The key ideas

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt, 2012

Why do smart, kind people clash so fiercely over politics and religion? Jonathan Haidt shows that morality rests on intuition, not logic, and that it reaches far beyond care and fairness. You will see why the other side seems blind to you, and learn how to really talk with them.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of political arguments where everyone is sure they are right. And for anyone curious about where our moral feelings come from, and why they differ so much from one person to the next.

If you really want to change someone's mind on a moral or political matter, you'll need to see things from that person's angle as well as your own.

“Can we all get along?”

In the spring of 1992, Los Angeles was burning. A jury had acquitted the police officers who beat a Black driver named Rodney King, and riots swept the city. On the third day, King came out to speak to reporters and, visibly shaken, asked a question people would repeat for years: can we all get along?

Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist who has spent many years studying how people decide what is right and what is wrong. His 2012 book is his answer to King's question. The answer is uncomfortable but honest: getting along is hard because our minds are built to be righteous. We are sure we are right, we judge others easily, and we band together into teams that fight other teams.

The book rests on three ideas. Intuition comes first, and reasoning comes after. Morality is much more than care and fairness. And morality binds people together, but it also blinds them. Haidt backs each idea with experiments, travels and an honest account of his own mistakes.

There is no campaigning here, for the right or for the left. Haidt started out as a committed liberal, and he admits that his research made him see his opponents differently. After this book you will understand why smart, kind people see the same events in completely different ways, and you will be able to really talk with them.

The family ate the dog, and no one was hurt

Back in graduate school, Haidt told people strange stories. A family's dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They have heard dog meat is delicious, so they cook it for dinner. A woman cuts an old national flag into rags and uses them to clean her toilet. Nobody sees it, nobody is harmed. There was just one question: is this wrong?

He asked it in two Brazilian cities, Recife and Porto Alegre, and in Philadelphia in the United States. He asked adults and children, rich and poor. If morality were only about harm, the answer should be the same everywhere: no harm, so no problem.

That was mostly how well-off college students in Philadelphia answered. Poor people in Recife saw these acts as true moral violations, not just bad manners. And the biggest factor was not the city or the country but a person's social class: educated people from all three cities were closer to one another than to their poorer neighbors.

For Haidt, this was the first warning sign. The morality he had been taught, a morality of harm and rights, turned out to be the view of a fairly narrow circle. Most people on the planet feel that you can do wrong without hurting anyone.

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About the author

Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist and a professor at New York University. For many years he taught at the University of Virginia, where he studied the psychology of morality.

All books by this author: Jonathan Haidt

Terms from the book

  • King
  • Campbell
  • Darwin
  • Gilovich
  • Putnam
  • Group selection
  • Tetlock
  • Recife: A large city in northeastern Brazil, one of the three cities where Haidt ran his early interviews.
  • Porto Alegre: A large city in southern Brazil, the second Brazilian city in Haidt's early interviews.
  • Moral dumbfounding: Haidt's term for the state of being sure an act is wrong while being unable to say why.
  • Wheatley: Thalia Wheatley, an American psychologist. With Haidt she ran a study in which disgust planted under hypnosis made moral judgments harsher.
  • Glaucon: Plato's brother and Socrates' conversation partner in Plato's Republic. He tells the tale of a ring that makes its wearer invisible.
  • WEIRD: An acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The word itself means strange. Scientists use it for the people on whom most psychological research is based.
  • Bhubaneswar: A city in eastern India, the capital of the state of Odisha. Haidt worked there in 1993.
  • Shweder: Richard Shweder, an American anthropologist at the University of Chicago, who proposed that morality is spoken in three languages: autonomy, community and divinity.
  • Moral foundations theory: The theory of Haidt and his colleagues that morality is built on several innate sensitivities, such as care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. It is the authors' model, not an established law.
  • McNeill: William McNeill (1917 to 2016), an American historian. He wrote about how moving together in rhythm binds people to one another.
  • Drill: Strict, monotonous marching practice in the army, with the same movements repeated over and over.
  • Sosis: Richard Sosis, an American anthropologist who studies religion and how it helps people cooperate.
  • Commune: A community whose members live together and share their property.

All terms

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