Haidt, J. (2013)

Haidt, J. (2013) The righteous mind. Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Penguin Books

(47) "Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made."

(50) Howard Margolis: "Give the judgments (themselves produced by the nonconscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgment. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations."

(53) "Emotions are a kind of information processing."

(54) "... intuition (rather than passion) is the main cause for moral judgment ... reasoning typically follows that judgment ... to construct post hoc justifications."

(57) "If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants."

(57) "The persuader's goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one's own case."

(58) "Empathy is an antidote to righteousness ..."

(64) "Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit for the self, and then adjust behavior to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad."

(66) "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: they "reduce the universe of alternatives" available to later thinking."

(69) "The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their reactions on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next."

(72) "Moral judgment is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice, It's a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things."

(78) People look at photos about moral situations. "... the areas in the brain involved in emotional processing activate almost immediately, and high activity in this areas corelates with the kinds of moral judgments or decisions that people ultimately make."

(79) "The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us the favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people's beliefs."

(80) "... if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person's arguments."

(82) "... if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources."

(89) "People are trying harder to look right than to be right."

(91) "... the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us."

(94) "[David] Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others in finding reasons on the other side."

(98) "The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, Can I believe it?" Then ..., we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don't want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?" Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it."

(100) "Political opinions function as "badges of social membership.""

(105) "... if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal it is to find truth ... or to produce good public policy ..."

(220) "I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it's self-interest, then it is easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual."

(221) "When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players."

(222) "... Morailty binds and blinds'. I will suggest that human nature is mostly selfish, but with a groupish overlay that resulted from the fact that natural selection works at multiple levels simultaneously."

(238) "According to [Michael] Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more men were pusuing together."

(274) "... people don't blindly empathize; they don't sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it."<br

(277) "Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like family. So don't call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group's shared values and common identity."

(290) "Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distict aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars. When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religion that's very different from the view of the New Atheists. I'll call this competing model the Durkheim model, because it says that the function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we've just done, or to support the groups we belong to."

(297) "Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking."

(298) "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."

(299) "Sacredness binds people together, ad then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice."

(314) "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, instiutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperarive societies possible."

(322) "Here's a simple definition of ideology: "A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.""

(324) "Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turs out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explain between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less."

(328) "Life narratives are saturated with morality."

(360) Robert Putnam: "Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to "hunker down" - that is, to pull in like a turtle."

(364) "We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects."

(364) "... if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the 'other' group, you'll find it far easier to listen to what they are saying, and maybe even see a controversial isue in a new light."