PSC 2371 Chapter Notes - Chapter The Righteous Mind Notes: Group Selection, Mirror Neuron, Normative Ethics
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Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion
“The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated,
and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to
encompass and regulate more aspects of life.
People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—
that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing
understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than
rationalist theories had given it.”
“• The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant
(automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant.
• You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded.
They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to
construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning)
comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment.
• The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral
reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That’s why
I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You’ll misunderstand moral
reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure
out the truth.
• Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk
to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions,
they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your
argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.”
-moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog
“And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in
vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to
embrace sounder principles”
“Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit to the self, and then
adjust behavior to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad”
Wilhelm Wundt - doctrine of “affective primacy”
Affect - small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid
something
-affective reactions too fleeting to be emotions
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-tightly integrated with perception
“Zajonc said that thinking could work independently of feeling in theory, but in practice
affective reactions are so fast and compelling that they act like blinders on a horse”
“Todorov studies how we form impressions of people”
-we judge attractive people to be smarter and more virtuous
-more than that though
-human minds constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, basing
responses on those reactions
the Macbeth effect — immorality makes people want to get clean
-the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions is universal
and unlearned
Brains evaluate instantly and constantly (as Wundt and Zajonc said).
Social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes (as Todorov
and work with the IAT have shown).
Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes
can make people more judgmental (as can anything that makes people think about
purity and cleanliness).
Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally).
Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality).
Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain (as shown by
Damasio, Greene, and a wave of more recent studies).
The rationalist delusion
-the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the
gods
-claim that philosophers, scientists should have more power, utopian program for
raising more rational children
expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might
even make it worse by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification
Haidt TED talk:
foundations of morality
harm/care
fairness/reciprocity
ingroup/loyalty
authority/respect
purity/sanctity
The Righteous Mind - pt 2, “There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness”
central metaphor: the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors
nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human
population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and
democratic (acronym WEIRD)
-WEIRD people are statistical outliers - least typical, representative people for
generalizations about human nature
the WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than the
relationships
-more independent, autonomous concept of self
-think more analytically than holistically
cultural psychology: combined anthropology love of context, variability w/ psychology
interest in mental processes
-culture and psyche make each other up
-cant study the mind while ignoring culture
-cant study culture while ignoring psychology
Shweder’s 3 ethics:
ethic of autonomy:
-dominant ethic in individualistic societies
-based on the idea that people are autonomous individuals with wants, needs,
preferences
-so societies develop moral concepts (rights, justice) to keep peaceful interactions
ethic of community:
-based on idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such
as families, teams etc
-large entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them
-people have an obligation in their roles
-societies develop moral concepts such as duty, respect
ethic of divinity
-based on idea that people are temporary vessels within which a divine soul has
been implanted
-not just animals with extra consciousness, but children of God
-societies develop moral concepts such as sanctity, sun, purity
-personal liberty of secular Western nations appeal hedonistic
Document Summary
Jonathan haidt, the righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and. It is unusually narrow in western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. People sometimes have gut feelings particularly about disgust and disrespect that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. Morality can"t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it. The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant: you can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justi cations for those feelings.
