In his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Haidt presents his life work and his personal development as he does research in moral psychology. His life’s goal (as hinted in his subtitle) has been to explain why we can be so divided politically and religiously and with that understanding can we get along better. His book makes three main points 1) “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second”, 2) “there is more to morality than harm and fairness” and 3) "morality binds and blinds”.
While working on his masters in the 1980’s while briefly living in India, Haidt was preoccupied with the question where does morality come from? He had come to realize that people all over the world had different moralities. Further he could see that many theories of the time may have been true if one only looks at WEIRD people that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. His experiences in India suggested that WEIRD people are literally weird – as in uncommon and not representative of humanity WEIRD people seem to have and speak on a very narrow sense of morality usually confined to justice or harm as the central moral problems. He credits/blames Lawrence Kohlberg for the scientific techniques of measuring moral development in people but also of “using his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.” Kohlberg used a “framework that predefined morality as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition…” In studying accounts of witches all around the world Haidt noted the surprisingly similar forms around the world. Either witches are real or as Haidt put it, “That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.” And further “morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.” A second phenomenon is the worldwide moral concern with purity and pollution. We hear about strange practices all over the world, but we often forget that we in the west have them too. For example, many westerners struggle to “choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically.” Recently we can imagine that some anti-vaxxers have claimed they do not want to put impurities in their body and list off a bunch of terrible sounding ingredients in vaccines. The point is that there is something universal about moral concerns of purity and pollution while at the same time huge diversity in the expression of these moral sentiments. One way to look at this is on where a society fits along a spectrum of balancing the needs of the individual and the group. Sociocentric cultures and individualistic cultures answer the question of where the balance is quite differently. In sociocentric cultures the social order is obviously the moral order – people in these kinds of societies speak and act this way. In individualistic cultures the social order appears and is often spoken about as social conventions and separate from the moral order. “When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It is a social convention.” So goes the popular thought. However, “Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom. The distinction between morals and mere conventions…turns out to be a cultural artifact, a necessary by-product of the individualistic answer to the question of how individuals and groups relate.” Haidt created a bunch of harmless taboo stories and asked people all over North and South America about them. Lower class groups moralized more than upper class and children more than adults. Many people who were disturbed engaged very hard in trying to find a victim. “These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.” In many of these stories the moral sentiment triggered was disgust or disrespect. Morality is “innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.”
The western philosophical tradition up until recently had 3 major models of the mind. Plato and successors till the enlightenment believed that reason ought to be the master – and in the most successful and noble people, reason is the master of human action. David Hume said, “reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions.” Finally, Thomas Jefferson said, “reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers” Any thoughts on who is right? E.O. Wilson was at this time the only person who suggested that emotions evolved and so did morality. While Wilson was ostracized for that belief later data showed that he was correct and further that Hume’s model was the closest to reality. Patients with brain insults to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex experience no emotionality yet they can reason perfectly, and their lives fall apart. “gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s conscious deliberations.” The harmless taboo stories demonstrated that “People made moral judgements quicky and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgements people had already made.” There are at least two parts to everyone’s mind. Haidt likes to use the metaphor of an elephant (the emotions and intuitions) and its rider (reason). The elephant is the powerful one and the boss. The rider is the elephant’s servant. If we want to change someone’s mind we must talk to their elephant.
One of the conceptual stumbling blocks of 20th century moral psychology was the emotion/cognition dichotomy in which they were considered two different human capabilities and especially the preference given to cognition as reason. The empirical evidence made better sense if we looked at all mental human faculties as types of cognition, of information processing. Haidt defines intuition as “the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgements and decision that we all make every day. Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in full-blown emotions.” Moral intuitions are rapid fire judgements based on patterns of information processing that have evolved with our species.
“[O]ur automatic self-righteousness…begins with rapid and compelling intuitions…and continues on with post hoc reasoning, done for socially strategic purposes.” Haidt give six relatively new research findings that led him to believe that intuitions come first. 1) “Brains evaluate instantly and constantly”. In the wild the survival of any animal requires that it correctly decide to approach or avoid anything 100 percent of the time. All animals are very good at this until they fail and die. In primates “affective primacy are the small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something…affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it sometimes even before we know what it is.” 2) Affective primacy can be adjusted with familiarity or a good association. “Social and political judgements are particularly intuitive” we can prime people in any direction with an association. 3) “Our bodies guide our judgements”. We are influenced by our senses more than we imagine. Bad odors and tastes can make us more judgmental in the moment by changing our mood and the reverse, “immorality can make us feel physically dirty”. We use our affect as information. 4) “Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally”. 5) “Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality”. 6) various scans conclusively show that “affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain”.
Changing a person’s mind is rarely done through reason alone. One must talk in terms of emotion and trigger the right associations. One must take time. One must let the other person come to the desired conclusion on their own (everyone is very good at finding reasons for what they want to believe). One can also use peer pressure because we are naturally drawn to bond with our tribe. Only when one is open can reason trigger new intuitions.
Haidt’s next question is: why did we evolve to rationalize and justify gut feelings rather than the truth? The short answer is that reputation has been more important than truth for our survival and in many places it still is. Plato’s older brother Gloucon appears several times in Plato’s Socratic dialogues with the correct (modern) answer that Plato then destroys. The question was would you prefer to be good in an evil world or evil in a good world. Gloucon said the second. “Gloucon was right: people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality…[and consequently]…the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.” We are more like intuitive politicians than scientists. As a species we have been able to evolve organizations far beyond kin relationships this has been made possible “by creating systems of formal and informal accountability” the unit of account in these systems is reputation. The research lead Haidt to five major conclusions. 1) “We are obsessed with polls”. Even when people say they do not care what others think of them they are lying according to brain imaging. “Self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a ‘sociometer’ that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner.” 2) Our reason is like a press secretary, it justifies everything. The confirmation bias, “the tendency to seek out an interpret new evidence in ways tha confirm what you already think”, is so ingrained that it is on the level of instinct. 3) “We lie, cheat, and justify so well that we honestly believe we are honest”. We don’t maximize cheating, only what we can justify and by justify that includes the moral blindness of plausible deniability. 4) “Reasoning (and Google) can take you wherever you want to go…people can literally see what they want to see – given a bit of ambiguity.” 5) “We can believe almost anything that supports our team”. We are groupish by nature not selfish. We want to fit in more than have the truth. “Political opinions function as ‘badges of social membership’”.