Book SummaryThe Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Righteous Mind

In The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all have different understandings of right and wrong. He argues that moral judgments are emotional, not logical—they are based on stories rather than reason. Consequently, liberals and conservatives lack a common language, and reason-based arguments about morality are ineffective. This leads to political polarization.

The Righteous Mind builds this argument on three basic principles:

• Morality is more intuitive than rational.
• Morality is about more than fairness and harm.
• Morality “binds and blinds” us.

Principle #1: Morality Is More Intuitive Than Rational

Morality’s Origins

To understand why morality is primarily intuitive, we first need to understand how morality evolved.

The question of where morality comes from has plagued scholars for centuries. One of the most common answers is that morality is innate. However, the truth is more complex.

In fact, morality is culture-dependent. For example, Westerners are unique in their prioritization of individual rights over the common good. The individualistic society, in which Westerners live now, is a product of the relatively recent Enlightenment. In individualistic societies, the role of society is to serve the individual. However, most societies subordinate the needs of the individual to the needs of the group—they are sociocentric.

Individualistic and sociocentric societies make different moral judgments. For example, in a sociocentric society, it might be morally wrong to move away from your family to pursue a promotion, whereas this is expected in an individualistic society. This shows that, contrary to what many people think, morality isn’t innate.

Intuition and Rationality

If morality is largely a cultural construct, do intuition or rationality play any part in moral decision-making? Yes, but their roles may surprise you.

The human mind functions something like an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant, which represents intuition, makes most of the decisions, guiding itself and the rider in different directions in response to all of the stimuli it takes in. The rider, or reason, can occasionally affect the elephant’s path a bit, but it’s mostly there to explain the decisions of the elephant after the elephant makes them. Moral reasoning is thus not a search for any empirical truth as much as it is a method by which we justify our moral decisions.

We only change our minds when people we respect talk to and appeal to our intuition. We’ll listen to them because we are social creatures who are desperate for the approval of our peers. Essentially, we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

How We Justify Our Moral Decisions

The fact that we’re social creatures is key to understanding why we make the moral decisions we do. We act “morally” primarily because we fear the social ramifications of getting caught acting immorally—we behave in ways we know we could justify to others if we had to. In this sense, the purpose of moral reasoning is to help us advance socially, whether by maintaining our reputations as moral individuals or persuading others to take our side in conflicts. Consequently, we think much more like a politician trying to win over constituents than a scientist looking for truth. Five examples prove this point:

1. We are fascinated by polling data (of ourselves): Experiments show that no matter how much someone says they don’t care what others think of them, their self-esteem will plummet when told that strangers don’t like them and will rise rapidly when told strangers do. On an unconscious level, we’re constantly measuring our social status. The elephant part of the mind is concerned about what others think of us, even if the “rider,” the rational mind, isn’t.
2. We all have a “press secretary,” constantly justifying everything: In other words, we all have confirmation bias and are constantly on the hunt, like a press secretary, for evidence that justifies our way of thinking. Simultaneously, we ignore anything that might challenge it. Research shows that people with higher IQs can generate more arguments to support a viewpoint, but only for their own side. As soon as the elephant leans in a direction, the rider starts looking for reasons to explain it.
3. We rationalize cheating and lying so well that we can convince ourselves we’re honest: Like politicians, when given the opportunity and plausible deniability, most people will cheat but still believe that they are virtuous. They cheat up to the point where they can no longer rationalize the cheating: In one study, when a cashier handed a subject more money than she was due, only 20% of the subjects corrected the mistake—because they were passive participants in the transaction, they could reconcile keeping the extra money with the belief that they were honest people. However, when the cashier asked if the amount was correct, 60% of people corrected the cashier’s mistake and gave the extra money back—in this case, it was harder to deny responsibility for the mistake because the cashier directly asked them about it.
4. We can reason ourselves into any idea: If we want to believe in something, we ask, “Can I believe it?” and look for reasons to believe. As soon as we find a piece of evidence, even if it’s weak, we stop searching and feel justified in that belief. On the other hand, if we don’t want to believe something, we ask, “Must I believe it?” and look for reasons not to. If we find even one piece of counterevidence, we feel justified in not believing it. In sum, unlike scientists, who generally change their theories in response to the strongest evidence, most people believe what they want to believe.
5. **We believe any evidence that supports our “team”:...

The Righteous Mind Summary Introduction

Why is it so hard for us to get along? The Righteous Mind attempts to answer that question and better understand why hostile groups have different conceptions of what it means to be “right.”

Author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, uses examples from history and studies of human nature to explore why we hold the moral beliefs we do and why moral values differ so dramatically across historical, geographical, and party lines.

Haidt agrees with Bible verse Matthew 7:3—he says we are all often self-righteous hypocrites. To understand ourselves and reach some form of enlightenment, we must drop our own moralism and examine the world through the lens of moral psychology, which states that people are governed by different moral frameworks. Consequently, we have trouble understanding humans with moral...

The Righteous Mind Summary Part 1: Morality Is Intuitive | Chapters 1-2, 5: Morality’s Origins

Clearly, we all define “morality” differently. But why are our beliefs about what’s right and wrong so different? To understand why morality is primarily intuitive, we first need to understand how morality evolved.

Moral psychologists ask where morality comes from and how kids learn what’s right and what’s wrong. The two clear answers are nature and nurture.

• If you answer nature, you are a nativist, and you think moral knowledge is pre-loaded, potentially from God or from evolution.
• If you answer nurture, you’re an empiricist. You think children are blank slates and their morality is grafted onto them from their upbringing and their life experiences.

Moral psychologists argue that the answer is somewhere in between nativist and empiricist views. They put forth rationalism, the theory that knowledge comes from reason, not experience or intuition.

However, Haidt argues that this common theory is wrong as well. We’ll move through three common arguments for rationalist thought and three counterarguments that, according to Haidt, debunk the theories of rationalism:

• Rationalist argument #1: Children develop moral frameworks on their own.
• ...

The Righteous Mind Summary Chapters 3-4: Intuition First, Reasoning Second

The last section demonstrated that we respond to stimuli first with our intuition and then use reasoning later to justify our response. This section will deepen that understanding and provide examples of why and how this happens.

We’ll begin with intuition and move on to reasoning.

Intuition First

In addition to Haidt’s experiments, there’s ample evidence that intuition comes before reasoning:

1. Our brains are instantly evaluating: Every time we see something, we have what’s called an “affect” reaction. From something as simple as reading a positive word, like “happiness,” we get a little bit of positive effect. This sort of feeling is the first process that humans developed evolutionarily—thinking came second.
2. All of our social or political judgments are intuitive: People have immediate and intense reactions when they see social groups. Most people have implicit biases against certain groups as well—think of it like the elephant seeing something and leaning away. This doesn’t have to do with any reasoned morality. For example, most younger people are biased towards the elderly, but not based on a moral reason—they have inherent biases against people...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Press Secretary

Consider times in your own life that your press secretary was working overtime.

Describe a time recently when you changed your mind about something (anything from a political opinion to how you felt about a restaurant’s service). What was the situation?

The Righteous Mind Summary Part 2: Morality Is More Than Fairness and Harm | Chapters 6-7: The “Taste Receptors”

In Part 1, we explored the rationalist principle that evaluates the morality of a behavior based on whether or not it causes harm. In Part 2, we’ll continue to question the validity of this principle and discuss the diverse foundations of people’s moralities.

Haidt argues that the rationalist’s narrow definition of morality is not only incorrect but dangerous. The attempt to ground society in just one moral principle, like preventing harm, leads to societies that are both unsatisfying and potentially inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles. In fact, the righteous mind has six “taste receptors,” or foundational moral principles.

This section will first explain how popular Western theories about morality came to be and then discuss the different taste receptors and the principles associated with each.

A Science of Morality

We’ll use a graph to understand how our current misconceptions about morality came to be. Levels of empathy are on the Y-axis and levels of systemizing, or the ability to analyze the rules of the system, are on the X-axis....

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Foundations

Given that everyone has different proportions of the “taste receptors” of morality and thus different foundations, it’s useful to understand what yours are so you can better understand what you care about and how your morality differs from others.

Think of something that happened to you recently, or that you saw on television or on the street, that you thought was immoral. Describe the event here.

The Righteous Mind Summary Chapter 8: The Sixth Taste Receptor and Conservative Morality

As Haidt began to conduct experiments and write opinions based on his five principles, he realized that liberals and conservatives understood the second principle, Fairness/cheating, differently. Liberals argued that conservatives don’t care about fairness because they don’t care about equal outcomes—for example, they don’t care whether every school district is equally well-funded. However, conservatives also argued that liberals don’t care about fairness in this case because they don’t care about proportional outcomes—for example, they don’t care that successful people have to pay a lot of their hard-earned money in taxes. Haidt realized that he needed a better definition of fairness, and with it a better definition of equality. This led him to create a sixth taste receptor.

The Sixth Taste Receptor: Liberty/Oppression

The Fairness foundation is rooted in the wish to protect communities from cheaters, while the new foundation, Liberty/oppression, is about protecting society from cheaters. Fairness/cheating is about reciprocity, while Liberty/oppression is about a broader definition of equality.

The Liberty/oppression foundation rests on human nature....

Shortform Exercise: Build a Good Political Advertisement

As Haidt describes, sometimes politicians have trouble connecting with potential voters. We’ll endeavor to build a political advertisement that can connect better with voters.

What political advertisement or speech in the last two decades has resonated the most with you?

The Righteous Mind Summary Part 3: Morality “Binds and Blinds” Us | Chapter 9: Altruism vs. Selfishness

At this point, you might believe that morality is primarily self-serving and blinds us to reality—we make decisions with our guts and then rationalize them so well we think we made them using reason; we cheat when we think no one will catch us and then convince ourselves we’re honest; we care more about others thinking we’re doing the right thing than we do about actually doing the right thing.

But this portrait of morality based solely on self-interest isn’t complete. In addition to being selfish, people are also groupish. We love to join groups—teams, clubs, political parties, religions, and so on. We are so happy to work with lots of others towards a common goal that we must be built for teamwork. We can’t fully understand morality until we understand the origin and implications of our groupish behavior and how our moralities bind us together, as well as blind us. The principle that morality both “binds and blinds” us is the focus of Part 3, and this chapter will explain how we’ve evolved to work together for the betterment of the whole.

Tribal Mentality

Our minds work to protect our own interests (selfish) but also the interests of a group that competes...

The Righteous Mind Summary Chapter 10: The Group’s Influence on Morality

What situations bring out the 10% of us that’s bee rather than chimp? This section will help to answer that question and explain how “hives” of people coalesce. It will also give examples of specific situations in which we might be more likely to feel groupish.

So, in what ways can we be groupish in practice? Thousands of years of recorded history show that men at war are more willing to risk their lives for their comrades in the army than for any country or ideal. In the heat of battle, the “I” turns into a “we,” and if an individual dies, he lives on in the form of his comrades who survived.

We are hive creatures, but only in certain situations. Our hivemind tendencies are conditional on our surroundings. There’s a “switch” that will turn this tendency on and off—when it’s on, we’ll transcend self-interest.

Interpersonal and Inter-Social Relationships

In order to flip that switch from off to on to off again, we must be programmed to be able to put the group first. Émile Durkheim argued that humans have a group of sentiments that allow us to exist as an individual and another group of sentiments that allow us to exist as part of a group. These two groups of...

The Righteous Mind Summary Chapter 11: Religion and Morality

So far, we’ve discussed the importance of community in finding our foundations and our hives. One of the strongest communities—that’s sometimes dismissed as an unthinking cult by many on the left—is a religious community. Religion doesn’t exist only in churches or mosques—it’s all around us and doesn’t always have a traditional “God” at its head.

This chapter will explain that religion doesn’t always have that much to do with explaining the universe, as many people think. Rather, it provides the social fabric that binds people together.

A college football game is analogous to the community that’s built around religion. Students and alumni dress up and participate in rituals that have been around for decades if not a century. From the outside, it looks costly and purposeless if not dangerous. But thinking about it from a sociological perspective, it brings people into a hive where they’re worshiping something greater than themselves. It changes people’s experience with a school, which in turn leads to more donations and a better experience for everyone in the community.

Many people don’t understand religion because they focus on the spiritual and supernatural beliefs...

The Righteous Mind Summary Chapter 12: How to Make Disagreements Respectful and Productive

People’s groupish behavior, along with their commitment to their moral matrices, can lead them into a blind defense of an ideology or a political party. This chapter is about how we can make better arguments and have more productive conversations with one another.

There’s significant evidence that we are understanding each other worse than ever. America is polarizing rapidly, with the gap widening between political opinions on the left and the right. There’s been a decline in the number of people who self-identify as centrist and a corresponding rise in those who identify as liberal and conservative. So, how can we learn to talk to one another better?

A Note on Political Diversity: This chapter will focus on the liberal to conservative scale and the psychology of “liberals” and “conservatives.” Many people in the U.S. don’t characterize themselves as a member of either major party and don’t reduce ideology to one dimension. Most people, though, are able to place themselves on the liberal to conservative axis, even if they don’t identify as a Republican or a Democrat.

Finding Our Preferred Moral Matrix

Before we can understand how liberals and...