal sentencing and perceived competency. In one study participants were shown pictures of political candidates and the participants were able to guess who won 2/3 of the time, even when they were shown the pictures for a tenth of a second.
Subconscious impressions of cleanliness impact judgment. The author list several studies again that show that "immorality makes us feel physically dirty, and cleansing ourselves can sometimes make us more concerned about guarding our moral purity." When we are "clean" we push "dirty" things away more.
Psychopaths reason but don't feel compassion, guilt, shame, or embarrassment which leads them to commit morally reprehensible acts.
Morality is to some degree present from birth at an intuitive level. Studies show that babies intuitively decipher who is nice and who isn't and will show preference towards those that are nice.
Brain activity in emotional processes of the brain predict moral decisions and judgments. If reason were to supersede intuition then the more logical parts of the brain's activity would correlate with moral judgments and decisions.
In the book The Republic by Plato, Socrates argues that a virtuous man is a happy man while Glaucon argued that reputation is more important. It seems that psychology would argue that people generally agree with Glaucon. The author cites studies that show that "conscious reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery."
Studies show that even people who say they don't care about what others think, when tested, do care what others think.
Confirmation bias - we "seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what [we] already think.
Most people will cheat when given the opportunity if they don't think they will be caught. "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 they cheated just a little bit."
We tend to look for evidence to back what we want to be true, not what is true.
The part of our brain that activates when engaging in partisanship is not the part of the brain responsible for reasoning.
Human nature opts for rewarding information, something we want to believe, rather than information that feels like a punishment, admitting we were wrong.
Our ethics and morals are a product of the intuitive elephant. Turns out that there is more to ethics than just the harm and fairness principles, as well as deviations within the two. The West typically thinks in terms of the ethics of autonomy, allowing people to act independently and without reserve as long as it doesn't harm others. The Eastern world operates from the ethics of community, what is best for a community, and ethics of divinity, what is regarded as divine.
The author determined six main categories, or foundations, of morality as determined by his research.
The Care/Harm Foundation - Compassion for others and their well-being.
The Fairness/ Cheating Foundation - Fairness based on equality or fairness based on contribution.
The Loyalty/ Betrayal Foundation - Tribalism based on how big you perceive your tribe to be.
The Authority/ Subversion Foundation - Following hierarchy for the sake of order and justice vs abuse of power.
The Sanctity/ Degradation Foundation - What is sacred vs what is not.
The Liberty/ Oppression Foundation - Liberty vs equality. Complete liberty rarely, if ever, results in total equality.
He goes on to say that liberals and conservatives share common foundations, conservatives just happen to have more foundations than liberals. Liberals primarily value the care/harm foundation and fairness/ cheating foundation, typically brought on by the liberty/oppression principle when they feel a particular population is being bullied or dominated. Conservatives on the other hand value all six foundations. Liberals tend to score higher on the care foundation and conservatives on the liberty foundation as well as on the fairness foundation (based on proportionality).
"Morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups."
So what purpose does morality serve functionally? Morality serves to bind groups together although it often comes at an equivalent cost, blindness to other groups plights. Cohesive groups have an advantage over non-cohesive groups by allowing them to pool resources towards the accomplishment of a larger goal. Cohesive groups also serve as a form of protection from other groups that may seek to do harm. Research shows that being a part of a group increases psychological health (at higher levels of functioning, not lower) whether it be a bowling league, sorority, sports team fan, religious group, or nation.
There are things that trigger altruistic or group mentalities. The author gives three examples although he acknowledges there are other ways to "flip the switch" as well.
The experience of awe - Nature is perhaps the most common way to experience awe but anything that allows you to feel like a part of a whole is an experience of awe.
Psychedelics - Psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca and other similar substances produce, and have produced throughout history, a feeling of sacredness and unity. One study found that participants experienced nine common things: a feeling of unity with others, transcendence of time and space, positive mood, sense of sacredness, gaining of intuitive knowledge that felt profound, paradoxicality, difficulty describing the experience, transiency (the altered state ending), and persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior.
Raves - Yup, raves, not concerts as a whole. Lasers and sweet dubstep beats create experiences of awe. I can personally attest to this as an avid raver and introducer of people to raves for many years. Not a single person hasn't liked it thus far (not to say that people can't or won't).
The author also gives biological ways to activate group mentality:
Oxytocin - Bonds us to partners.
Mirror Neurons - The neurons responsible for feeling another person's emotions.
And environmental ways:
Increase similarity, not diversity - People are warmer towards people who are like them.
Exploit synchrony - Doing something simultaneously as a group promotes group trust.
Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals - Competition for fun, not for scarce resources, builds cooperation.
"Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible."
So what brings people to their moral positions? The author notes a couple of factors.
Genes - Twins raised in completely different environments have shown to be more similar than dissimilar in all areas, not just major ones. Things like taste in music, art, and other similarities exist between twins raised in contrasting environments. Genes make people more or less reactive to threats and more or less open to new experiences, two main differences between liberals and conservatives with liberals showing less reactivity to threats (death, lack of structure/ order) and more pleasure to new experiences.
Traits - Perhaps better phrased as environment, our environment shapes who we become.
Life Narratives - Perhaps better phrased as experiences, our experiences greatly influence how we see the world.
Moral positions have their accompanying benefits according to the author and he chooses to go over liberal and conservative values, with libertarian values as a part of conservative values.
Liberals believe 1) that governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms and 2) that some problems really can be solved by regulation. Liberals believe that corporations should be controlled by governments to some extent to prevent them from engaging in non-ethical behaviors like poisoning a cities water supply, something that both parties can agree upon is wrong, but if the corporations don't regulate themselves and get away with what they can, what is the other option? Some problems can and should be solved by regulation to control those who intentionally cause harm to others without other recourse.
Libertarians value freedom above all other foundations and for good reason. I don't know many people that love having their freedom limited or that love being told what to do. Freedom is an integral part of any desirable life which is the wisdom libertarians bring to the table. Conservatives recognize the value of groups and subdivisions in order to effect change within the defined parameters. It's much harder to change the world than it is to change a state or a country. The more diffuse group boundaries become, the more challenging it becomes to form group cohesion and get anything done. "You can't help the bees by destroying the hive."
"When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it."
Morality binds and blinds. Dialectically, each moral position comes with its accompanying blind spots. The liberal blindspot is what the author calls moral capital, the cohesiveness that can be attained by a group with similar morals based on mutual trust. Conservatives tend to believe that their moral view is the answer to achieve human happiness and believe that humans are naturally prone to actions based on self-interest which a unified moral society controls (which is true based on the psychological studies emphasized in the book), something that liberals fail to understand. In their desire for a unified moral society, the blindspot of conservatives can become prejudice for the in-group vs the out-groups. Humanitarianism can be lost in the desire to help one's own group at the expense of others. Libertarians assume that freedom will lead to optimal outcomes, but that isn't always the case. In fact, regulation is sometimes the only way to control a system when it doesn't result in self-regulated moral behavior. The author gives an example of hospitals in 2007 that could've adopted a simple protocol for sanitation that would cut the death rate from accidental infections by two-thirds, but most hospitals didn't adopt the protocol.
In essence, the book is a call for a reformation of how we view one another. We all have good, morally good, reasons for our political positions and we don't have to devalue each other just because we don't value things the exact same. We all want what we think is best at the end of the day, we just have different ideas of how to get there.
Love this book! It changed the way I saw different belief systems. Great summary.