Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.
Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong.
Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. To the question many people ask about politics - Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? - Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.” Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You think conservatives are narrow-minded.
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