On Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt's work is to understanding social psychology as Google Maps is to a successful road trip. You might be able to get by without it, but I'm not sure why you'd want to.
I became fascinated with Haidt's work while researching for my essay on compulsory national service. The basic premise of my essay is that the United States is more divided than at nearly any other point in history, and compulsory national service is a potential solution. In order to understand the division, polarization, and animosity, I looked to Haidt's work on social psychology, broadly, and moral reasoning, specifically.
What follows is an overview and introduction to Haidt's work. It's by no means a comprehensive guide, but it's a great starting point to decide if you want to dig further.
TED Talks
The moral roots of liberals and conservatives
In the fun and entertaining style of most TED Talks, Haidt delivers an explanation of his crown jewel - moral foundations theory. In short, it's a discussion about how and why people make moral judgments and how these decisions are rooted in evolution.
Here's the most important point: The crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives is that liberals reject three of the five moral foundations.
Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos.
Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at cost to those at the bottom. Order is hard to achieve and easy to lose.
Once you see that liberals and conservatives each have something to contribute, you can step outside the moral matrix. You can see the two sides for what they are, necessary complements to a properly functioning and enduring society.
Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self transcendence
In this talk, Haidt discusses the so-called staircase humans can climb from the profane (self interest) to the sacred (group interest). He explains how religion is a tool to help people transcend from the profane to the sacred.
Ultimately, this transcendence was important to ancient survival, as group selection favored the groups of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members. Group selection seems less pertinent to humans than it used to be, so modern society has drifted to favor the profane.
The challenge of society, says Haidt, is finding the sacred among the profane. This idea is similar to the argument I made for compulsory national service - put everyone in the same boat and cohesion will follow.
How common threats can make common political ground
This is my favorite of Haidt's three TED Talks. It feels most relevant and applicable to daily life.
In the talk, Haidt discusses the rarity of large scale cooperation in animals. The only reason humans can do it is because we can circle around sacred values. Unfortunately, we also create false dichotomies of good and evil. So while we have the ability to cooperate, we also have the tendency to become polarized.
As polarization is currently a serious problem for the United States, Haidt proposes a solution: common enemies. United States polarization was at an all-time low after World War II because the politicians had just finished fighting side by side against a common enemy.
While we don't have an enemy quite like the Axis powers, we do have issues such as global warming, rising debt to GDP ratio, income inequality, and children born to unwed parents. If Americans could see all of these as problems, says Haidt, we could work together to solve them rather than denying some, accepting others, and fighting each other on everything.
This talk has major implications on how we move forward as a country. It's just as relevant now as it was when he delivered it in 2012.
Academic Papers
Academic papers are generally dense and not reader friendly. For that reason, I don't burden myself by reading them often. For Haidt, I made an exception. He's contributed to numerous academic papers, but this is the one I found most interesting and spent the most time digesting.
The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum
In the paper, Haidt and his colleagues examine the accuracy of stereotypes of political liberals and conservatives. They found that stereotypes are directionally accurate; however, people tend to overestimate the degree to which liberals and conservatives differ.
Books
The Righteous Mind
This book is all about moral reasoning. A few interesting points include:
Moral decisions are intuitive - part evolved, part learned. We use moral reasoning primarily to justify our intuitions.
"People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it's your belief, then it's your possession - your child, almost - and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it."
Morality is based on six different foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. These foundations are like taste buds. Just like some people prefer salty to sweet, some people prefer care to sanctity.
Find my full notes (3,000+ words) on the book here.
The Coddling of the American Mind
Jon Haidt co-authored this book with Greg Lukianoff, and it's one of my favorite reads so far in 2020. It's based on what the authors call The Three Great Untruths:
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
The authors observed unique and disturbing behavior from students on college campuses beginning around 2013. From the first chapter:
"Students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions."
The book includes detailed conversations about various cognitive distortions caused by a combination of factors, including:
Increased anxiety and depression among adolescents
Paranoid parents resulting in a decrease of free play
Unnecessary and excessive focus on safetyism
While the trend is frightening, the authors end with many suggestions for improvement.
For more of Haidt's work, check out his personal website.
