Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) is about social psychology and the evolutionary roots of human morality. It overlaps significantly with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Instead of describing cognition via System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (rational), however, Haidt suggests an equivalent metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider. The focus of Righteous Mind is morality and how much it varies by (and within) cultures. Major take-aways:

• Be empathetic – see things, as Dale Carnegie advised long ago, from other people's viewpoints
• Be wary of Confirmation Bias – seek counter-examples rather than evidence in favor of one's beliefs
• Be conscious of divergent "foundations of morality" – especially during political-social conversations
  • Care v harm – compassion, kindness, ...
  • Fairness v cheating – justice, trustworthiness, ...
  • Loyalty v betrayal – group pride, patriotism, self-sacrifice, ...
  • Authority v subversion – respect, fear, obedience, deference, ...
  • Sanctity v degradation – disgust, temperance, chastity, piety, cleanliness, ...
  • Liberty v oppression – egalitarianism, independence, freedom from constraint, ...

Haidt suggests that, in general, Liberals concentrate their attention on Care & Fairness; Libertarians focus narrowly on Liberty; Conservatives value all six dimensions in roughly equal amounts. Different societies differ wildly. But, as Rushworth Kidder noted, there's a lot of common ground.

^z - 2020-07-12