[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

Jonathan Haidt: It’s as though these giant electromagnets got turned on in the ’60s, and they’ve been cranking up ever since, and anything that has the vaguest left-right charge gets pulled to one side. Everything gets purified. Psychologically, what we find empirically is that people who identify as conservative tend to like order and predictability, whereas people who identify as liberal, they like variety and diversity. I have one study where we have dots moving around on a screen. Conservatives like the images where the dots are moving around more in lockstep with each other. Liberals like it when it’s all chaotic and random.

Krista Tippett, host: The surprising psychology behind morality — this is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research. “When it comes to moral judgments,” he says, “we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” In his acclaimed book, The Righteous Mind, he examined the conundrum behind good people divided by religion and politics. Jonathan Haidt explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types, ways of moving through the world. And his own self-described “conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular-liberal instincts” have been challenged by his own studies.

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

Jonathan Haidt is professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. I interviewed him in 2014 at the invitation of a group called Encounter. It is interested in Jonathan Haidt’s research as it navigates an iconically entrenched, bitterly divisive moral conflict of our age, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. We gathered before an intimate group at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan.

Ms. Tippett: It’s exciting to be talking about an important subject in an important place in a room surrounded by books. And actually, where I’d like to start is just with you, just a little bit about your background. And I’m curious, specifically, whether you would find traces or roots of not just your interest in morality, but in a sense, your passion for morality, in the religious or spiritual background of your childhood.

Mr. Haidt: Well, my religious and spiritual background is sort of stereotypical for my generation — born in 1963 to parents who were first generation. All four of my grandparents were born in Russia and Poland, came to New York, worked in the garment industry, loved Roosevelt, union organizers. My parents moved, raised me in Scarsdale, New York. I was very assimilated — I have a strong sense of being Jewish as my culture, but not as, really, as a religion. As a kid who always loved science, and when I first read the bible in college, the Old Testament, I was horrified when I read the whole thing. And so I went through the phase that many young scientific types go through. I’m the sort of person who would have been a New Atheist if I hadn’t taken a very different turn in my own research.

Ms. Tippett: So you studied philosophy in college, is that right? And then it seems to me that you made a move, a shift that our culture is actually making, which is that great questions, or this great inquiry about the human condition, which once was reserved for philosophers and theologians, has now moved onto frontiers where we are learning to understand our minds, and in understanding our minds, understanding ourselves in a whole new way.

Mr. Haidt: That’s right. That’s what most excites me, is, I think we’re all interested in our origins. Everybody’s interested in origin stories: Where do we come from? Why are we this way? And when I first read, actually, Richard Dawkins, when I first read The Selfish Gene, and I began to learn about evolution, I felt, “Oh my God, it all makes so much sense. This is why we are the way we are.”

And I remember when I was in London — in Westminster Abbey, I guess it was, wherever Darwin is buried, and in England, they have the graves right there in the church, and people walk over them. And I was like, “No! don’t walk on Darwin’s grave!” So I felt like — I felt as though studying the social sciences and evolution, I feel like we are really beginning to reconstruct our ancestor and origin story, and it’s very, very exciting. And I find it gives me a lot of compassion for us as a species, because a lot of people love to shake their heads and say, “Oh, my God, things are so terrible, and we’re such monsters.” But I have very, very low expectations. My standard is, we’re animals. We’re like chimpanzees that actually figured out how to get along amazingly well and not hurt each other, not hit each other. I mean it’s amazing how peaceful we are, actually.

Ms. Tippett: I mean I just think — just what you just said, I feel like we are — we’re coming to a place where we can have a vocabulary of considering ourselves as a species, which is kind of a new evolutionary phase. And having said that, that you started thinking about these things seriously with Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the field you are part of — which is new, which has developed in your lifetime, in our lifetime — is positive psychology, the study of human flourishing, which it takes off into new directions from there.

Mr. Haidt: That’s right. So that would be, I guess — part of the story is, psychology has tended to be a very negative field, in that it’s especially focused on problems.

Ms. Tippett: Pathologies and neurosis.

Mr. Haidt: Pathologies, violence, drug addiction, racism, all those sorts of things. Those are, of course, extremely important to study. We’ve made a lot of progress on them. But in the 1990s, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at Penn, said, when he was president of the American Psychological Association, “Well, what about the positive side of life? Most people are doing pretty well. And when they go to the bookstore, all they have on offer are books by Deepak Chopra. So we should be having psychologists doing research on the positive side of life.” And I started doing research because I study morality and how it’s based on the emotions, so I’d been studying the emotions of disgust and anger and shame, and then I started to think, “Well, what’s the opposite of disgust?” And I started — what do you feel when you see somebody do something beautiful or uplifting? And it felt to me as though there’s such an emotion, but there wasn’t a word for it, at least not in the psychological language — I mean you can say “uplifted” or “touched” or “moved.”

And I came across a wonderful passage in Thomas Jefferson. I’d just arrived at the University of Virginia, and he is the — he’s everywhere. I felt like I worked for the man. It was wonderful. But he describes why it’s so important to read good fiction: because of the effect that beautiful deeds, beautifully explained, can have on you. He said, “Does it not elevate his sentiments, does it not dilate the breast and elevate the sentiment” — a sort of a feeling of opening — “as much as any example in real history can furnish?” And he talked about how it makes us more open, and then new things are possible.

Ms. Tippett: It seems like he almost had an intuition of what’s being learned in social psychology now, or that he had a wisdom.

Mr. Haidt: Jefferson was a fantastic — Jefferson and Ben Franklin. We had a few founders who were great psychologists.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. So let’s just talk about your basic premises. So one of them, we kind of have had this illusion that we were primarily rational creatures. And your first premise would be that moral judgment is based mostly on intuitions, rather than conscious reasoning. I mean here is the one way you said this: “When it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.”

Mr. Haidt: Exactly. And if you don’t believe that about yourself, just note how true it is of everybody else.

[laughter]

And then think, they think that of you.

Ms. Tippett: So a second premise is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. So explain what that means.

Mr. Haidt: So in psychology, pretty much everybody who studies morality is politically liberal.

Ms. Tippett: Really? Is that really true?

Mr. Haidt: Yeah. Yeah. I have found one social psychologist who’s a conservative. He’s a friend of mine. I’ve not found another. And that’s a whole separate discussion about the terrible things that happen — I mean we’re talking about polarization here — what happens when the academy itself becomes polarized, so that all the liberals are in the academy, all the conservatives are in think tanks in Washington.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Haidt: So it really interferes with our ability to think and to study.

Ms. Tippett: But it makes for great cable television.

Mr. Haidt: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Ms. Tippett: It produces the talking heads.

Mr. Haidt: Yeah, that’s right, and no progress.

[laughter]

So the field — so when I entered the field in 1987, it was dominated by people who were pretty far left. And so morality was basically defined as altruism. And it was especially altruism towards poor victims. So ideally, helping poor kids in Africa, that is the best thing you could possibly do. So all the research was about compassion and about fairness and justice, and that’s it. And when I took a course in cultural psychology from a wonderful anthropologist named Alan Fiske, and we read all these books about these ethnographies of morality in other cultures — and people care a lot about food and food taboos and menstruating women and the body and all these things that I had read 15 years before in the Old Testament. And I realized: Oh, my God, almost every culture on earth has this very broad conception