The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion

THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION Jonathan Haidt, Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 2012, Pp. xi + 318, Hb, ISBN: 978-0-307-37790-6.Woodrow Wilson said of conservatives, "A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits. " Robert Frost said of liberals, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. " As these quotes demonstrate, politics, as well as religion, often divide people. In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics And Religion, psychological scientist Jonathan Haidt brings to light a possible source of this division: morality. Moral psychology has long been dominated by Lawrence Kohlberg and Elliot Turiel and their rationalist, developmental approach. Several years ago, Haidt and his colleagues began to develop a social intuitionist approach to moral psychology. In the first few chapters, Haidt retells the experiences, which guided his research. As a graduate student, Haidt began to read anthropological works; with these works, Haidt began to realize that many cultures, including our own, do not fit into the neat stagebased models of Western rationalist morality. Continuing the work of Richard Shweder, Haidt began to devise studies to assess how people of different cultures determine what is moral expecially when appraising violations of harmless taboos as well as the commission of more harmful acts. From these studies, Haidt concluded that emotions and intuitions are instrumental in initial moral judgments, and moral reasoning comes into play after the fact, in order to justify the judgments.Building on these findings, Haidt proposes the first principle of morality, "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second," which is the topic of the first part of the book. The analogy used throughout the book is that of an elephant and its rider. The elephant represents automatic cognition such as emotion and intuition; the rider represents controlled cognition characterized by logic and reason. The elephant responds intuitively to life situations, and the rider provides moral justifications after the fact. Haidt cites the philosophical ideas of Hume as a basis for his model that the rider (reason) serves the elephant (intuition), which is in contrast to rational models presented by Plato and John Stuart Mill. In chapter three, Haidt explores six major discoveries, which support the principle that intuitions come first: the mind evaluates continually and instantaneously, sociopolitical judgments depend on quick intuitions, the senses can influence moral judgments, psychopaths can present reasoned moral judgments which lack emotion, babies seems to have some moral capacity to recognize harm without the presentation of reason, and emotive reactions are connected to the brain areas involved in moral cognition. In the next chapter, Haidt reviews research, which supports the notion that post hoc strategic reasoning is "more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for the truth (p. 76). " This research suggests that impression management and self-serving bias are more influential to moral decisions than is reasoning. …