Published on Edge.org (https://www.edge.org)

PONDERING HAIDT'S HYPOTHESIS

About, Jonathan Haidt [3.30.12]

Introduction by:

In July, 2010, Edge ran a seminar entitled "A NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY" which was introduced with the following paragraph:

Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials: all are questions of critical importance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature.

The driving force behind the conference was University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happinesss Hypothesis and the recently-published The Righteous Mind, whose research indicates that morality is a social construction which has evolved out of raw materials provided by five (or more) innate "psychological" foundations: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. Highly educated liberals generally rely upon and endorse only the first two foundations, whereas people who are more conservative, more religious, or of lower social class usually rely upon and endorse all five foundations.

In his talk at 'THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY" , he said:

I've been arguing for the last few years that we've got to expand our conception of the moral domain, that it includes multiple moral foundations, not just sugar and salt, and not just harm and fairness, but a lot more as well. So, with Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, I've developed a theory called Moral Foundations Theory, which draws heavily on the anthropological insights of Richard Shweder.

Down here, I've just listed a very brief summary of it. That the five most important taste receptors of the moral mind are the following…care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. And that moral systems are like cuisines that are constructed from local elements to please these receptors.

So, I'm proposing, we're proposing, that these are the five best candidates for being the taste receptors of the moral mind. They're not the only five. There's a lot more. So much of our evolutionary heritage, of our perceptual abilities, of our language ability, so much goes into giving us moral concerns, the moral judgments that we have. But I think this is a good starting point. I think it's one that Hume would approve of. It uses the same metaphor that he used, the metaphor of taste.

Haidt, a frequent Edge contributor, has been developing ths set of ideas over the years. In September, 2007, in MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION, he noted the following:

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it's impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages "brights" to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

He presented the following conclusion in his widely read piece of September 2008,"WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN":

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

More recently, in February 2011, in THE BRIGHT FUTURE OF POST-PARTISAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY", he called attention to the fact that 99% of social psychologists on the psychology faculties of American universities are liberals.

Has social psychology become a Tribal Moral Community since the 1960s? Are we a community that is bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values? I believe the answer is yes, and I'll make 3 points to support that claim.

The publication last week of his mangum opus, The Righteous Mind (already a NEW YORK TIMES hardcover bestseller), pulls together Haidt's provocative ideas and focuses our attention on this innovative and original thinker. Today I noticed that various luminaries among the Edge crowd were quoting him, emailing each other and arguing about his ideas and conclusions. Edge has an editorial policy of staying away from books, and focusing instead on the questions people are asking themselves today, not several years ago when they were contemplating and writing their books. In this case, the explosion on interest in Haidt's work and the questioning being done by the Edgies who are now publicly airing their responses to his interesting and controversial ideas, is new, illuminating, and worth presenting as an Edge conversation.

—John Brockman

Jonathan Haidt's Edge Bio Page

PONDERING HAIDT'S HYPOTHESIS [1]

THE REALITY CLUB: Stewart Brand [2], John Brockman [3], Stewart Brand [4], Daniel Kahneman [5], Steven Pinker [6], Brian Eno [7], Jonathan Haidt [8]

Reality Club Discussion

Stewart Brand

Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline

To Brian Eno:

Jonathan Haidt’s ideas about political divisions in the US suggest to me a deep flaw in the Liberal’s Sacred Story. It’s built around achieving certain goals, whereas the Conservative story is goal-less and focusses on personal discipline—”moral order.“ Goals, once reached, become uninteresting, especially if true believers keep insisting, “No, no, the struggle is endless! We‘re only part way to the promised land! If we stop fighting, we fall back!” As Pinker shows, injustice, cruelty, and violence are declining radically. A black is in the White House. The game is no longer up, it is largely over. ... Take a bow, Liberals, and find something more bracing to adhere to. (Like long-term responsibility?) —Stewart

John Brockman

Editor, Edge.org; Chairman of Brockman, Inc.; Author, By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture

Sbb,

The way I understand Jon's point is that the conservatives are not going to embrace any story held sacred by liberals. Thus, for example, there will never be a coming together on climate change. And if long-term responsibility becomes sacred to liberals, same deal.

There's an interesting Edge conversation here. I woud like to hear Jon's response to your comment and also hear from a few other smart people. You edit. Edge will host. Due to Edge's editorial policy (no selling from the stage, no book promotion, etc.), we'll focus on "Pondering Haidt's Hypothesis" (your coinage) rather than his new book The Righteous Mind.

—JB

Stewart Brand

Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline

Sure, frame it however it works.

Daniel Kahneman

Recipient, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002; Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton; Author, Thinking, Fast and Slow

This is truly illuminating. Yes, the sense of burning injustice that animated the civil rights movement is largely gone because much of the worst injustice is gone: Blacks, women and gay people cannot be described as starkly oppressed, as was once the case.

Something else is at work here. There is a broad strand of antipathy to losers in American culture, which distinguishes it quite sharply from Western Europe. The tolerance for inequality of outcomes runs quite deep. This is where the definition of fairness differs between the left and the right, and the broad culture (and the independents) are probably closer to the right than to the left on this issue. The developments of the last decades have left the left with less to complain about, and with complaints that have less resonance.

Thank you, Stewart!

Steven Pinker

Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Enlightenment Now

Actually, conservatives frequently have come over to positions advanced by liberals. One can see this in how the culture-war debates evolve. Today there is a debate over gay marriage. Not so long ago the debate was over the criminalization of homosexual behavior—a debate the conservatives lost and gave up on. Likewise, compare the debate over requiring religious institutions to offer health insurance that covers contraception -- the culture war issue du jour – with the 1960s debate over whether contraception should be legal in the first place. Here, too, the conservatives lost and gave up. Racial segregation, women in the workplace and then the military, prayer in schools, in-vitro fertilization, decriminalization of marijuana, no-fault divorce—and in earlier centuries, slavery, heresy laws, religious persecution and disenfranchisement, absolute monarchy, corporal punishment in the legal system—the trend in the West has been away from legal systems based on authority, purity, and conformity and toward those based on autonomy and fairness. To a lesser extent the trend can be seen elsewhere in the world (e.g., the enfranchisement of women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the replacement of Jim-Crow laws with affirmative-action laws, the rise of democracies)—these are global (though jerky and geographically uneven) long-term trends. The current divide between American liberals and conservatives is embedded in a longer continuum that stretches more or less from Denmark at one pole to Saudi Arabia at the otherwith, perhaps, the entire world sliding slowly and jerkily in the Denmark direction (as seen, for example, in the very late but historically inevitable abolition of chattel slavery in Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962).

Jon’s theory of moral foundations is indispensable in making sense of these trends. What is less clear to me is whether all of the foundations are equally justifiable on normative grounds, and whether the current weightings that liberals and conservatives give them are irrevocable and beyond rational debate.

Brian Eno

Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist

Good timing...I just logged on after two days off (sitting on a beach reading and getting sunburnt)..and here's a mail from you about exactly what I've been reading! I'm glad you're getting into Haidt as well. I have been thinking about his ideas and almost hearing the crunching sound of my mental gears recalibrating. It's very heady stuff, and it all leaves me with one question: 'OK. What next?'

It's clear that liberals and conservatives have broadly different moral 'mixes' going on. But I think the picture is more complicated: in different situations you NEED different moral mixes—for instance in war you'd definitely want less emphasis on the fairness/care mix and more on the loyalty/respect one. Even within a lifetime one would (should) move through a variety of moral mixes. What's that famous sentence?..something like "If you're not a socialist when you're young you lack a heart...if you're still a socialist when you're old you lack a brain". I think that captures it well—the idea that one moves through different moral structures as the situation dictates, and as your own personal development dictates too.

Haidt can seem to give the impression that the conservatives got it right and the libs got it wrong—because it sounds better to have a bigger variety of moral bases to call on, and the conservatives clearly do. But what about the possibility that some of those moral bases are no longer applicable? It could be that the liberal mix—with its emphasis on just two bases, is a perfectly fitting response to a certain type of social condition...and of course it could also be the case, as you suggest, that that condition no longer obtains. But it worked while it was working! It wasn't wrong.

As Octavio Paz once said of communism "Just because it was the wrong answer doesn't mean it was the wrong question". And I think, for all his brilliance, Haidt doesn't make that clear. My feeling is that for a phase of our (you-and-me our) history, the liberal consensus was good and fruitful. And now it needs to be rethought, and we have to start looking to our traditional adversaries for some of their wisdom. But, the other thing Haidt never suggests: they also ought to be looking to us for some of ours.

I love his hypothesis, but I also see a danger that there's a bit too much mea culpa-ing going on. It isn't as if the conservatives got it right either: we all need to hear that crunching sound in our heads.

Your point about goals versus moral order is well put. That really is a serious difference. If only there weren't so many truly beastly people on their side, I would be able to embrace them more wholeheartedly.

The conservative that’s embraceable in the US is David Brooks at the New York Times. No one else comes close, that I’ve found.

p.s. By the way, I'm having a public conversation with Haidt in London on April 11...so this is good practice!

Jonathan Haidt

Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind

I’m sorry I’m so late to this conversation. Let me catch up by commenting on some of the major points:

1) Stewart Brand's initial point: The narrative no longer compels.

Yes! I think this is a superb insight. It explains why American liberalism was so successful in the 20^th century, as the struggle against fascism morphed into the struggle against racism and other forms of oppression. It explains why the passion has ebbed as the left succeeded. Danny then amplified the point by noting that the worst injustices are gone. Yes. When racism, sexism, and the cruelty inflicted upon civilians in Viet Nam were visible for all to see on the evening news, liberal arguments rested on a firm base of visceral support. Non-violence worked for King because the juxtaposition of peaceful marchers and hate-filled racists yelling epithets, or unleashing attack dogs, is about as stark a contrast of good vs evil as could be.

2) Danny Kahneman on fairness:

Yes! Americans don’t care much at all about equality of outcomes. I draw on the work of Mike Tomasello to argue that there is a deep desire to “share the spoils” when people feel that they have worked together to create those spoils. In a small homogenous nation, this is much easier to achieve. Such nations can get great buy-in for a welfare state. But in a large diverse nation, this is much harder. The only people who seem to value equality of outcome in the USA is the far left. But everyone values equal opportunity, and the civil rights movement found it easy to show—dramatically—that America denied equal opportunity to African Americans. Later liberation movements could make the same case. But once gay marriage is achieved, there will be no more groups able to make the claim so clearly. The left should be thinking now about what it stands for after all the major liberation struggles have succeeded. (This was Stewart’s point).

3) Brian Eno on the left fighting against corruption:

Yes! I said above that everyone values equal opportunity, which is a subtype of what’s called “procedural fairness” (as opposed to “distributive fairness”). Tom Tyler (NYU) has shown that everyone cares about procedural fairness, and they get angry when forced to play in a game that has been rigged. In the post-liberation world, when the older narrative is no longer compelling, I think the left’s motto should be Andrew Jackson’s campaign slogan from 1820: “Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.” The Occupy movement and the Tea Party are both mad as hell about special privileges, about being forced to play in a rigged game. They differ somewhat as to who is doing the rigging, but even Sarah Palin gave a speech denouncing “crony capitalism.” Brian is absolutely right that the Right will not lead this issue. Since the progressive era it has always been the left that is more concerned with good government and clean government–in part because they want to USE government to achieve their ends. Brian and John are right that the conservatives are unlikely to embrace an issue once the left makes it its own, but the key for the left is to find an issue that will inspire the left and bring along the center. Everyone is upset about corruption and special privileges. The challenge for the left will be that following this line will require them to alienate the groups that they bestow special privileges upon, such as unions and civil rights groups.

4) Steve Pinker on the long term trend:

Yes! I fully agree, this is the trend. And I fully agree that the three “binding” foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) are of most use (i.e., are normatively justifiable from a consequentialist perspective) when societies face strong external threats. As violence and war decline, the need for everyone to hang together and fight an external enemy declines, and we do indeed see a broad movement toward social institutions based on care, fairness, and liberty. Liberals do indeed lead, but sometimes they lead too fast; sometimes they take some wrong turns and have to back up (as with forced bussing and race-based quotas to achieve racial integration—both deeply unpopular because they violated liberty and fairness). Two relevant quotes here:

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” (J.S. Mill)

Conservatives “stand athwart history yelling ‘STOP!’” (William F. Buckley).

So I think Steve and Stewart have put their finger on an important idea for the left: It is indeed up to the left to lead – to point out where “progress or reform” are needed. And if they pick wisely and lead in ways that don’t alienate voters who rely on a broader set of moral foundations, then they win, over the course of just a few decades. So now the question for the left is: What’s next, and how will you get there? Will you learn from your past mistakes, learn to understand the intuitive reactions arrayed against you, and commit less “sacrilege” against the sacred values of mainstream voters along the way? If so you’ll get there faster, and with less collateral damage along the way. Who knows, you just might create a stable electoral majority which has eluded the American left for decades.

I think the next big fight is crony capitalism. It’s money in politics, but it’s also rethinking capitalism beginning from the premise that capitalism is basically good, yet it only produces its bounty when markets are fair and efficient, not controlled by monopolists, and not populated by corporations freed to foist externalities on others. Only governments can exert such control over corporate super-organisms.

Links:
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/jonathan_haidt-pondering-haidts-hypothesis
[2] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#sbrand
[3] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#jbrockman
[4] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#sb
[5] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#dkahneman
[6] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#spinker
[7] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#beno
[8] http://www.edge.org/conversation/pondering-haidt-hypothesis#jhaidt