jonathan haidt | the righteous mind

TLDR

• Dont live in a moral Matrix, where you are blind to the other side
• Good people make decisions based on their moral taste receptors. They may weigh the moral domains different then you.

Opening Credits

• righteous minds made it possible for us to form groups, also guarantees that we will have differences
• dont really want world peace, want a world where people are able to have different opinions, but are controlled so they dont hurt others
• we are all self righteous hypocrites - MATT 7 - “take log out of own eye”

The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease;” - Sengcan - Chinese philospher - senstsan

Humans are 90% Chimpanzee and 10% Bee with the “Hive Switch” (p.223). We are mostly selfish individuals,but, when triggered, we can be very altruistic.

Chapter 1

Where does morality come from?

• children recognize that rules that prevent harm are special and unalterable (moral rules vs conventional social rules)
• well educated citizens in different countries are more alike to each other, rather than their poor counterparts - study that looked at several countries across different classes

• in bathroom stall -

  • son: what would happen if i pooped in the uranal?
  • dad: it would be yucky
  • son: what would happen if i pooped in the sink?
  • dad: the people working here would get mad at you
  • son: what would happen if i pooped in the sink at home?
  • dad: mom would get mad at you
  • son: what if you pooped int he sink at home?
  • dad: mom would get mad at me
  • son: what if we all pooped in the sink?
  • dad: we would all get in trouble
• son is probing to remove the punisher - the dad is left relying on some cosmic justice to promote good behavior

Chapter 2

Intuitive dog and its rational tail

• doesnt matter how ‘reasoned’ our argument is, we need to appeal to the emotions (elephant)
• need to see from that persons angle, and when you do see it it might open us up
• empathy is an antidote to righteousness, but hard to empathize across a moral divide

• Reason vs Intuition (emotions)

  • Plato - Reason rules over all

  • Jefferson - Equal partners

    • Wrote love letter to Maria Cosway

      • the mind and heart are given different dominions and work together
  • Hume - reason is servant of passions
• Mind is divided into parts liek rider and elphant

• Rider serves elephant

  1. strong moral intuition that something is wrong (stories where no harm was done, but still ppl clinged to feeling that it was wrong e.g. consensual incest, man with frozen chicken)
  2. but even when trying to put a reason to it they cant, they still cling to intuition

• social intuition model is humes model but adds social element

  1. we try to find a way to win friends and influence people
  2. intuition first, strategic reasoning second

• talk to elephant first

  1. if you target rider first, they will find a reason to not listen

Chapter 3

Elephants rule

It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice - Buddha?

• Wife asked him to not put dishes on counter - he immediately came up with an excuse

  • Intuitions come first, reasoning comes second

• Affective Primacy

  • The phenomenon of feeling (and reacting) before appraising and evaluating a situation

Morality Primacy Research

• Stood on corner and had ppl take survey about controversial topics
• stood right next to a trash can, sprayed fart spray
• People made harsher judgments when in foul air

• Washing hards before filling out questionnaire caused people to become more moralistic

  • when we are clean - we want to keep clean

Babies feel but dont reason

• puppet show - helper and hinder puppet
• babies choose the helper puppet when given option
• “capacity to evaluate people on basis of social interactions is universal and unlearned”

Elephant leans

• elephant intuitively leans to a side, rider looks for way to make a reason for that movement
• given a ‘cool down’ period, the elephant will settle back to center

Chapter 4

Vote for me

Chapter points:

1. reason is designed to find justification not truth
2. people care more about perception, than by reality
3. important principle in designing an ethical society - make sure the reputation is on the line, all the time - so bad behavior always brings bad consequences
4. we are good at holding people accountable in society and navigating a society where we will be held accountable
5. Our reason is like a press secretary for the president - the rider finds an excuse for the elephant to get what it wants

• 2,4,6 Research Expirement

  • told the numbers 2,4,6 follow a pattern
  • generate new triplet, ask if it matches the pattern

  • give numbers:

    • 6,8,10 - they guess the pattern as - must be up even numbers up by 2
    • researcher says no
    • 5,7,9 - they guess the pattern as - must be any numbers up by 2
    • researcher say no
  • little trouble generating hypothesis about the rule they thought

  • hardly ever gave a triplet that didnt conform to their hypothesis

    • 2,4,3 - would have helped them figure out the pattern
  • Confirmation Bias - seek out reason for what you already believe

England MP

• they are able to get funds to buy a second home so they can be at primary residence and in London
• turned into a ‘blank check’ and would get large homes - renovate them - sell them - etc..
• expenses were not public - so they thought they would be ‘hidden’

Plausible Deniability

• cashier gives them too much money - only 30% spoke up

• cashier gives them too much money- asked if its correct - 60% said no

  • would take a direct lie to keep the money, so more ppl were ethical

Addictive Partisan

• partisans brain has been reinforced to enjoy thinking through issues in a way that free it from unwanted beliefs
• extreme partisanship could be literally addictive

Summary

1. we care about what others think
2. reason is a press secretary
3. with help of press secretary we can cheat and lie, and belief ourselves

Chapter 5

Beyond weird morality

• Ethic of divinity

  • america has a lot of battles over sacrilege.

  is the flag just a piece of cloth? or does each flag contain something that is not material within it?

  artist submerges Crucifix in jar of own urine or smears elephant dung on an image of virgin mary. Do these works belong in art museums? can the artist tell religious christians, if you dont want to see it dont go to the museum? or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane and more degraded?

  if you cant see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. imagine a conservative artist, had created these works using images of martin luther king jr and nelson mendela, instead of jesus and mary. image his intent was to mock the quasi deification on the left of so many black leaders. could such works be displayed in new york or paris without triggering angry demonstrations? might some on the left feel that museum had been polluted by racism even after the paintings were removed.

Summary

• More to morality than harm and fairness
• Western educated industiral rich democratic (WEIRD)
• moral domain varies across culture.
• moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence or even existence of other matrices.

Chapter 6

Tastebuds of the righteous mind

Morality is nothing in the abstract nature of things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular being, in the same manner as the distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold arise from the particular feeling of each sense or organ. Moral perceptions, therefore, ought not to be classed with the operations of the understanding, but with the tastes or sentiments.

-Hume https://www.iep.utm.edu/humemora/

• 5 Tongue Tastebuds

  • saltiness
  • sweetness
  • bitterness
  • sourness
  • savoriness (umami)

6 Moral Receptors

My Score

https://www.yourmorals.org/explore.php

Chapter 7

Moral foundations of politics

Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. - Leon Kass

Leon Kass is a bioethicist commenting on human cloning.

The foundations:

1. Care/Harm
2. Fairness/Cheating
3. Loyalty/Betratal
4. Authority/Subversion
5. Sanctity/Degradation

Left - Care and Fairness

Right - More balanced on all of them

Chapter 8

The conservative advantage

Unitarian vs Baptist sermons (Liberal and conservative)

Looking at word counts based on moral foundations. Unitarian more On care and fairness. Baptist more on sanctity and loyalty.

Community pot study

• Put in coins to invest you get return, but if you withhold and others put it you get even more.

• After the round, you can pay to punish anyone that was selfish

  • 84% ppl paid to punish
  • over time - punishing increased group participation
• When threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly. (Ring of gyges)

Liberals are based on 3 foundations. Conservatives appeal to all 6.

Left:

• Care/Harm

• Liberty/Oppression

  • rights of vulnerable groups, look to government

• Fairness/Cheating

  • People should get the same amount

Right:

• Care/Harm

• Liberty/Oppression

  • right to be left alone (libertarian)

• Fairness/Cheating

  • People dont get what they dont work for
• Loyalty/Betrayal
• Authority/Subversion
• Sanctity/Degradation

Liberals may think that they may own the concept of Karma, but a morality based on compassion and concerns of oppression forces you to violate karma (proportionality) in many ways.

Chapter 9

Why are we so groupish

After 9/11, we naturally felt desire to raise a flag. We wanted to show our team.

We are groupish, but also self interested individuals. Weird combination.

• Individual Selection

  • ind vs ind selects out the more fit ind

• Group Selection

  • groups vs groups selects out the more fit group

    • the group that can be most cooperative and achieve more wins

Adaption and Natural Selection 1966

• If you can identify a reason for adaption at the individual level, you dont have to look to another level to explain it

• A fast herd of deer

  • its not the herd, its because the individuals that are fast dont die, so eventually you have a fast herd

• Wings on a bird

  • designed for flight to the individual, not for the group

Morality is the key to understanding humanity.

Scholars have rejected group selection, with arguments looking at other species. But humans are different. We have worked together and created culture. Just like biological evolution, we have had cultural evolution that has led us to work together.

Timeline of Man

• 5-7 Million years ago

  • Humans diverge from chimps and bonobos

• 4 Million years ago

  • australopithecus (lucy) emerge - fossils found in africa

• 2.4 Million years ago

  • genus Homo

• 1.8 Million years ago

  • acheulean toolkit appears

• 500-700 Thousand years ago

  • “Crossing the rubicon moment”

  • Homo heidelbergensis

    • started to work together
    • hunting with spears, cooking on hearths
    • divide labor and share cultural norms

• 50-70 Thousand years ago

  • Migrate out of Africa and Middle East

• 20 Thousand years ago

  • Holocene , agriculture and herding

• 2-7 Thousand years ago

  • City states and empires

• 10 Years ago

  • Facebook links .5 Billion together

Foxes

• 30 generations of breeding tame foxes led to them being able to be kept as pets

Chickens

• breeding for the hens that lay the most (individual) is actually not the best
• hens live together and so the ones that lay the most are the most aggresive

• using group selection

  • pick the cages that product the most
  • within 3 months aggression reduced
  • within 6 months death rate was very low

Its not just war - whatever traits make a group better at turning resources into offspring will win

• Darwin combination of individual and group selection
• his theory was refuted by the ‘free rider’ problem

Multilevel selection helps explain the morality of humans and why we are so selfish and so groupish

We are 90% Chimp and 10% Bee

Chapter 10

The Hive Switch

Hive Hypothesis: Human are conditional hive creatures - we have ability to lose ourself for something larger than ourselves. This ability is from evolution, group selection has created people that have this ability because it gave them advantage of cooperation against threats.

Being in a group can lead to stronger emotions than if you were doing it as in individual. There is an emotion that flips on our hive switch. We feel connected to the group and feel like we are reaching a high level of feeling.

examples:

1. being in nature
2. drugs
3. raves

oxytocin

oxytocin responses lead us to unite together and feel better about others. so if we give eveyrone oxytocin, will war ends? no. it doesnt transcend beyond our in group. we are dutch, we like dutch names more. but doesnt change our views on islam.

mirror neurons

helps us determine the intent of actions in others.

what do we do

• stop thinking so much about leadership

  1. studying leadership is like studying clapping, but just looking at the left hand
  2. its not hard to imagine why people would want to lead
  3. it is more important to know why people are willing to follow

• increase similarity

  1. magnify the things that are the same, they can drown out the differences

• increase synchronicity

  1. get people moving together
  2. hakka

• healthy competition on teams, not individuals

  1. intergroup increase more ingroup cohesion, than hate to out groups.

summary

hiving comes naturally, easy, and joyfully to us. its purpose is to unite us to peers. its not to be feared, just used correctly.

used to think happiness came from within, it was about changing who you are and what you want

learned that happiness comes from “between” - between yourself and [others], [work] and [something larger than yourself]

we evolved to have a group overlay to our happiness. we need groups

Chapter 11

Religion is a team sport

Religion - social facts, cant be studied in the individual, unified system of beliefs in regard to the sacred

after 9/11 - religion was attacked, specifically islam, but led to a general attack

new atheism (4 main authors)

• sam harris - end of faith
• richard dawkins - god delusion
• daniel dennet - breaking the spell
• christopher hitchens - god is not great, how religion poisons everything

evolution weeds out ineffective beahavior. if a trait is not helpful it will be removed over many generations. why is religion so pervasive and every group has created a religion?

either 1) it is helpful or 2) humans have somehow gone against the tide and somehow held on to this behavior against all evolutionary efforts

new atheism story

• agency detection module

  • we walk through the woods and notice things that are byproducts of agency. we dont notice much the wind blowing a pinecone, but we would notice a branch that was clawed by a bear.
  • we notice things that we perceive are done by something with agency
  • if weather is bad, we might assume that god is mad at us. we are hijacking this trait of detecting agency and falsely perceiving agency behind it
  • you might think that our noses evolved to have a bridge so it could hold up glasses, but really we have just reused it

• gullible learning module

  • selective advantage to children who just believe parents without question

• falling in love module

  • we have fallen in love with a god

• minds were designed for dualism,

  • mind and body are separate but both very real, must have an eternal spirit

a better story

religions help groups cooperate, so when they win, the people dont evolve but their ideas do. the religion gets picked up by the defeated and over time it changes.

religion does help groups cohere, solve free rider problem, and contribute to groups overall survival

communes - the more sacrifices a commune demanded the longer the commune lasted. especially if those practices are attached to the sacred.

Bali - Subak

• irrigation system, very advanced and well done
• tragedy of commons problem solved by bring in temple worship at the fork of each channel
• promotes unity and willingness to share and care for commons
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subak_(irrigation)

gods and religion are group level adaptations. group selection can move quickly

genes, brains, groups, religion all co-evolve into a tight embrace

maypole dance (dancers with ribbons tie as they dance around the pole, weaving the ribbons together)

studies show religious people are more charitable (money and time) and they give through the religious group

you might think that religious people dont have much left to give after this charitable giving. but they do consistently give just as much if not more to secular groups as well. (american grace book, putnam and campbell)

morality:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible

summary

• durkheim - humans want to belong
• darwin - humans are exposed to group selection

• you get religion

  • helps us belong and feel included
  • our group is more successful and we win

Chapter 11

Cant We all Disagree more Constructively?

Genetic basis for your ideology. Twins raised by different families were more similar, then kids raised in own home. genes can explain 33-50% of your leanings.

Personality Levels

1. Dispositional Traits

   1. naturally try, curious about experiences etc..

2. Character Adaptations

   1. what you do because of your environment

3. Integrative Life Story

   1. our experiences that give us meaning

Conservative Claims

• people will act badly when accountability is removed

  • glaucon

• reason is prone to overconfidence

  • hume, baron cohen

• institutions emerge gradual as social facts, that we except as sacred, but strip of authority and you see its part of our groupish evolution

  • durkheim

Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible

Bertrand Russell

Yin and Yan - Change and Stability

Liberal Wisdom

• governments can and should restrain cooperate super powers

  • many coops are not held accountable and dont operate transparent
  • they sort of have a ring of gyges, this leads to bad outcome
  • efficient markets requires regulation

• regulation can be helpful

  • gas refineries put led in gasoline to make it more efficient
  • led was coming out of exhaust, causing lots of issues, retarding neural growth
  • led was high in children
  • regulation forced companies to come fix this
  • liberals entered and improved the situation, conservatives may think all regulation will have bad externalities

Libertarian Wisdom

• strongest moral foundation is liberty/oppression

• markets are miraculous

  • so much goes into providing a can of peas for under a dollar

  • medical industry is case of failed open market

    • go to store, get whatever you want dont see prices, take to cashier and pay flat 10 dollars

Conservative Wisdom

• preserve moral capital - dont destroy the hive

  • Liberals standup to fight for the oppressed - but sometimes this zeal pushes them to hurt moral capital (weaken group and institutions)

    • welfare programs in 1960

      • aimed to improve life of poor, reduced value of marriage, increased out of wedlock births, weakened african american families

    • empowering students in 1970

      • eroded moral authority and capital in schools
      • created disorderly societies that hurt the poor above all

    • spanish immigrants in 1980

      • led to multi cultural programs that emphasized difference rather than united on similarities
  • sometimes they hurt the group they are trying to help

Summary

• we are predisposed to join teams - to choose sides
• once on that team - we enter a moral matrix where it is hard to see the other side
• libs and cons are yin and yan - need both to move forward

Conclusion

• Remember horse and rider - when you find yourself making post hoc arguments, take a step back
• Beware of anyone that believes there is 1 moral way to meet a challenge - there are many configurations of morality
• small bump on back of our heads, the hive switch - we all have capacity to put aside self for the group

Figures-for-The-Righteous-Mind.pdf