In this section I will review the moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt who explains how different political views are shaped by aspects of human psychology that is conditioned by evolution and informed by genetics, life experiences,and social groups. To understand ourselves and others, we should learn to be aware of certain aspects of our psychological makeup and how they relate to our life narrative.
a. Moral Intuitions and Rationality
We tend to see ourselves as reasonable and others as unreasonable. However, in order to better understand each other we should move past this tendency. Jonathan Haidt argues that we do not come to the conclusion that something is morally right or wrong through rationalization. Rather, we intuitively acquire a sense of morality from our sensibilities and our cultural context. Moral reasoning is actually our thought-out justification for why we believe what we believe. That is, “moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just as surely as a dog wags it's tail.”6 In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt discusses the psychology of belief formation (especially beliefs about morality). In the first section of the book, Haidt argues that “Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Comes Second.” He likens the relationship between reason and the intuition to a rider on an elephant. The elephant,representing our intuition, goes where it wants to go and the rider,our reasoning, must go where the elephant goes (although, the elephant CAN listen to the rider). The rider operates as a press secretary and justifies the beliefs and actions of the elephant. Our arguments that justify what we believe are post hoc constructions; that is, people unconsciously come up with their reasons for their beliefs after the belief is established. Haidt then discusses highly interpretive and selective aspects of our rationality.
One interesting aspect of our belief formation is what Haidt refers to as confirmatory thinking. In general, there are two types of thinking: exploratory and confirmatory. Exploratory thinking seeks the truth in certain matters, executing careful judgment and a desire to learn. Confirmatory thinking involves a bias towards our own ideas and beliefs and a tendency to pick out information and arguments that support our own perspectives. Haidt sites Peter Wason who describes the confirmation bias as “the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.”7 “People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it's your belief, then it's your possession –your child, almost – and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.”8 Wason's findings are based in an experiment involving the “2-4-6”problem:
He showed people a series of three numbers and told them that the triplet conforms to a rule. They had to guess the rule by generating other triples and then asking the experimenter whether the new triplet conformed to the rule. When they were confident they had guessed the rule, they were supposed to tell the experimenter their guess.
Suppose a subject first sees 2-4-6. The subject then generates a triplet in response:“4-6-8?”
“Yes,” says the experimenter.
“How about 120-122-124?”
“”Yes.”
It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so they tested out other rules: “3-5-7?”
“Yes.”
“What about 35-37-39?”
“Yes.”
“OK,so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?”
“No.”
People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule, sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypothesis by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis. For example, proposing 2-4-5 (yes) and 2-4-3 (no)would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers.9
Another piece of research comes from David Perkins, who would ask various people their opinions on social issues and ask them to write down all the arguments they could think of on either side. Of course, people had more “my side” arguments than “other side” arguments.
But when Perkins compared fourth-year students in high school, college,or graduate school to first-year students in those same schools, he found barely any improvement within each school. Rather, the high school students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go on to college, and the college students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go onto graduate school. Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”10
Haidt suggests that in the real world of political interests, when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions are involved, the confirmatory bias is operating at a high level to help people reach a preordained conclusion.
Haidt goes further and discusses research in the social psychology of “strange belief.” When people want to believe something, they seem to ask themselves “Can I believe this?” and then search for supporting evidence. In this finding, the slightest bit of pseudo-science permits us to stop thinking. When we confront something we don't want to believe, we ask ourselves, “MustI believe it?” We then search for contrary evidence that will permit us to dismiss the claim.
One of the major things that informs how we think about an issue and what opinions we hold, is not so much what serves self-interest, but what supports our group. “Political opinions function as 'badges of membership.' They're like an array of bumper stickers people put on their cars showing the political causes, universities, and sports teams they support. Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”11 An interesting experiment Haidt mentions measures people's brain activities when presented contradictory information about a favorite politician. The researcher, Drew Weston, “engineered situations in which partisans would temporarily feel threatened by their candidate’s apparent hypocrisy. At the same time, they'd feel no threat – and perhaps even pleasure – when it was the other party's guy who seemed to have been caught.” According to the data, the “threatening information (their own candidates hypocrisy)immediately activated a network of emotion-related brain areas –areas associated with negative emotion and responses to punishment.”12 The thought process was not weighing out or calculating. It was emotional reactions.
Haidt concludes this section with an interesting suggestion.
Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their candidate) got a little hit of dopamine. And if this is true, then it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may literally be addictive.13
In the second part of the book, There's More to Morality Than Harm and Fairness, Haidt argues that the “righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.” That is, he argues that there are six different “moral foundations” that shape humans' moral judgments about a situation. Furthermore, different people respond to different degrees to each foundation. The six foundations are the Care/Harm foundation (makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need), the Fairness foundation (makes us sensitive to proportionality and just deserts), the Liberty foundation(makes people notice and resent signs of attempted domination), the Loyalty foundation (makes us sensitive to signs that another person is or is not a team player), the Authority foundation(makes us sensitive to signs of rank and status, and to people's performance given designated roles), and the Sanctity foundation(makes of wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats,makes it possible to invest objects with extreme values which are important for binding groups together). One interesting find in this section is that the moralities of liberals tend to rest more strongly on the Care, Liberty, and Fairness foundations, whereas conservatives tend to embrace all six moral foundations more evenly.
The third section in Haidt's book, Morality Binds and Blinds,focuses on group cohesion of humans. People are able to transcend their selfish interests and ban together with others in common causes. However, this often involves binding together for something that is considered sacred, hence blinding us from other perspectives. Once something is sacred, we cannot question it. I will now focus a little on the last chapter of Haidt's book.
b. Political Views: From Genes to Life Narratives
In the final chapter of the book, Jonothan Haidt discusses the genetic and developmental factors that contribute to our political attitudes. It has for some time been understood that people with differing political beliefs have a differences in personality. Liberals score high on a personality trait called “openness to experience.” They are driven by curiosity and love of novelty. People who are low on this trait like things that are familiar, safe, and dependable. These personality traits are partly informed by our genes.
The genetic aspect of our political beliefs are suggested in twin studies. “Whether you end up on the right or left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits:genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household counts for much less.”14 Genes give someone innate features that are “organized in advanced.” Some of the genetic differences found among liberals and conservatives are
related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain's response to threat and fear. This finding fits well with many studies showing that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise. Other studies have implicated genes related to receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been tied to sensation-seeking and openness to experience, which are among the best-established correlates of liberalism. ...
Even though the effects of any single gene are tiny, these findings are important because they illustrate one sort of pathway from genes to politics: the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produces less (or more)pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals from conservatives.15
Of course, genes do not predetermine one's political attitudes. Haidt draws on psychologist Dan McAdams and discusses how genes contribute to personalities by outlining three levels of traits. On the lowest level of our personalities are “dispositional traits” which are fairly consistent throughout our lives. “These are traits such as threat sensitivity, novelty seeking, extroversion, and conscientiousness.” The combination of genetic traits and the environment allows young children to begin to create their world. “One study found that women who called themselves liberals as adults had been rated by their nursery school teachers as having traits consistent with threat sensitivity and novelty seeking. Future liberals were described to be more curious, verbal, and self-reliant, but also more assertive and aggressive, less obedient and neat.”16 The second level are traits McAdams calls “characteristic adaptations,” which develop in response to different environments and challenges. These may determine our social behaviors and what groups we get along with. Finally, in maturity people develop “life narratives” within which they identify their values. Life narratives are “simplified and selective reconstructions of the past, often connected to an idealized vision of the future.” Life narratives “provide a bridge between a developing adolescent self and an adult political identity.” Conservatives' life narratives emphasize “respect for authority, allegiance to one's group, and purity of the self, whereas liberals emphasize their deep feelings regarding human suffering and social fairness.”17 That is, they correspond with the moral foundations outlined above. Through the construction of these narratives, we make sense of our lives and interpret our world.
Haidt draws from sociologist Christian Smith and argues that there are“grand narratives” that resonate with the differing moral foundations in various personalities. These grand narratives are related to ideologies and are used to galvanize people with particular moral visions. These narratives include a beginning, a challenge, and an achieved resolution. “Each narrative is designed to orient listeners morally – to draw attention to a set of virtues and vices, or good and evil forces – and to impart lessons about what must be done now to protect, recover, or attain the sacred core of vision.”18 As an example, Smith gives the “liberal progress narrative”,which goes like this:
Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that there unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. The traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism....But the noble human aspiration for autonomy,equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one's life to achieving.19
Whereas this grand narrative resonates with the moral foundations and personalities of liberals, Haidt borrows a narrative that resonates more with the moral foundations and personalities of conservatives from clinical psychologist Drew Weston. This is what Weston refers to as the Reagan narrative and it goes like this:
Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way....Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried the “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals....Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle ...and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles....Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected out soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose to negotiation and multilateralism....Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.20
It now seems clear that in order to understand those with opposing views, it is important to understand the life narrative and grand narrative of one's political adversary and the moral foundations inherent in those narratives.
Can liberals and conservatives understand each other's grand narratives? Haidt's research suggests that conservatives seem to understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives. “If the left builds it's moral matrices on a smaller number of moral foundations, then there is no foundation used by the left that is not also used by the right.”21 When Haidt discusses the three binding foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity to an audience, he finds that liberals reject the concerns as immoral. “Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.”22 Haidt continues: “If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen tothe Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He's more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex-lives. ... If you don't see Reagan as pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness.”23
Haidt, then, argues that liberals and conservatives fail to understand each other because they respond to different moral foundations as an aspect of their personalities. While conservatives and moderates can demonstratively understand liberals, extreme liberals have trouble understanding conservatives. This is because extreme liberals don't identify with the binding moral foundations that humans evolved in order to safeguard group cohesion.
I would like to emphasize that this does not demonstrate anything about the content of someone's political beliefs, but merely our ability to understand each other. Certainly, different cultures along different points in history had their own “liberal” and “Reagan”narratives. It is also my sense that differing moral foundations look different from culture to culture. Certainly a lesbian womanist academic can resonate with loyalty and sanctity foundations, though they may manifest differently in her political circles than they do in the Reagan narrative. These moral foundations are actively brought alive by genetic conditioning, developmental adaptations, and the political groups with which we mediate a sense belonging. Haidt concludes this chapter by saying that “Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something to say.”24
In order to understand others, it is important to pay attention to people's life narratives, attending to the sacred core of their moral belief system (their “moral matrix”), and to understand that many of the beliefs that seem naïve or offensive has a positive motivation behind it.
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