CapitalistImperialistPig

One repeated Haidt theme is that our morality makes us team players. Our opinions on a whole range of questions that might seem to be independent are largely determined by what team we see ourselves playing for. Thus opinions on Keynes and Krugman today are largely determined by whether one sees oneself as liberal or conservative. Ditto gay marriage, welfare, civil rights and global warming. Discuss.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is a highly readable yet still scholarly look at the foundations of human morality. His point of view is essentially that of evolutionary psychology: that our moral systems evolved in order for us to live in highly cooperative communities not composed solely of close kin – the only animals who can do that. Haidt describes his starting point as that of essentially a conventional liberal, scornful of conservatives and persuaded that their success was based on fraudulent appeals. His story of scientific discovery, then, is not just a scientific one but of a change of personal perspective, to that of a self-described “centrist” with a lot of admiration for conservative thinkers but not much for the modern Republican Party. He is a story teller, and he weaves together themes from familiar and unfamiliar philosophers – his original major in college was philosophy – to ethnography and especially ex...

Major social revolutions on questions of morality are rare, and we appear to have lived through one quite recently - the transition to widespread acceptance of gay marriage. As such, it provides a natural laboratory for the ideas Jonathan Haidt has described in his book, The Righteous Mind . Gay marriage presents a fundamental collision between the two pillars of liberal morality - care and fairness - and a third fundamental moral module which is much more important to conservatives - the purity/sanctity module. Purity/sanctity can be considered to be concerned mostly with societal "rules of the road," regulations which have an element of arbitrariness to them, like the rule for driving on the right side of the road (in most countries) but are necessary for the smooth functioning of society. Such rules are given moral weight by embedding them in a moral/religious matrix. One effect of having read The Righteous Mind is that I can now articulate the conservative arguments a...

It's easy to conflate the concept of morality with our own personal moral beliefs. That's a mistake, from the standpoint of descriptive moral psychology. If morality was designed by evolutionary processes to permit groups to compete more efficiently with other groups, it's well to remember that our innate morality gives rise to religious and racial prejudice, war, and genocide as well as altruism and other qualities we may regard as more admirable.

“It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” -- Michael Tomasello, expert in Chimp cognition. Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 204). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. Collective phenomena in micro physics are a property mainly of bosons, which can share the same quantum state. On a larger scale, collective phenomena like galaxies and ocean waves depend on longer range forces like gravity or viscosity which unify the motions of components otherwise disposed to go every which way. The sociological equivalent of bosonization is shared intentionality, the ability of different people to share a common purpose and communicate it to each other. This ability is not shared by any other primate. Shared intentionality is key to any kind of cooperative work, and it plays the fundamental role in Haidt's theory of morality. There is persuasive evidence that there are trigg...

Darwin postulated that their might be both individual natural selection and group selection. With his customary penetration he saw precisely why the notion was problematic and clearly identified the conditions for it to take place. Less careful thinkers ran wild with the idea until the 1966, when George C. Williams wrote Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought . In it, he used a gene centered approach to demolish almost all ideas of group selection, sending them into a long limbo. He was as clear as Darwin on the exceptional circumstances needed for group selection to actually occur, but apparently didn't think they occurred in nature. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene helped publicize these ideas. Jonathan Haidt argues that precisely the exceptional circumstances Darwin and Williams foresaw occurred in human evolution, and makes a very strong case. Essentially the mechanism needed is one to punish those who aren't team playe...

Nietzsche had a special hatred of the "slave morality" which valued compassion for the poor and oppressed. He attributed it to a sort of conspiracy against the strong, perhaps due to the Jews. He saw the mob rising against the mighty hunter or conqueror. It's a fact that our closest relatives, the Chimpanzees, tend to be very hierarchical, with the Alpha male being not so much a leader as the biggest bully on the block. Human hunter-gatherer societies aren't like that. Instead they are highly egalitarian, without chiefs or subordinates. How did this transition happen? Nobody knows, but there are some clues, including the fact that given the right circumstances humans do form hierarchies rather easily. The biggest clue, though is the way hunter-gatherers deal with those who overstep and bully and dominate. Gossip and shunning is step one. Sometimes the offenders are driven out. Egregious offenders are killed. Haidt discusses the case of a Bushman who was exec...

... in the political wars, at least recently. Haidt plots importance of five "morality modules" against position on the political spectrum from very liberal to very conservative and finds a striking result. Only two of the modules (care, and fairness) are very important to the most liberal, and their importance declines with relative conservatism, while the other three (loyalty, authority, and purity/divinity) increase with increasing conservatism, until all are of essentially equal importance to mainstream conservatives. This fact says Haidt, gives conservatives a built in advantage in that they can appeal to all five of our these root moral modules.

...or anywhere else. Our brains and the brains of many other animals come pre-equipped with modules for recognizing and fearing snakes. and snake like objects. There are lots of other "modules" too, and Jonathan Haidt believes that he has found several that form the basis of our social morality. These modules are templates, not fully formed at birth, and their malleability, he believes, accounts for the variety of our moral systems. The templates themselves appear to be universal, except in pathological cases like psychopaths.

One of the more surprising findings about political opinions found in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: ...political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ”36 Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 86). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. Perceived self interest seems to be less important than the interest of some group of which one is a member. This finding is a little less startling if you think of political opinions as badges of team membership - public postures, if you will.

Physics seems to be wandering off into domains where I can't follow, such as the pressing question of why there is something rather than nothing, while Lubos has become fascinated with fruit flies , so my interests have turned to morality and the question of how we come by our frequently conflicting moral views. This interest is prompted by Jonathan Haidt's new book: The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion . It's pretty easy to collect folk theories on the above topic. Liberals are immoral. Conservatives are unevolved, or maybe just dumb. These theories are not too enlightening. Haidt, however, takes a point of view that I find congenial: he studies the questions experimentally and systematically. In particular, he has looked in detail at moral views of peoples and cultures from all over, and experimentally probed how people make moral decisions. The methods are fascinating in themselves, as are the results. I am only about four chap...

Reasoning is largely done by automatic pattern recognition somewhere in our brains submerged beneath conscious thought. Justification of our conclusions is another matter, and requires our conscious and verbal apparatus. This is one of the themes of Jonathan Haidt's fascinating new book: The Righteous Mind . It sounds likely to me. I going to speculate that when Wolfgang reads Krugman (if he reads Krugman) he doesn't need to do line by line textual analysis to decide Krugman is wrong. Contrariwise, when I read Krugman, my subconscious pattern recognizers can tell right away that he's probably right, as usual. It's when we try to convince each other that our rhetorical brains get involved. If persuasion were impossible, most speech would be superfluous. It it were easy, most would be unnecessary. People do change their minds, even about very important things, but not very easily. I've seen a few such changes propagate across the nation during my life, and th...

We humans have an analytical side. We like to break things into more elementary parts and see what we can build out of them. The atomic theory of matter seems to have been conceived at least 2500 years before it achieved real success, but that success is now overwhelming. The crucial detail was getting the atoms right. Earth, air, fire and water were a cute attempt, but they didn’t work out. Jonathan Haidt has sought for the atoms that constitute our moral intuitions, as he calls them, and builds his characters out of some that he thinks he has found in The Righteous Mind. As with matter, the strategy would seem to make sense. He makes a good case that our moral and political opinions are indeed built on a foundation of moral intuitions – I would probably call them instincts – beyond the normal reach of logic. So if I accept that step of his logic, my next question is what do I think of his atoms? It’s hard to criticize his approach. He and colleagues travelled the world, ...

I haven't read enough yet to have an opinion, so here is a review fragment from William Saletan in The New York Times : This is where Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that Nazi politicians manipulated voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters liked Nazi messages, there was something in Nazi Party messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” Nazism, treating it as a pathology. National Socialism thrived because it fit how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Nazi aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.” Oops - I guess I made a copy error. Somehow Republican -> Nazi and Conservative -> National Socialist. ...