The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt

Part 1: Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning comes second

Chapter 1: Where does morality come from?

• One of Haidt’s early cross-cultural studies on moral judgement found that between rural Brazil, a city in Brazil, and a city in the USA, those in the more disadvantaged areas tended to moralize more
• Within each city, lower social status individuals tended to moralize more than those in high status. This effect of status was stronger than the differences in location
• Kids tended to moralize more than adults
• Those in rural Brazil still tended to deem something morally unacceptable even if they didn’t find anyone was harmed by the proposed scenario, whereas in the USA they would say it violates a social convention—showing that moral intuitions are not solely innate but absorbed via environmental influence
• Gut feelings about disgust and disrespect can sometimes drive reasoning, normally fabricated post-hoc. People may have a moral intuition about a certain circumstance, and struggle to come up with a distinct reason as to why they believe it’s bad/good

  Chapter 2: The intuitive dog and its rational tail

• “Desire and reason pull in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong”-Ovid, Roman poet
• There is a difference between personal preference and moral judgements. With personal preferences, it’s perfectly ok to decline a situation because you don’t want to, based on your subjective preference
• Moral judgements, however, are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong. I can’t gather support to punish you just because I don’t like what you’re doing. I must point to something outside my personal preferences, that pointing is our moral reasoning
• We reason morally not to see how we came to a judgement; but to find the best reasons why others ought to join us in our judgment
• Moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail; you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments
• Empathy is an antidote to righteousness and divisiveness, yet it’s challenging to empathize across a moral divide
• The mere exposure effect: An experiment showed that repeated exposure to arbitrary objects made people like them more; the brain tags familiar things as good things. This is a basic principle in advertising
• When exposed to a bad smell, subjects of a study were more likely to give harsher moral judgments. When reflecting on a past moral transgression, we are more likely to want to clean ourselves (Lady Macbeth effect). Even when something as simple as a hand-sanitizer is nearby, we become more morally conservative
• Animals first evolved to attract and averse to smells and tastes, i.e., biochemical senses. This could be one reason why a bad/good smell effects our moral judgments—if I’m sensing something pleasant, this is probably something that’s good for me
• An experiment gave its subjects a moral quandary and provided half of them with a weak justification and half with a strong justification. When asked their stance on the situation directly after reading the justification, most stuck to their intuitions and condemned the situation. When given 2 minutes to reflect afterwards, most who were shown the strong justification were much more likely to change their minds
• After ingesting information that provokes an affective response, letting it mellow for a few minutes, such that our initial brain stem response dies down, allows us to judge things with more reason and openness

  Chapter 4: Vote for me (here’s why)

• People are more likely to engage in exploratory thought (truth seeking) than confirmatory thought (one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point) when:
  • Prior to forming an opinion, they are told they will be accountable to an audience
  • The views of the audience are unknown
  • The audience are well-informed and seek accuracy
• One of thought’s central functions is to allow one to justifiably and persuasively describe why one acted in a particular way, and to search for reasons to convince oneself that they have made the “right” choice of action
• Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons (normally supporting their side and discounting the opposition)
• When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Can I believe it?” and search for supporting evidence; when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Must I believe it?” and search for contrary evidence

  Part 2: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness

  Chapter 5: Beyond WEIRD morality

• When asked to write statements beginning with the words “I am…”, westerners are more likely to reference internal psychological states (I am happy, I am outgoing, etc.) and East Asians are more likely to reference roles and relationships (I am a father, I am a husband, etc.)
• The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive things as separate objects rather than relationships
• Other than ethics around harm and fairness, the ethic of autonomy is prevalent in western societies. Not as prominent in WEIRD societies are the ethics of community and divinity, though in more conservative and religious factions of western society these ethics are more prevalent
• “We are multiple from the start.” The foundation for each of these moral ethics lies within us, latent, from the start. It is possible to view them all, to improve understanding of why others take moral positions, and to reduce ignorance towards why they feel that type of way

  Chapter 6: Taste buds of the righteous mind

• Five good candidates for being the “taste receptors” of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity

  Chapter 7: The moral foundations of politics

• The brain of a newborn is one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, i.e., fixed and immutable
• “Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises…built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”
• The moral matrix of liberals falls more heavily on the Care foundation than does that of the conservatives, though conservatives do still have some (e.g., save our troops… respect those who sacrifice for the group). The care foundation for the conservatives is aimed more locally, liberals tend to be a bit more universalist (e.g., human eating practices)
• Regarding the foundation of fairness, on the left, fairness often implies equality, whereas on the right it implies proportionality (i.e., get paid in proportion to one’s contributions)
• The loyalty foundation comes stronger for conservatives, who lean into loyalty by pledging loyalty their nation (nationalism) and to sports teams. Liberals have a harder time with this one as they tend to be universalists
• We are the descendants of individuals who were best able to play the game of authority/subversion—to rise in status while cultivating protection from superiors and the allegiance of subordinates
• The omnivore’s dilemma is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. They thus go through life with two competing motives: neophilia and neophobia
• Liberals tend to be more neophilic (open to new experiences); conservatives tend to be more neophobic (preferring what’s tried and true)
• There is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes to immigrants are more common in times and places where risks of disease are lower (the recent pandemic made this apparent)

  Chapter 8: The conservative advantage

• The liberty/oppression foundation makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination, triggering an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies
  • This manifests as egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism on the left, and “don’t-tread-on-me” and anti-government attitudes on the right
• The fairness foundation focuses mostly on proportionality. Most people have a few intuitive concern for the law of karma, we want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to their deeds

  Part 3: Morality binds and blinds

  Chapter 9: Why are we so groupish?

• Shared intentionality, i.e., when groups of humans share a common representation of a task they are pursuing, could have been the keystone step in the development in human morality. Once people began sharing a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and someone violated it, the group would feel a twinge of negativity towards the violator
• Morality is like the matrix, it’s a shared, consensual hallucination within a group
• A set of selection pressures operated within groups, e.g., via punishment of nonconformists; and between groups, e.g., via the most cohesive groups surviving and taking resources from less cohesive, smaller groups
• The human love of using symbolic markers to demonstrate a group membership likely adapted because it provided a way for our ancestors to develop a sense of “we” beyond kinship. The more permanent the symbol (e.g., piercings and tattoos) the more permanent the membership. We trust and cooperate better with people who look and sound like us, we expect them to share our values and norms
• We have a psychology which “expects” the social world to be divided into symbolically marked groups
• Humans “self-domesticated” themselves when they began selecting for partners and friends based on their ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix
• Changes in our genes accelerated greatly during the Holocene era, once humans started becoming more social, agriculture development began, and humans expanded across the globe into novel environments. Genes and culture coevolve, and once culture starts picking up the pace, genetic evolution picks up the pace as well
• Early population bottlenecks can also contribute to rapid genetic evolution. If we suddenly lose 95% of all food, the humans that survive are going to be the ones that work best together to monopolize the remaining resources. The small number of people that are left and the genes they carry have an immense impact on the generations that follow. Some suspect this happened 70000-140000 years ago during large global temperature fluctuations and volcanic eruptions that disrupted the environment
• Groupishness tends to be focused on improving the well-being of the in-group, instead of harming the out-group (although this does happen, e.g., warfare)
• Human nature is mostly shaped by individual selection. However, there is certainly a case to be made that group selection has played a role in shaping human nature, particularly in shaping our righteous minds

  Chapter 10: The hive switch

• There exists a “switch” in us that, when engaged, dissolves selfish interests and prioritizes the collective. The peak of this is collective effervescence, a state achieved when a large group acts in synchrony, generating a sort of electricity that reverberates throughout the group
• We are homo-duplex, we live most of our lives in our individual, ordinary worlds, but achieve some of our greatest joys in brief moments of connection to the “sacred” world, where the self dissolves and we become part of the whole
• Oxytocin bonds people to their groups. It increases intra-group love, but not love towards all humans as a whole
• Mirror neurons enable empathy, but studies show that they activate more for those that share their moral matrix (i.e., for those on their good side)

  Ch11. Religion is a team sport

• Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to
• New atheists dismiss religion as costly, ineffective, and irrational—a product of cognitive misfirings (e.g., agent-detection module). However, it turns out religion is a solution to one of the hardest challenges humanity faces: cooperation without kinship
• Communes (i.e., groups of people who reject the moral matrix of general society) in the United States tend to persist longer when they adopt a religion. More within group demands for sacrifice also correlated with group longevity. The longevity of secular communes was much shorter, though this doesn’t necessarily mean the people in these communes were more or less happy. It just means religious communes may be more effective groups
• In the human population as a whole, genes that promoted religious behaviour were likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perished and the more united ones thrived
• If human minds and human religions coevolved, shaping one another, we can not expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course, one can still reject organized religion, a more recent cultural phenomena. But someone who rejects all religion will have a hard time shaking off their religious psychology
• Particular religious beliefs and practices don’t correlate much with how altruistic a religious person is. How enmeshed with their co-religious community is the strongest correlate to how generous and charitable they are in general. Friendship and group activities carried out in a shared moral matrix enhance selflessness.
• “It is religious belongingness that supports neighbourliness, not particular religious beliefs.”

  Chapter 12: Can’t we all disagree more constructively?

• Genes collectively give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. Genetics play a role in one’s tendency to be conservative or liberal
• A study which asked thousands of American to fill out a moral foundation questionnaire, where a third answered as themselves, a third pretended to be a typical conservative, and a third pretended to be a typical liberal, found that moderates and conservatives were able to most accurately predict what the other sides would answer in the questionnaire. Liberals were the least accurate, with those who were “very liberal” having abysmal ability to predict the morals of conservatives
• This is likely due in part to the emphasis on two moral pillars (care/harm and fairness) that liberals stand on, and the six pillars that conservatives stand on (even though, ironically, conservatives tend to be a bit less empathetic)
• Can you convince yourself that the following statements hold merit?
  • People are inherently imperfect and prone to act poorly when all constraints of accountability are removed
  • Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, making it dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason (i.e., rationality), unconstrained by intuition and historical experience
  • Institutions gradually emerge, shaped by society, which we then respect and sometimes even sacralise; if we strip institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary and artificial, we render them less effective, exposing ourselves to social disorder and potentially a lack of meaning (anomie)
• “Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for traditions, and dissolution/subjection to foreign conquest through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.”
• Liberal programs with good intentions can sometimes have unintended consequences, e.g., the urge to help Hispanic immigrants in 1989 led to multicultural education programs that emphasizes the differences among Americans, rather than their shared values and identity
• “Emphasizing differences between one another makes many people more racist, not less.”
• “We think the other side is blind to the truth, science, reason, and common sense, yet everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects (i.e., beliefs).”