Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and
problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the
motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and
points the way forward to mutual understanding.
His starting point is moral intuition--the nearly instantaneous
perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These
intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain
that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how
these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the
political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those
of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of
the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that
map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of
morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally
selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately
altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim--that we are fundamentally
groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our
greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations.
In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what
each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals,
conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.
