Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done the seemingly impossible: He’s written a book that allows people of differing political and religious persuasions to put down their weapons and their guards long enough to learn where their moral intuitions come from and why we have such a hard time playing nice.

We are wired to be righteous. But what each of us comes to consider righteous varies dramatically.  Where does this urge to be righteous come from? In moral psychology, there are a few different takes on it.

There’s the nativist position, that morality is an inborn trait, present in every human being. The Christians would call this the image of God, whose law is “written on our hearts.” The naturalists would call it an adaptive strategy that natural selection has given us to survive.

Then there’s the empiricist position, that each person comes into the world an unmarked slate, and life experiences and guidance from adults etch moral intuitions into that slate over time. The empiricist position came from a skepticism that morality could not be inborn if moral sense varies so widely with culture and geography.

A third option is the rationalist position, which had issues with the nativist and empiricist positions. Maybe morality isn’t innate or learned from adults. Maybe kids figure things out for themselves, drawing their own conclusions about what’s right and wrong when they encounter enough formative life experiences. Like a caterpillar that eats enough greens and emerges a butterfly, so a person gets enough experiences that teach about fairness, waiting your turn, sharing with others, and, voila! that person becomes a moral creature. Rationality is the base, and a moral system is a (hopefully) structurally sound home built upon it.

A more recent theory, that takes elements of the nativist, empiricist, and the rationalist (and challenges others), is the social intuitionist theory. This is the theory this book puts forward as the reason for divisions and our difficulties overcoming them. The social intuitionist thinks the rationalist overestimates our rational abilities and underestimates the power of the social and knee-jerk intuitions. Moral reasoning often comes into play well after a gut feeling of revulsion or anger, and it’s a far less articulate response.

Moreover, the role that culture plays in our moral learning seems very strong, and this doesn’t seem to be a conscious, rational process at all. It seems to come from a deep desire to make friends and keep them. The social intuitionist model could be the best way to make sense of our righteous minds.

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Intuition and reason are both parts of the human experience, but how do they interact with each other? Plato thought that reason must be master, and that people must rein in their passions. Thomas Jefferson thought the two forces of head and heart have equal power, and that man is a house divided. Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that it isn’t even a contest—that our intuitions and emotions are far stronger than reason—and that reason accommodates them.

Hume’s view has turned out to be the most accurate: that intuitions are triggered well before conscious reasoning kicks in, and, when it does kick in, it’s usually to provide rational scaffolding to support the gut-level moral intuition.

Research in a number of areas of study is indicating the same thing. Gross smells and tastes tend to make people more “judgy.” The judgments people make about political and social issues are virtually instantaneous. The body itself carries imprints of past traumas, and reactions to triggers are visceral and unconscious. The psychopath has a capacity for reason but zero emotion, making him morally impaired. Infants have lots of emotion but little to no reasoning skills, and they are at the beginning of developing moral intuitions. These disparate discoveries show us how important intuitions are in forming and informing our moral stances.  

The best image for understanding the relationship between moral intuitions and reasoning (in other words, the righteous mind) is the relationship between an elephant and its rider, where the elephant represents automatic intuitive response and the rider represents reason. It might seem like the rider is the one directing the elephant, but when the elephant is startled, the rider hangs on for dear life and repositions himself to accommodate the reaction of the elephant.

If you really want to change someone, or at least have a constructive conversation, talk to the elephant rather than the rider. Don’t startle the elephant. Don’t anger it. A big part of the reason that religious and political groups are so divided is that they don’t respect the elephant. They jab the elephant and then start trying to reason with the rider, not realizing the window for open-minded conversation has already closed, that the rider is now working furiously to adjust to the elephant’s frightened rage. The elephant is now either running away from you, charging right at you, or, minimally, getting antsy, and the rider is too busy adjusting to the elephant’s movements to talk to you. People will almost inevitably find reasons to support their gut reactions. Even if they don’t find good reasons (even if they don’t find reasons at all!), people will almost always refuse to change their positions.

Reason can inform and shape our gut moral intuitions. The best ways to accomplish this are with anecdotes, stories, and quotations from respected writers and thinkers, moving metaphors and images.  But if the elephant gets antsy, it’s hard to persuade anyone.

Evolution could have developed a rational, judicious judge inside each of us, but instead, it’s developed an inner lawyer. Apparently reputation had more survival value than truth when our ancestors were making moral choices. Not much has changed.

If your neighbors’ dog were hit by a car and killed, and your neighbors decided to cook and eat Spot’s remains instead of burying him, did they do anything immoral? Why or why not? No one saw any of this. Does that make a difference?

Or what about this: A man goes to the grocery store and purchases a chicken, brings it home, and has sex with it before cooking and eating it. Has he done anything wrong?

In the first scenario, you might be grossed out, but distance yourself enough from it to say something to the effect of, “I wouldn’t eat Spot, and I think that’s pretty gross, but it’s their right to do so in the privacy of their own home. They didn’t hurt anyone.”

The second scenario, however, seems more complicated for most people. Some people employ the same logic, but the words get caught in their throats as they say it. For most, the stomach takes a churn for the worst.

The author used these scenarios for his PhD research at UPenn. Among other places, he conducted interviews on the UPenn campus and at a McDonald’s in inner-city Philadelphia. The two locations were only blocks away from each other, but the differences in responses to the dog and chicken dilemmas made them seem much more distant than that.

Respondents from inner city Philly were less inhibited in their responses. They found the questions strange, and often laughed about the man and his chicken carcass. The overwhelming majority from the inner city considered it wrong, and when asked why they thought it was wrong, they would look at the author like he was insane. It seemed self-evident to them, like there was no need to question why it was messed up—it just was.

Of the dozen groups that the author interviewed, UPenn students proved to be most unique in their responses. Almost all held fervently to John Stuart Mill’s principle of letting people do what they will unless their actions harm someone else. They were the only group in which the vast majority interviewed could stomach the chicken story (almost three out of four). Unlike other groups, who expressed disgust verbally and non-verbally, UPenn students would take it in stride, saying something to the effect of, “Gross, but he can do what he wants in the privacy of his own home.” One student responded coolly that it was “an efficient use of natural resources.”

Students at UPenn are, in fact, weird, compared to the rest of the world. They are part of an extremely small subgroup whose views, while very influential, hardly represent opinions popular in the rest of the world. This tiny group of people is sometimes referred to as part of a WEIRD culture: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. W-E-I-R-D. Numerous tests reveal that the WEIRD perspective is appropriately named: It’s an outlier. If you wanted to study patterns of human nature, this is not the group to start with. The richer, the more educated, the more of an outlier this already outlying group becomes. So Ivy-league students from wealthy families are about as WEIRD as it gets.

Depending on where you are in the world, you will find different ethics at work in cultures. According to cultural psychologist Richard Shweder, the three most prominent ethics are the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity. Which ethics a culture takes seriously has everything to do with how a culture sees a person.

The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that the parts are greater than the whole, and that an individual’s desires, preferences, and needs get the last word. Rights, freedom, and justice are important words in these societies, and when a government protects these and allows people to pursue their interests without interference from government or other people, that allows for a harmonious society. The ethic of autonomy thrives in individualistic cultures.

The ethic of community takes it for granted that people are part of a larger whole, whether that’s a family, neighborhood, village, caste, or nation. Whatever the whole is, it’s far greater than the sum of the parts. This means that people have roles they are expected to play in order to protect and maintain the integrity of the whole. Senses of honor (and shame), hierarchy, and duty are much more developed in such societies. The rugged individualism of the West—in which a person does what’s best for him, even at the expense of his family or community—is seen as self-absorbed, inconsiderate, and a cancer in the social organism.

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that before anything else, people are earthen vessels, molded by God or gods, containing a soul, a spark of divinity. These cultures usually have strong spiritual vocabularies, and speak of purity and pollution, honor and shame, holiness and sin. To pollute oneself or transgress divine injunctions is to rebel against the cosmic order that a higher power has ordained. To people from cultures steeped in the ethic of divinity, the West looks like a culture that not only allows but glorifies its more animal instincts and disregards a divine code of conduct.

Part of the reason WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) culture is so weird compared to the rest of the world is that its understanding of morality takes very seriously the view that a person is a distinct, autonomous unit. One of the world’s most revered anthropologists, the late Clifford Geertz, said the assumption that each person is a discrete center of awareness, emotion, and will, or that people define themselves in contrast to other people who also contain their own inner-world, is extremely strange to everyone else outside the West. The ethic of autonomy is deeply nestled in the individualist view of people, and it’s not something that’s leaving the West any time soon.

Because people from the West tend to see distinctions and categories before they see connections and unity, they have a hard time integrating any other ethical grids with the autonomous ethic. For just about every culture outside the West, morality is intimately tied to the divine or, even more commonly, to the community. 

Why have just one ethical lens when a culture could have three? At the very least, awareness of the ethic of community and ethic of divinity could help the West better understand and evaluate its own moral gut reactions. Learning to speak other moral languages may not be such a bad idea, as it would connect us to other aspects of human existence that our autonomy ethic doesn’t give us ready access to.

The Democrats have been struggling to win the public’s support since the 1980s, and that won’t change until they learn some moral psychology. There’s an idea of moral psychology called Moral Foundations Theory that goes a long way in telling us why.

Moral Foundations Theory says that people have different moral tastes, and that certain scenarios will activate different portions of a person’s moral palate. There are five moral foundations.

There’s the care-harm foundation, which makes us see the value of caring for the vulnerable and gives us an aversion to cruelty.  

The fairness-cheating foundation gives us a desire for justice, wanting to see the good prosper and for cheaters to get their comeuppance.

There’s the loyalty-betrayal foundation,  which rewards people who support the team and marginalizes (or eliminates) those who would undermine it.

The authority-subversion foundation makes us aware of social rank and file in our society and tells us when someone is stepping out of line.

Finally, the sanctity-degradation foundation inclines us to elevate some objects and people and degrade others, both of which act as social glue for a culture.

These moral foundations appear to be innate—present across cultures—even if their expression varies greatly. Both Democrats and Republicans appeal to each of these foundations to one degree or another, but the Democrats go heavy on the care-harm and fairness-cheating foundations while struggling to tap into the others.

The Republicans, on the other hand, tap into all of the foundations, and do a far better job with the authority-subversion, sanctity-degradation, and loyalty-betrayal foundations.

Social conservatives, in the spirit of sociologist Emile Durkheim, see family as the most basic social unit, whereas liberals, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, see the individual as the basic social building block, explains why Republicans do better than Democrats in activating those parts of the moral palate and in rallying support. Conservatives are far more likely to pluck the poignant heart strings of tradition, hierarchy, loyalty, and sacredness that liberals either don’t know how to or don’t attempt to pluck. The goal of E pluribus unum (“from many, one”) is more challenging when the individual is the basic social block and not the family.

To use the image of the elephant and its rider, Republicans do a better job of speaking to the elephant. They activate more moral taste buds than the Democrats.

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