The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

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Politics & Power

In Jonathan Haidt's picture, your moral judgments start as intuitions, and your reasoning mostly arrives afterward to justify them. The conscious mind is a rider on an elephant that mostly decides where they go, and people across politics and religion build their morality on different combinations of the same small set of intuitive foundations.

Core ideas
  • Six foundations: Care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression work something like taste receptors, and liberals and conservatives weight them differently.
  • WEIRD is unusual: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies are morally distinctive rather than typical of humanity.
  • The hive switch: Shared activities like singing or dancing turn self-interested individuals toward the group. Chris Hedges called the book reductive, while William Saletan praised it.
Published2012
Pages419
ISBN9780307455772
ReadJun 2023

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