The moral roots of liberals and conservatives Jonathan Haidt
suppose the two american friends are
traveling together in italy
they go to see michelangelo’s david and
when they finally come face to face with
the statue they both freeze dead in
their tracks
the first guy we’ll call him adam is
transfixed by the beauty of the perfect
human form
second guy we’ll call him bill is
transfixed by embarrassment it’s staring
at the
thing there in the in the center so
here’s my question for you
which one of these two guys was more
likely to voted for george bush which
for al gore
i don’t need to show of hands because we
all have the same political stereotypes
we all know that it’s uh that it’s bill
in this case the stereotype corresponds
to a reality it really is a fact
that liberals are much higher than
conservatives on a major personality
trait
called openness to experience people are
high on openness to experience just
crave
novelty variety diversity new ideas
travel
people low on it like things that are
familiar that are that are
uh safe and dependable if you know about
this trait you can understand a lot of
puzzles about human behavior you can
understand
why artists are so different from
accountants you can actually predict
uh what kinds of books they like to read
what kinds of places they like to travel
to
and what kinds of food they like to eat
once you understand this trait you can
understand
why anybody would eat at applebee’s but
not anybody that you know
this trade also tells us a lot about
politics the the main researcher of this
trait robert mcrae
says that open individuals have an
affinity for liberal progressive
left-wing political views
they like a society which is open and
changing whereas closed individuals
prefer conservative traditional
right-wing views this trade also tells
us a lot about the kinds of groups
people join
so here’s the description of a group i
found on the web what kinds of people
would join a global community welcoming
people from every discipline and culture
who seek a deeper understanding of the
world and who hope to turn that
understanding
into a better future for us all this is
from some guy named ted
well let’s see now if openness predicts
who becomes liberal
and openness predicts who becomes a
tedster then might we predict that most
tipsters are liberal
let’s find out i’m going to ask you to
raise your hand uh whether you are
liberal left of center on social issues
we’re talking about primarily
or conservative and i’ll give a third
option because i know the number of
libertarians in the audience
so right now please raise your hand down
in the simulcast rooms too let’s
let everybody see who’s here please
raise your hand if you would say that
you are liberal or left of center
please raise your hand high right now
okay
please raise your hand if you say you’re
libertarian okay
about a two dozen and please raise your
hand if you say you are right of center
or conservative
one two three four five about eight or
ten
okay this is a bit of a problem
because if our goal is to understand the
world to seek a deeper understanding of
the world
our general lack of moral diversity here
is going to make it harder
because when people all share values
when people all share morals
they become a team and once you engage
the psychology of teams
it shuts down open-minded thinking
we when the liberal team loses
as it did in 2004 and as it almost did
in 2000
we comfort ourselves we try to explain
why half of america voted for the other
team
we think they must be blinded by
religion uh or
by simple stupidity
so so if you think
if you think that half of america votes
republican
because they are blinded in this way
then my message to you is that you’re
trapped in
a moral matrix in a particular moral
matrix and by the matrix i mean
literally the matrix like the movie
the matrix but i’m here today to give
you a choice
you can either take the blue pill and
stick to your comforting
delusions or you can take the red pill
learn some moral psychology and step
outside the moral matrix
now because i know
okay i assume that answers my question i
was going to ask you which one you
picked but
no need you’re all high in openness to
experience and besides it looks like it
might even taste good and you’re all
epicurus so anyway let’s go with the red
pill let’s take let’s study some moral
psychology and see where it takes us
let’s start at the beginning what is
morality and where does it come from the
worst idea in all of psychology
is the idea that the mind is a blank
slate at birth developmental psychology
has
shown that kids come into the world
already knowing so much about the
physical and social worlds
and programmed to make it uh really easy
for them to learn certain things and
hard to learn
others the best definition of innateness
i’ve ever seen this just clarifies so
many things for me
it’s from the brain scientist gary
marcus he says the initial organization
of the brain
does not depend that much on experience
nature provides a first draft which
experience then revises
built-in doesn’t mean unmalleable it
means organized in advance of experience
okay so what’s on the first draft of the
moral mind to find out
um my my colleague craig joseph and i
read through the literature on
anthropology
on cultural variation and morality and
also on evolutionary psychology
looking for matches what are the sorts
of things that people talk about across
disciplines that you find across
cultures and even across species
we found five five best matches which we
call the found the five foundations of
morality the first one is harm care
we’re all mammals here we all have a lot
of neural and hormonal programming that
makes us
really bond with others care for others
feel compassion for others especially
the weak and vulnerable
gives us very strong feelings about
those who cause harm
this moral foundation underlies about 70
percent of the moral statements i’ve
heard
here at ted the second foundation is
fairness reciprocity
uh there’s actually ambiguous evidence
as to whether you find reciprocity in
other animals but the evidence for
people could not be clearer
this norman rockwell painting is called
the golden rule and we heard about this
from karen armstrong of course is the
foundation of so many
uh religions that second foundation
underlies the other 30 percent of the
moral statements i’ve heard
uh here at ted third foundation is in
group loyalty you do find groups uh in
the animal kingdom you do find
cooperative groups but these groups are
always either very small
or they’re all siblings it’s only among
humans that you find very large groups
of people who are able to cooperate
join together into groups but in this
case groups that are united to
fight other groups this probably comes
from our long history of tribal
living a tribal psychology um and this
tribal psychology is so deeply
pleasurable that even when we don’t have
tribes
we’d go ahead and make them because it’s
fun
um
sports is to war as pornography is to
sex we get to exercise
uh are some ancient ancient drives uh
the the fourth foundation is authority
respect here you see submissive gestures
from two members of very closely related
species
but authority in humans is is not so
closely based on on power and brutality
as it is in other primates
it’s based on more voluntary deference
and even elements of love at times
the fifth foundation is purity sanctity
this painting is called the allegory of
chastity
but purity is not just about suppressing
female sexuality
it’s about any kind of ideology any kind
of idea that tells you that you can
attain virtue by controlling what you do
with your body
by controlling what you put into your
body and while the political
right may moralize sex much more the
political left is
really doing a lot of it with food food
is becoming extremely moralized nowadays
and a lot of it is ideas about purity
about what you’re willing to touch
or put into your body i believe these
are the five
best candidates for what’s written on
the first draft of the moral mind
i think this is what we come with is a
preparedness to learn all of these
things
but as my son max grows up in a liberal
college town
how is this first draft going to get
revised and how will it end up being
different
from a kid born 60 miles south of us in
lynchburg virginia
to think about culture variation let’s
try a different metaphor if there really
are five systems at work in the mind
five sources of intuitions and emotions
then we can think of the moral mind as
being like one of those audio equalizers
that has five channels where you can set
it to a different setting on every
channel
and my colleagues brian nozick and jesse
graham and i
made a questionnaire which we put up on
the web at uh www.yourmorals.org
and so far 30 000 people have taken have
taken this questionnaire and you can too
here are the results hear the results
from about 23
000 uh american citizens on the left
i’ve plotted the scores for liberals on
the right those for conservatives in the
middle of the moderates
the blue line shows you people’s
responses on the average of all the harm
questions
so as you see people care about harm and
care issues they give high endorsement
of these sorts of statements all across
the board but as you also see
liberals care about a little more than
conservatives the line slopes down
same story for fairness but look at the
other three lines
for liberals the scores are very low
liberals are basically saying no this is
not morality in group authority
this stuff has nothing to do with
morality i reject it but as people get
more conservative the values rise
we could say that liberals have a kind
of a two channel or two foundation
morality
uh conservatives have more of a five
foundation or five channel
morality we find this in every country
we look at here’s the data for 1100
canadians i’ll just flip through a few
other slides the uk
australia new zealand western europe
eastern europe latin america
the middle east the east asia and south
asia
notice also that on all these graphs the
slope is steeper
on in group authority purity which shows
that within any country
the disagreement isn’t over harm in
fairness everybody i mean we debate over
what’s fair but everybody
agrees that harm and fairness matter
moral
moral arguments within cultures are
especially about issues of in-group
authority
purity this effect is so robust uh that
we find it no matter how we ask the
question
in one recent study we asked people to
suppose you’re about to get a dog you
picked a particular breed
you learn some new information about the
breed suppose you learn that this
particular breed is independent-minded
relates to its owner as a friend and an
equal
well if you’re a liberal you say hey
that’s great because liberals like to
say fetch
please
but if you’re conservative that’s not so
attractive
if you’re conservative and you learn
that a dog is extremely loyal to its
home and family and doesn’t warm up
quickly to strangers for conservative
well loyalty is good dogs ought to be
loyal but to a liberal it sounds like
this dog is running for the republican
nomination
so you might say okay there are these
differences between liberals and
conservatives but what makes
those three other foundations moral
aren’t those just the foundations of
xenophobia and authoritarianism and
puritanism what makes them moral the
answer i think is contained
in this incredible triptych from
hieronymus bosch the garden of earthly
delights
in the first panel we see the moment of
creation
it all is ordered all is beautiful all
the people and animals are doing what
they’re supposed to be doing where
they’re supposed
to be but then given the way of the
world
things change we get every person doing
whatever he wants with every aperture of
every other person every other animal
some of you might recognize this as the
60s
but the 60s inevitably gives way uh
to the 70s where uh the uh cuttings of
the apertures hurt a little bit more of
course bosch called this hell
um so this this triptych these three
panels
portray the timeless truth that uh order
tends to decay
the truth of social entropy but lest you
think this is just
some part of the christian imagination
where christians have this weird problem
with pleasure
here’s the same story the same
progression uh told in a paper that was
published in nature a few years ago
in which uh ernst fair and simon gacter
had people play
a commons dilemma a game in which you
give people money uh and then on each
round of the game
they can put money into a common pot and
then the experimenter doubles what’s in
there and then it’s all divided
among the players so it’s a really nice
analog for all sorts of environmental
issues
where we’re asking people to make a
sacrifice and they themselves don’t
really benefit from their own sacrifice
but you really want everybody else to
sacrifice
but everybody has a temptation to free
ride and what happens
uh is that at first people start off
reasonably cooperative and this all
played anonymously
on the first round people give about
half of the money that they can
but they quickly see you know what other
people aren’t doing so much so i don’t
want to be a sucker i’m not going to
cooperate
and so cooperation quickly decays from
reasonably good down to close to zero
but then and here’s the trick farron
gacter said on the seventh round they
told people
you know what new rule if you want to
give some of your own money to punish
people who aren’t contributing you can
do that
and as soon as people heard about the
punishment issue going on
cooperation shoots up it shoots up and
it keeps going up there’s a lot of
research showing
that to solve cooperative problems it
really helps it’s not enough to just
appeal to people’s good motives it
really helps to have some sort of
punishment
even if it’s just shame or embarrassment
or gossip you need some sort of
punishment to bring people when they’re
in large groups to cooperate
there’s even some recent research
suggesting that religion uh
priming god making people think about
god often in some situations leads to
more cooperative more pro-social
behavior
um some people think that religion is an
adaptation evolved both by cultural and
biological evolution
to make groups cohere in part for the
purpose of trusting each other and then
being more effective at competing with
other groups
i think that’s probably right although
this is a controversial issue um
but i’m particularly interested in
religion in the origin of religion
and what it does to us and for us
because i think that the greatest wonder
in the world
is not the grand canyon the grand canyon
is really simple it’s just a lot of rock
and then a lot of
water and wind and a lot of time and you
get the grand canyon it’s not that
complicated this is what’s really
complicated that there were people
living in places like the grand canyon
cooperating with each other or on the
savannahs of africa or on the frozen
shores of alaska and then some of these
villages
grew into the mighty cities of babylon
and rome and tenochtitlan how did this
happen this is an
absolute miracle much harder to explain
than the grand canyon the answer i think
is that they used every tool in the
toolbox it took all of our moral
psychology to create these cooperative
groups yes you do need
to be concerned about harm you do need a
psychology justice but it really helps
to organize a group
if you can have subgroups and if those
subgroups have some internal structure
and if you have some ideology that tells
people to suppress their carnality to
pursue higher nobler
ends and now we get to the crux of the
disagreement between liberals and
conservatives
because liberals reject three of these
foundations they say no let’s celebrate
diversity not common in group membership
they say let’s question authority
and they say keep your laws off my body
liberals have very noble motives for
doing this traditional authority
traditional morality can be quite
repressive and restrictive to those at
the bottom to women to people who don’t
fit in
so liberals speak for the weak and
oppressed they want change and justice
even at the risk of chaos as this guy’s
shirt says stop bitching start a
revolution if you’re high on openness to
experience revolution is good it’s
change it’s fun
conservatives on the other hand speak
for institutions and traditions they
want order even at some cost to those at
the bottom
the great conservative insight is that
order is really hard to achieve it’s
really precious
and it’s really easy to lose so as
edmund burke said the restraints on men
as well as their liberties are to be
reckoned among their rights this was
after the chaos of the french revolution
so once you see this once you see that
liberals and conservatives both have
something to contribute that
they form a balance on on change versus
stability
then i think the way is open to step
outside the moral matrix
this is the great insight that all the
asian religions have
attained think about yin and yang yin
and yang aren’t enemies
yin and yang don’t hate each other yin
and yang are both necessary
like night and day for the functioning
of the world you find the same thing in
hinduism
uh there are many high gods in hinduism
two of them are vishnu the preserver
shiva the destroyer
this image actually is both of those
gods sharing the same body
you have the markings of vishnu on the
left so we could think of vishnu as the
conservative god
you have the markings of shiva on the
right shiv is the liberal god
and they work together you find the same
thing in buddhism these two stanzas
contain i think the deepest insights
that have ever been attained
into moral psychology from the zen
master sensan
if you want the truth to stand clear
before you never before or against the
struggle between for and against
is the mind’s worst disease now
unfortunately
it’s a disease that has been caught by
many of the world’s leaders but before
you feel superior to george bush before
you
throw a stone ask yourself do you accept
this
do you accept stepping out of the battle
of good and evil
can you be not for or against anything
so what’s the point what should you do
well
if you take the greatest insights from
ancient asian philosophies and religions
and you combine them with the latest
research on moral psychology
i think you’ve come to these conclusions
that our righteous minds were designed
uh by evolution to unite us into teams
to divide us against other teams and
then to blind us to the truth
so what should you do am i telling you
to not strive
am i telling you to embrace sensan and
stop stop with this struggle
uh uh for and against no absolutely not
i’m not saying that
this is an amazing group of people who
are doing so much
using so much of their of their talent
their brilliance their energy their
money
to make the world a better place to
fight to fight wrongs uh to solve
problems
but as we learned from samantha power in
her in her
story about sergio uh viet de mayo
you can’t just go charging in saying
you’re wrong and i’m right
because as we just heard everybody
thinks they are right
a lot of the problems we have to solve
are problems that requires to change
other people
and if you want to change other people a
much better way to do it is to first
understand who we are
understand our moral psychology
understand that we all think we’re right
and then step out even if it’s just for
a moment step
out check in with censon step out of the
moral matrix
just try to see it as a struggle playing
out in which everybody does think
they’re right and everybody at least has
some reasons even if you disagree with
them everybody has some reasons for what
they’re doing
step out if you do that that’s the
essential move to cultivate moral
humility
to get yourself out of this
self-righteousness which is the normal
human condition
think about the dalai lama think about
the enormous moral authority
of the dalai lama and it comes from his
moral humility
so i think the point the point of of my
talk and i think the point of
the point of ted is that this is a group
that is passionately engaged
in the pursuit of changing the world for
the better people here are
passionately engaged in trying to make
the world a better place
but there is also a passionate
commitment to the truth
so i think that the answer is to use
that passionate commitment for
to the truth uh to try to turn it into a
better future for us all
thank you