“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

Can liberals and conservatives understand each other? Haidt examines the priorities of each over his six bases for morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty). Liberals, he finds, place weight on care and liberty, with little or no interest in loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Conservatives placed weight on all the bases, with relatively more than liberals on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and equal amounts on fairness. Incidentally, liberals are also usually more sensation-seeking and open to new experiences, while conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger.

As a result, he says, liberals find it hard to reach out to or even understand conservatives, because they place no value on the moral bases of conservatives. To test this, he studies how well each side could predict how the other would respond to questions. Conservatives and moderates did well; liberals, on the other hand, did very poorly in predicting conservative responses, particularly on care and fairness questions, because they assumed conservatives attached no weight to these bases.

The problem, Haidt says, is that when we already support something, when challenged we ask ourselves if we can agree with our previous position: we look for any reason to stick with what we support. When we intuitively disagree with something, however, we look for whether we must agree, and seize on any reason not to. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for us to ignore the views of others, and rather than acknowledging that each side is acting morally but simply from different moral bases, we assume that our opponents are evil and self-interested. Interestingly, by the way, research suggests that self-interest has no predictive power when it comes to voting: instead, the interest of groups with which we self-identify is the key variable, even when that conflicts with self interest.

How do we fix this? We must interact with other people. Our brains are “terrible at seeking  evidence that challenges our beliefs, but other people do us this favor.”  Forming a connection with someone and then having them disagree with you is the ideal way to make sure our beliefs are challenged.  If we don’t form that connection first though, we too often debate not to convince others or learn ourselves, but to score points with our own side, who need no convincing.

“It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). I’d recommend you do.