The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
View on GoodreadsSocial psychologist Jonathan Haidt's synthesis of moral foundations theory — the argument that humans navigate moral life via six (originally five) intuitive "taste buds," not via rational deliberation, and that left and right use the palette differently.
Core ideas
- "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" — the rider/elephant metaphor: conscious reasoning is the rider explaining what the intuitive elephant already decided.
- Six moral foundations — care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, liberty/oppression. Progressives lean heavily on the first two; conservatives use all six more evenly.
- Cross-tribal moral understanding requires translating across foundations, not insisting yours are the only legitimate ones — and most political mutual incomprehension is a foundations mismatch.
Published2012
Pages419
ISBN9780307455772
ReadJun 2023
