A Conversation With Jonathan Haidt
National politics is different from local. National politics, I believe, is much more like religion than local politics is. If you take it all the way down to the very local level — who the dogcatcher is, who the treasurer is of the town — that’s all very practical stuff. People are very worried about their property values and things like that. It’s not very ideological.
National politics is much more like a religion. The president is the high priest of the American civil religion — I think that’s what Robert Bellah called it.
.. We’re primates. Primates are mostly hierarchical. We’ve got a lot of innate programming that makes us deferential to authority.
.. Another one is sanctity versus degradation.
This is the weirdest one for secular progressives, but it’s one that you see in Kosher laws, and Hinduism, and Islam. You see it in a lot of religions. You see it if you go to a yoga store or someplace where they talk about chakras and toxins. You see it there, too. The idea that the body is a temple and you’d want to guard against impurities.
.. Whereas, if you go to, say, Amsterdam, or New York, or places that are port cities with a lot of variety, diversity, commerce, those tend to thin down the moral domain. They don’t tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, “I’ll tell you what, you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you. You honor your contracts, I’ll honor mine.”
.. The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.
.. If you and I were twins separated at birth and raised in different families, our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue, but once we’re out on our own, we’re going to both converge on our brain’s natural level of religiosity.
Same with politics, whether you’re on the right or left is not determined by your genes, but you’re predisposed. You find variety and diversity and challenging authority really exciting. If that’s the way you were as a kid, even if you’re raised in a conservative household, once you go to college you’re going to be attracted to more radical left‑wing politics.
.. The core psychology, here, is called openness to experience. People on the left are higher on a variable called openness to experience. People on the right are lower on it, but they’re also higher on conscientiousness, they’re more neat, orderly, they make deadlines.
.. What Gosling found, people who are conservative, their rooms are more orderly and neat. They have more calendars, more postage stamps. They’re just better prepared to be orderly and neat and get things done. People on the left had more stylistic elements, more high design elements. They had more varied books.
.. If you look at dentists, they’re pretty Republican. Doctors lean heavily Democratic. Superficially, they’re doing similar things. They’re taking care of bodies. Motel owners lean Republican or conservative. But “innkeepers” lean Democratic or liberal.
.. But he and his generation were very guided by economic pressures and necessities. You do a job because your uncle has an opening for you.
.. If you are interested in learning new things and trying to change the world and things like that, you’ll be more likely drawn to occupations that have a predominance of left‑wing people.
.. Hollywood is overwhelmingly left. Perhaps there’s discrimination after the fact but creative areas are almost always heavily left. Police, military, engineering, there are certain things that are more conducive to minds predisposed to conservatism.
.. The core idea of Obamacare was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation,
.. Isn’t it the case that people just slot in the harms they want? Conservatives are very sensitive to some kinds of harms, like a deserving white student who didn’t get into Yale because of affirmative action. That to them is a focal harm.
For the left, people not getting adequate healthcare because there’s no Medicaid expansion, that’s a focal harm. Isn’t it more the split of what gets put into harm as opposed to — .
.. The basic fact about moral argument is that we’re not really listening to each other, we’re not actually open to reasoning. We start with our gut feeling or our partisan loyalty, and at that point we become lawyers. We’re really good at being lawyers and knocking down the other guy’s arguments, and giving them our own.
.. there’s a paradoxical sense in which the better they get, the worse the protests will be. It’s not coincidental that most of the protests have been at the most egalitarian, left‑leaning schools.
.. There’s a lot of social science research on this, the more you make something diverse, the less trust there will be, the harder it is for people to work together.
.. No, that’s not what it’s all about. We want clashing ideas.
.. It’s what is the sacred value. The sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was truth.
.. At the start of the 1990s, the overall left‑right ratio of the academy, taking all departments, was two to one, just twice as many people on the left as right. That’s fine, that’s not a problem. But by 2005, it had gone to five to one, five people on the left for every one on the right. Those people on the right are mostly engineering, nursing, things like that. If you look at the core — the humanities and the social sciences, other than economics, it’s closer to 10 to 1 or 20 to 1.
.. it’s in the social sciences and humanities where the sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims. That’s the division. One university of the sciences still pursues truth, the other university in the social sciences and humanities pursues social justice.
.. They should not step in. We should be extremely limited when we say that authorities can step in and change things. The very fact of doing that encourages microaggression culture, encourages students to orient themselves towards appealing to these authorities. The point of the microaggression article is young people these days have become moral dependents.
.. We just should have a process so that it’s not just the loudest group in the space of one year that gets to do it. There should be a process that says if three-quarters of the people vote to do it, and you take that vote two years apart, then it should be done.
.. To the extent that behavioral economists are saying, “Look at a person shopping, what influences their decision? If the apple is at eye‑level — .” They’re looking at lone consumers who are trying to make choices to optimize their outcomes. That’s great work, but that’s setting all the interesting variables to zero. The interesting stuff is all social. It’s what does this say about me?
.. People who pursue parsimony, scientists who pursue it and think that the simplest explanation is better than one that’s a little more complicated, that’s a problem. I’m trying to advocate for what I’m calling antiparsimony, or antiparsimonialism.
.. Extremism in defense of any virtue becomes a vice, it becomes sick, it becomes something that leads to horrible inhumanity and brutality.
.. Psychopaths have no sense of care, or compassion, or sympathy.
.. Yes, as far as I can tell psychopaths have no real morality. They do get angry if they feel disrespected sometimes, but that’s about it.
.. COWEN: What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?
.. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom. Which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it.