Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

This book is amazing. A few takeaways:

Takeaway #1

• There is a difference between “can” and “must.” When we want to believe something, we ask: can I believe it? One piece of evidence will do. And when we don’t want to believe something, we ask: must I believe it? And we look for one reason to doubt the claim. People will hear, see, and believe what they want to.

• Moral reasoning is more gut feelings. We then do post-hoc justification

• Our reasoning evolved not to help us find truth, but to engage in arguments and manipulate other people

  • Confirmation bias is a built-in feature of our moral minds

  • Thus, we must be wary of any one individual’s ability to reason. We should put diverse people together for the pursuit of truth

Takeaway #2

• Western societies are more individualistic, seeing independent objects. Most other societies are more holistic, seeing the context and relationships among parts

• There are 6 moral foundations that are evolutionarily created and found across cultures (in different manifestations). They can be activated differently in people because of culture and genes. The 6 are:

  • Care/harm: caring for vulnerable members of our group

  • Fairness/cheating: we should be fair in collaborating

  • Liberty/oppression: we should fight domination 

  • Loyalty/betrayal: should be loyal

  • Authority/subversion: we should keep the social hierarchy

  • Sanctity/degradation: we should uphold cleanliness and moral behaviors

• Liberals tend to care more about care, fairness, and liberty. Conservatives all 6. Conservatives have an advantage in US politics because they appeal to more moral foundations.

• There are many different moral foundations that shape how people see a “good society.”. For example, what I see as women being oppressed in India, is a society built more on the foundation of authority and sanctity, where the family unit should be maintained at all costs and actions should be pute.

Takeaway #3

• Human cognition veered away from primates when we developed shared intentionality, the ability to work together to accomplish a big task

• When we developed this, we also developed a sense of how things should be done and a flash of negativity when those expectations are violated

  • Moral matrices are a shared, consensual hallucination

Takeaway #4

• We evolved in a way to develop hives, groups of unrelated people that work together (this is because of group selection, the groups that were biggest and most cohesive won out)

• We have a dual nature, focused on the individual, and connecting to something larger than ourselves. Our minds were designed to unite us with our group.

  • We are designed to love and help those in our groups. Thus, more homogeneous countries (Nordics) have more welfare states because people are more willing to help their in group

• Hives do cause some hatred for the outgroup. But they also create meaning, which prevents tyranny from an individual promising meaning.

Takeaway #5

• Groups and religions have been binding us for centuries, helping us create trust and function as a society

• It’s not the believing, but the belonging, that makes this societies flourish and survive

Takeaway #6

• Genes determine political leaning. We are then thrust into a society that guides us one way or another (ex: an artistic kid in a strict school may become more anti-authority). These are called characteristic adaptations, because they emerge as we grow

• People construct narratives that connect their experiences to political ideology

Takeaway #7

• Moral capital is what a society has where they have interlocking values, which enables them to suppress individualism and make cooperation possible

• Liberals must understand the tearing down institutions like religion erode moral capital. That is why liberal reforms often backfire,