Author Information

"Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a visiting professor of business ethics at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia."

First Impressions

There is a lot of information in this almost 400 page book. Fundamentally the book discusses human psychology with respect to morality and relates it to modern political issues (and more general philosophical issues), such as conservatism and liberalism in modern American politics. There are three parts to the book and each feels quite different than the other. The first part deals largely with fundamental psychology and Haidt attempts to make the comparison of intuition vs strategic reasoning as like a rider on an elephant, where the elephant represent intution and cannot be easily controlled and the rider represents strategic reasoning. Part 2 delves more into morality but I found Part 3 to be the most intersting as Haidt really described the interesting characteristics and advantages of religious behaviors of cooperative societies.

Definitions of terms used in the book

Nativist - Someone who believes the morality of an individual is acquired at birth as if it were a genetic trait.
Empiricist - Someone who believes morality is taught to an individual and all are equal until they go through different education systems.
Rationalist - Anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.
Rationalism - The idea that children figure out for themselves what morality is and it is neither innate nor learned directly from parents.
Sociocentric - Places the needs of groups and institutions first.
Individualistic - Places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.
Social Darwinism - The idea that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals are the fittest. Therefore giving charity to the poor interferes with the natural progress of evolution: it allows the poor to breed.
Evolutionary Psychology - The idea that emotions are the foundation of morality and the emotions are assumed to be shaped by evolution.
Ethic of Autonomy - The idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other's projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies.
Ethic of Community - The idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous.

Moral Foundations

The author, Jonathan Haidt, introduces these 5 "guesses" as his first draft that defines the moral foundations of human nature

• "The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering."
• "The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters."
• "The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group."
• "The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position."
• "The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore's dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values (both positive and negative) which are important for binding groups together."

A Metaphorical History of Life on Earth

In chapter 9 Haidt describes an amusing metaphor for the evolution of life on Earth

"Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you're in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you're passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such row boats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are not rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed."

Genes Make Brains

In chapter 12 Haidt describes an interesting experiment performed in Australia to understand the relationship of genetics to political preference

"After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain's response to threat and fear. This finding fits well with many studies showing that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as a sudden blast of white noise."

Fascinating Quotes

• "I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness...is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design...Our righteous minds made it possible....to produce large cooperative groups.."
• "...human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee....We're not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group...Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide."
• "...the take-home message of the book is ancient. It is the realization that we are all self-righteous hypocrites.."
• "This is the essence of psychological rationalism: We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies...if the child gets enough experience in of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature..."
• "...groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies."
• "David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.'"
• "Here Jonathan Haidt describes his definition of morality, "The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broadened the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. People sometimes have gut feelings 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."
• "Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years."
• "Plato believed that reason could and should be the master; Jefferson believed that the two processes were equal partners (head and heart) ruling a divided empire; Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions. In this chapter I tried to show that Hume was right.."
• "Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide...Henry Ford (once said) 'If there is any secret to success it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.'"
• "I had long teased my wife for altering stories to make them more dramatic when she told them to friends, but it took twenty years of studying moral psychology to see that I altered my stories too."
• "Here's the same idea from Buddha: It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one's own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice."
• "Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit to the self, and then adjust behavior to get more of the good and less of the bad....You'll usually know within a second or two whether you liked or disliked the person, but it can take much longer to remember who the person is or how you know each other."
• "Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual process model in which.. 'feeling' is the first process (and)..The second process-thinking-is an evolutionary newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation."
• "The bottom line is that the human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions."
• "The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous...Psychopathy (is)... a genetically heritable condition that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others."
• "By six months of age, infants are watching how people behave towards other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean."
• "...why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn't it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important to our ancestor's suvival: truth or reputation."
• "Socrates.. argues that a just city is one in which there is harmony, cooperation, and a division of labor between all castes. Farmers farm, carpenters build, and rulers rule. All contribute to the common good, and all lament when misfortune happens to any of them. But in an unjust society, one group's gain is another's lose, faction schemes against faction, the powerful exploit the weak, and the city is divided against itself. To make sure that the polis doesn't descend into the chaos of ruthless self-interest, Socrates says that the philosopher must rule..."
• "Glaucon (Platos brother)...the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences."
• "What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg. Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputation and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are Glauconian."
• "Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons."
• "Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are not better than others at finding reasons on the other side."
• "In his book, Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes a brilliant series of studies....they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty."
• "...the truth will emerge as a large number of flawed and limited minds battle it out.
• "We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game--to rise in status while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates...Like chimpanzees, people track and remember who is above whom...If authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station."
• "The 'omnivore's dilemma' (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two new competing motives: neophelia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things)."
• "The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah call the "American civil religion". The president must invoke the name of God (though not jesus), glorify America's heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unam"
• "In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a "political transition" that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group."
• "..we care more about looking good that about truly being good. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced or our own virtue."
• A modern translation of a brief extract from Darwin's The Descent of Man,"He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature"
• "When groups compete, the cohesive, cooperative group usually wins. But within each group, selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead. They share in the group's gains while contributing little to its efforts. The bravest army wins, but within the bravest army, the few cowards who hang back are the most likely of all to survive the fight, go home alive, and become fathers."
• "It is inconceivablee that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together...human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality
• "Bees construct hives out of wax and wood fibers, which they then fight, kill, and die to defend. Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first centry, they fight, kill, and die to defend."
• "Acheulean tools are nearly identical everywhere, from Africa to Europe to Asia, for more than a million years...which suggests that the knowledge of how to make these tools may not have been passed on culturally. Rather, the knowledge of how to make these tools may have become innate, just as the "knowledge" of how to build a dam is innate in beavers."
• "A nation of individuals, in contrast, in which citizens spend all their time in Durkheim's lower level, is likely to be hungry for meaning. If people can't satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways, they'll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of "selfish momentary pleasure" and follow him onward to "that purely spiritual existence" in which their value as human beings consists."
• "Some religions are better than others at hijacking the human mind.."
• "There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival....the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly and inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship....Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice...Religions can spread far faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century."
• In his book, The Faith Instinct, science writer Nicholas Wade writes, "In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the more united ones thrive."
• "When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing them to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies every known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)."
• "At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism every since."
• "..identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to eachother...Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities."
• "Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible."
• " 'Imagine' Imagine if there were no countries, and no religion too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would 'be as one.' It's a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe that it would quickly descent into hell. I think the conservatives are on to something."
• "The third-century Persian prophet Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil). Human beings are the frontline in the battle; we contain both good and evil, and we each must pick one side and fight for it. Mani's preaching developed into Manichaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don't issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you. America's political class bas become far more Manichaean since the early 1990s, first in Washington and then in many state capitals."
• "Technology and changing residential patters have allowed each of us to isolate ourselves within cocoons of like-minded individuals.

Final Thoughts

I highly recommend this book as it was a pleasure to read. My only criticism is that it contains such a large variety of information (just look at the quotes) that it did become hard sometimes to remember what the overlying purpose of the book was. If you are someone who is interested in understanding how we has humans work together and the cooperative psychology involved in any civilization than you should read this book.