Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
The righteous mind
Jonathan haidt
Intro
What Lies Ahead – If you think moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll constantly be frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. Think instead of moral reasoning as a skill we’ve learned to justify our actions and defend the teams we belong to.
90% Chimp & 10% Bee – We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves. We are usually selfish chimps furthering a baser agenda, but sometimes we can shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, facilitating altruism, heroism, war and genocide.
Religion: Is an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.
Chapter 1 – Where Does Morality Come From
Jean Piaget – Greatest developmental psychologist who started as a zoologist studying the development of insects. He brought this lens to child development. [Water test]
The Great Debate – the social order is a moral order for some cultures
Inventing Victims – Even when it was established harm wasn’t caused, or victim claims were bogus, they kept searching for reasons to justify their initial emotional reactions, not the truth.
Chapter 2 – The Inventive Dog & Its Rational Tail
A Mind At War With Itself – To be human is to feel pulled in different directions and to marvel in horror at your inability to control your own actions.
Roach Juice & Incest Studies – Seeing that and reasoning why. A lot of our judgments are a product of rapid intuitive judgment followed by slow and sometimes tortuous justifications.
We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why some else ought to join us in our judgment.
Rather than looking for truth in how we feel, we try to find the best possible reasons why others should join us in our judgments.
Chapter 3 - Elephants Rule
Moral talk and changing minds - moral talk serves a variety of purposes such as managing your reputation, building alliances, and recruiting bystanders to support your side in the disputes that are so common in daily life.
We make first judgments rapidly, and suck at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments. But friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions and make it possible for us to change our minds.
Changing Minds - if you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.
If you truly see it their way, you might even find your own mind opening in response.
Hypnotism - researcher implanted words in subjects, they responded with negative affect when they saw them in a paragraph, even when the context wasn’t negatively valenced. Subjects will make up absurd reasons to justify judgments they made on the basis of gut feelings.
Brains evaluate instantly and constantly
Our brains are constantly analyzing situations to seek good and avoid bad, and our affective reactions are so instantaneous and tied to perception that we often find ourselves liking or disliking something before we even know what it is.
Everything we look at triggers a flash of affect, and we can like things more through sheer repetition [mere exposure effect, core principle of advertising]
Social Political Judgments are Particularly Intuitive
Implicit association test and inherent racism. These implicit tests also favor the attractive.
People use how they’re currently feeling to inform what they think about something. I’m feeling good, I must like it. I'm feeling bad, must hate it.
Moral judgment isn't purely cerebral where we weigh concerns about harm, rights and justice. It’s a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to how animals make judgments.
Elephants are sometimes open to reason
The main way we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with others. We’re terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our beliefs, but others do us this favor just as we’re good at finding errors in other people’s judgments. However, if there’s affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, the other person leans toward that and tries to find the truth in the other person's arguments. Elephant is steered by other friend
Using good reasons is no better at persuading people than bad reasons. The unconscious finds a way to rebut the argument and condemn the claim either way.
Chapter 4 - Vote for me (and here’s why)
Plato’s brother was better
“People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than they do about reality.” He said the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring consequences.
We are all intuitive politicians
Natural selection did not breed us to shape and craft moral reasoning in pursuit of truth. It bred us to shape and craft it to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing others to support us.
Without accountability we fall apart, we act like intuitive politicians striving to maintain positive moral identities.
Accountability increases exploratory thought, as opposed to confirmatory thought, only when these conditions are met
Decision makers learn before forming an opinion that they will be held accountable to an audience,
The audience's views are unknown
They believe the audience is well-informed and interested in accuracy.
A central function of thought is making sure one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others.
How we justify our choices is so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choice to others, but they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the “right” choice.
People usually say: here is some evidence i can point to that supports my theory, therefore my theory is right.
But it's people who generate more arguments who succeed educationally.
Do i want to believe vs can i believe
Can: search for supporting evidence, and if we find a single piece of “evidence” we can stop thinking. We have permission/justification to believe.
If we don't want to believe, we ask “must i believe” here we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason of doubt to the claim, we can dismiss it.
If people can literally see what they want to see, is it any wonder scientific studies fail to persuade the public.
Now with google, we can call up information that confirms what we want to believe about fetuses and global warming every hour of the day. Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
Rationalist delusion
Everything makes sense once you realize reasoning evolved to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with others.
Chapter 5 - Beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) Morality
Giving an ethics class is never going to change ethical behavior. To change behavior, you need to change the elephant, which is next to impossible, or you can:
Make minor and inexpensive tweaks
Three ethics are better than one
You can't study the mind while ignoring culture, because minds only fill out after they’ve been filled out by a particular culture. And you can’t ignore psychology while looking at culture, because the institutions (initiation rites, witchcraft, religion) are to a large extent shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind, which is why they take similar forms on different continents.
In india, there was a kind of beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one’s higher, nobler self, and negation of one’s desires. The dark side to that is that once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what god wants, then minorities [gays] can be ostracised and treated cruelly. The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.
The ethic of divinity allows of a voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation, our sense of higher and lower. It lets us condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality. WE can understand long-standing laments about the spiritual emptiness of a consumer society in which everyone’s mission is to satisfy their personal desires.
For liberals and conservatives to agree, you need to be able to imagine other moralities. If you can’t do that, you’re doomed.
The moral domain is unusual in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals) it is broader - including the ethics of community and divinity - in most other societies, and within religious and conservative matrices within WEIRD societies.
Educated liberals marched for peace, worker/civil rights, and secularism and saw republicans as marching for war, big business, racism, and evangelical christianity, rather than helping victims or pursuing group based equality (american), and until we can imagine other moral realities we won’t be able to believe that conservatives are as sincere in their beliefs as us.
Chapter 6 - Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
Autistic people are “mind blind” high on Baron-Cohen’s systemizing and low on empathizing
A lot of evolutionary theorists will see a trait and ask how they can come up with a story about how it might once have been adaptive “just-so stories”
Came up with moral foundations theory - best universal cognitive modules upon which cultures construct moral matrices.
Chapter 7 - The Moral Foundations of Politics
A note on innateness - nature has bestowed upon us a considerably complex brain that has been prewired, not hardwired. It is not immutable, it is subject to change.
The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. Experience then revises the draft “Built in” just means, organized in advance of experience.
Care/harm foundation - Humans have a higher cost of motherhood than any other species. Instead of casting a wide net, we invest more in the few offspring we produce in hopes of greater yield. Human brains are so big it takes a year before it can come out of the fetal sac. Another 25 years to fully develop.
Fairness/cheating - Evolutionary theorists always describe genes as selfish, they influence animals to do things that will spread copies of that gene.
However, selfish genes, at least in humans, can give rise to generous ones, like reciprocal altruism. We can extend generosity beyond kin selection by limiting it to outside others whom we expect will repay the favor. We’re nice to strangers and then selective based on we think will reciprocate
The left cares about fairness as equality, the right as proportionality
Loyalty/Betrayal - ingroups and outgroups
Authority/Subversion -
Sanctity/Degradation - Developing as an omnivore evolved our species with two competing motives for survival
Seeking out new foods (neophilia: attraction to new things) “Liberals”
Open to new foods, people, ideas
Being wary of toxic foods (neophobia: fear of new things) “Conservatives”
Protect borders, boundaries, traditions
The omnivore's dilemma developed our sense of disgust. The survivors could eat more calories than their overly sensitive brothers and eat fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable sisters.
Disgust is a part of the behavioral immune system, a cognitive module that triggers the need to get away from those dangerous or infectious.
Disgust can warn us when we’re going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims.
The psychology of why we sacralize people and objects and principles is why we can so easily bind into moral communities.
If morality focuses on individuals and their conscious experiences, why wouldn’t you want to make your body a playground.
Chapter 8 - The Conservative Advantage
Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t.
Republicans know how to trigger the full range of Moral Foundations Theory.
Republicans talk about:
Care of Innocent Victims (of harmful Democratic Politics)
Fairness (the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking people and giving it to cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools)
Only Republicans talk about:
Loyalty (patriotism and military values)
Authority (respect for parents, teachers, elders, police, traditions)
After Reagan made them into the family values party, Republicans took on the Sanctity and sexual deviance that allowed them to call democrats the satanists.
The more liberal you are, the higher you are on Care and Fairness while the lower you are on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity
The more conservative you are, the more standard and across the board you are about the 5 morals.
Conservatives are conservatives because they were raised by strict parents, or because they are afraid of change, novelty, complexity, or because they suffer from an existential worldview and cling to a simple worldview. This is the wrong approach.
There’s a 6th moral foundation: Liberty/Oppression: Alpha males dominate groups, but they’re not the true leaders. They’re just bullies who take what they want. Eventually the bullied band together to overthrow them.
L/O evolved in response to the challenge of living in small groups with people who would given the chance dominate and bully. Triggers included attempted domination, which invoked feelings of righteous anger (reactance) when authority tells you you can't do something and you feel yourself wanting to do it more strongly.
People don’t suffer oppression in private, they unite to eradicate the oppressor.
L/O is employed in service of underdogs, victims.
It leads liberals to sacralize equality, but liberals sometimes go beyond pursuing equality of rights to equality of outcomes, which doesn't work in a capitalist system.
It leads conservatives to say don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don't tread on my business (with your oppressive regulations) and don’t tread on my nation (with your united nations and your sovereignty-reducing international treaties). Conservatives sacralize liberty, not equality.
Reciprocal altruism is hard to understand because it takes the sort of punitive, gossiping, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and keep them down with a shared moral matrix.
In an industrialized social society, the Fairness foundation activates conservatives when people rely upon the social safety net for more than the occasionally life-saving bounce. They cause:
“I'm not giving my tax dollars to a non-producing, welfare collecting, single mother, crack baby producing future democrat”
“People vote democrat because they’re lazy and they despise people who work hard for their money, live their own lives, and don’t rely on the government for help cradle to grave.”
Anger at bailing out homeowners when many lied on mortgage applications.
Three v Six
Everyone cares about care/harm but libs care more
Everyone cares about lib/op but they care in different ways.
Moral psychology can help explain why democrats have such a hard time connecting with voters. Republicans speak more to the sleeping mind.
Chapter 9 - Why are we so groupish?
Moralism is more than our righteous minds being shaped by kin selection plus reciprocal altruism augmented by gossip and reputation management.
Ultrasociality: natural selection favored group mindedness - the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and create and obey social institutions, like religion.
Selection pressures within groups - nonconformists were punished, or not chosen as partners for joint ventures, or not chosen as mates, and between groups - cohesive groups took more territory and resources from less cohesive groups.
Language happened after shared intentionality. A word isn't a relationship between a sound and object, it's an agreement amongst people who share joint representations of things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.
Homo habilis used to use Oldowan tools, little sharp flakes of rock to scrape meat from carcasses other predators had killed. We were scavengers.
They acquired the “Acheulean tool kit” a teardrop shaped hand axe, which were nearly identical and emerged simultaneously from africa to europe to asia. Suggests the knowledge of how to make these tools may not have been passed 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.
Gene-culture coevolution - first cattle domesticators.
In humans[mammals], the ability to digest lactose (milk sugar) is lost during childhood. The gene that makes lactase (enzyme that breaks down lactose) shuts off because mammals don’t drink milk after being weaned.
Problem is, cattle keepers now had a vast supply of fresh milk that could be given to children but not adults
Any individuals whose mutated genes delayed the shutdown of lactose production had an advantage. Such people left more lactose-tolerant descendants than did their lactose intolerant cousins.
Genetic changes then in turn drove cultural innovations:
Groups with the new lactose gene kept larger herds, found more ways to use/process milk [cheese].
We trust people who look and sound like us. We expect them to share our norms. And once groups developed this prototribalism, they changed the environment within which genetic evolution took place.
Individuals who found it harder to play along, to restrain their antisocial impulses, and to conform to the most important collective norms would not have been anyone's hunting/foraging/mate.
“Self-domestication” - just like how it was already the most friendly of dogs who'd approach groups of humans, volunteering to have themselves later selected for friendliness, so too did humans select friends and partners based on their ability to live within a tribe’s moral matrix.
Our genes are super active - they are constantly turning on and off in response to stress, starvation and sickness. These changing genes built people as vehicles, these people hell-bent on exposing themselves to new climates, predators, parasites, food options, social structures, forms of warfare.
All this happening while populations explode in the holocene, people putting more and more genetic mutations into play, is it any wonder evolution kicked into overdrive with the lactose tolerance gene or tibetan blood surviving at high tolerances.
Evolution can fine tune our teeth, skin and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, so it makes sense that evolution tinkered with our behavior as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history.
Think about it, as our societies become more hierarchical or entrepreneurial, or as it took up rice farming, herding or trade, these changes alter human relationships and begin to reward very different sets of virtues.
Most, but not all, human nature was shaped on the individual level of natural selection. We are selfish creatures who long to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
Chapter 10 - The Hive Switch
EDM taps into our hive switch, where we engage in this muscular bonding/collective effervescence and people get the sense that they’re a united tribe, the beat a throbbing heartbeat everyone moves in tune to. Its as if individual consciousness disappears and is replaced by group consciousness.
It’s a mechanism that appeared before recorded history to shut down the self and create a temporary superorganism. Enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and crush less cohesive groups.
*Look up in ebook. People don’t die for their country, they don’t die for their beliefs, they die for their comrades who they know would die for them.
Oxytocin is the love hormone. It increases with intimate contact and when we watch people suffer [due to desire to help]. But research shows oxytocin doesn’t lessen outgroup hate. It only strengthens in-group love. It makes us love our ingroup more. It makes us altruists only in the parochial sense.
The neurobiological mechanisms of oxytocin evolved to sustain and facilitate within-group coordination and cooperation.
The 2nd way we sustain within-group coordination is thru mirror neurons.
Discovered accidentally in 1980s when italian scientists were performing fine motor movement studies on the cerebral cortices of macaques. They were looking to confirm where in the brain neurons fired during hand movement, but when they hooked the neuron electrodes up to speakers, they found the speakers booming during weird times, like when the researcher made the same hand movement.
Which was weird because the areas for perception and action were supposed to occur in separate regions of the brain. The monkey mirrored the actions of others in the same part of its brain that it would use to do those actions itself.
Later research demonstrated mirror neurons fire not when they see a specific physical movement but when they see an action that indicates a more general goal/intention.
Ex: neural systems infer others intentions, so when you see a video of someone picking up a cup at a clean table it activates neurons for eating but if off a dirty table it triggers neurons for picking things up in general.
We are conditional hive creatures - more likely to mirror and empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.
Corporations are the biggest superorganisms, and are now so powerful that only national governments can restrain the largest of them [only some governments, some of the time].
The best way to engender leadership is to stop thinking about it as leading. Leadership is more the complement of followership. It's easy to imagine why people want to lead, harder so to understand why we want to follow.
When disaster strikes people are happy to follow someone who emerges as a leader and does not activate their hypersensitive oppression detectors.
Make groups more hivish and happy/productive
Increase similarity, not diversity - make racial and ethnical differences less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating group values and identity. There's nothing special about race so you can make people care less by drowning race out in a sea of similarities.
Exploit synchrony - ritualize something at the beginning of the day.
Chapter 11 - Religion Is A Team Sport
College football
Naively: extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims.
Sociologically informed: religious rite that does just what it is supposed to do: pulls people up from the profane to rest on the sacred. It flips the hive switch, simply letting people temporarily feel “a part of a whole.”
It augments the school spirit, which in turn attracts better students and more alumni donations, which in turn improves the experience for the entire community, including professors who hate sports.
Intellectuals often mislabel religion as a harmful system of indoctrination rather than by its groups and binding practices.
New Atheist Movement was born out of 911. Scientists began saying all religions are delusions that prevent people from embracing science, secularism, and modernity.
Trying to understand religion by studying beliefs about god is like trying to understand college football by studying ball movement. You have to look at the ways religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.
The New Atheist Story - religion evolved as noise over several evolutionary byproducts
The Hypersensitive Agency Detection (seeing faces in clouds, but never clouds in faces
We have special cognitive modules for facial recognition and it’s so trigger happy it creates a lot of mistakes, all in the direction of false positives [faces where there are none].
Animals confront the challenge of distinguishing events caused by the presence of another animal [something that moves under its own power] from those caused by wind, or lack of agency. This is on a similar hair trigger with a lot of false positives.
Its adaptive to be this hypersensitive, because imagine the costly error of walking home and not paying attention to it. Finely tuned to maximize survival not accuracy
Now suppose early humans, capable of this shared intentionality, a hypersensitive agency detector, and a love of stories, talk about their misperceptions.
Suppose they begin attributing agency to the weather
Suppose a group creates a pantheon of invisible agents who cause weather/fortune.
Also a selective advantage in children that possess rule of thumb, believe everything grown ups say
The nymphs and fairies that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency in anything that frightens us.
Religions did help solve the free rider problem. Gods who punished gave cultures ultimate accountability, so groups that were held accountable were more cohesive and more likely to survive.
The more sacrifice a commune demands the longer it will survive.
Religion helped groups survive by uniting them into a moral community. In this way tribal morality evolved through group selection. They existed to get people to achieve together what they couldn't on their own.
Hunter gatherer gods werent gods of punishment, they just were. If you hunted and found something, the spirits were in your favor, if you didn't, they weren't. It wasn't until the holocene era that gods became more moralistic, right around the same time the people were.
If religious behavior had consequences for both individuals and groups in a way that was stable over millennia, then there had to be some degree of gene-culture coevolution for righteous minds that believed in gods and then used those gods to create moral communities.
More united groups thrived, and groups were more united under a moral commonality, and a moral commonality was created via religion.
It's hard for people to give up religion bc you give up an overwhelming sense of belonging. Asking someone to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely rational beliefs might be like asking people to give up earth and live on colonies orbiting the moon.
New Atheists say religion is the cause for war, genocide, terrorism, and oppression of women. Religious people say atheists are immoral and untrustworthy.
God and trust and trade have an interaction in ancient commerce as well, long distance trade was made easier because religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts.
Religious people are better neighbors and citizens not because of their devoutness, how much they prayed/went to church; the moral benefits were based on how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. “Religious belonging matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”
Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while demonizing an out-group can lead to moralistic killing
If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it. You see beliefs as foolish delusions, but if you focus on belonging, and multilevel selection, you see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years.
Once early humans believed in such agents, the people in the groups that used them to construct moral communities are the ones that survived. They used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.
Chapter 12 - Can’t We All Disagree A Little More Constructively?
Ideology: a set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be acheived
Most basic ideological question - Preserve the present order? Or change it?
French Assembly of 1789, those who favored preservation sat on the right, those who favored change sat on the left.
Social class and furthering self-interest are bad predictors of ideology
Rich go both ways [industrialists to the right, tech billionaires to the left]
Poor go both ways [rural poor to the right, urban poor to the left]
According to McAdams, personality has 3 levels
When corporations operate in full view of the public, with a free press that is willing and able to report on the externalities being foisted on the public, they are likely to behave well.
But many corporations operate with a high degree of secrecy and public invisibility [food processors/factory farms]
Many corps have the ability to capture/influence politicians and federal agencies whose job it is to regulate them [esp now that US supreme court has given corps/unions the right to make unlimited donations to political causes]
Liberals say a major function of government is to stand up for public interest against corps and their tendency to distort markets and impose externalities on others, particularly on those who can’t stand up for themselves in court, like poor, immigrants, animals
Efficient markets require government regulation
Auto ownership in 50s and 60s skyrocketed, boosting lead pumping into atmosphere, 200,000 tons a year.
Gasoline refiners had added lead to improve efficiency of refining process.
Despite evidence it was retarding the neural development of millions of children, the chemical industry had been able to block all efforts to ban lead additives from gasoline for decades
Classic case of corporate superorganisms using all methods of leverage to preserve their ability to pass a deadly externality onto the public.
Republicans defund EPA to draft new regulations or enforce old ones.