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Reddit mentions of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Sentiment score: 63
Reddit mentions: 146

We found 146 Reddit mentions of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here are the top ones.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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Found 146 comments on The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:

u/austex_mike · 261 pointsr/TrueReddit

A good compliment to this is Jonathon Haidt's The Righteous Mind.

Also, the article said:

> That’s exactly what Americans did after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. People began flying less and driving more. The result, estimated Gerd Gigerenzer, a German risk specialist, was that 1,595 more Americans died in road accidents during the 12 months after 9/11 than would have otherwise.

I don't think more people are driving merely because they are afraid of terrorism. I hate flying now because of all the stupid security theater we are now subject to. I much prefer to get in my car and drive versus going to the airport two hours early, get felt up, make sure all my bottles are tiny, etc. I have made several long car trips because I simply didn't want the hassle of flying.

u/TorsionFree · 58 pointsr/philosophy

> This is why politics fails often, people can not let go of their dogmatic views.

It's not necessarily that their views themselves are dogmatic; it's often that their underlying premises are inflexible. For example, someone who holds the view that the U.S. should deport all undocumented immigrants may think that their position on the issue is fixed, but what's more likely to be fixed is their underlying moral philosophy, such as

  • Fairness (immigrants should pay taxes just as citizens do), or
  • Monoculturalism (preference against difference), or
  • Purity (correlated to nationalism/racial supremacy).

    In other words, their beliefs on individual issues are slow to change no in themselves, but because they're consistent with a much less fluid set of underlying epistemic preferences. Jonathan Haidt makes a similar case in "The Righteous Mind" -- that political liberals and political conservatives disagree because they have different sets of moral "taste buds."
u/PanickedPoodle · 35 pointsr/politics

This is not about thinking. There have been studies showing that education can make you better at defending incorrect information.

We spread and defend incorrect information because it reinforces a pre-existing bias, often subconscious. Information that is shared virally tends to align with one of humanity's trigger points:

  • Tribalism (racism, they tuk me jobs)
  • Authority (support for police, borders, force)
  • Purity ("dirty" immigrants, "bleeding from her whatever")
  • Sexual dominance ("I just didn't like Hillary", "Pelosi is a bitch")
  • Fairness ("Republicans are hypocrites", welfare queen myths)
  • Loyalty (ok for my guy to break the law)

    When we focus on intelligence, we are demonstrating the Democratic bias toward rules. Education = competence = success. The Republican brain wants to reward personal exceptionalism. "I succeeded, not because of how hard I worked, but because of who I am."

    If we don't understand these triggers, we will continue to be manipulated by them.

    Edit: thanks very much to my anonymous gilder, but the ideas are cribbed from Jonathan Haidt's work. Highly recommend you check out either his book or his TED talk.

    https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

    https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=asc_df_0307455777/
u/Ardonpitt · 33 pointsr/AskAnthropology

Best I could offer off the top of my head would be The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. He's been doing some particularly interesting work with the psychology that makes up the differences in liberals and conservatives.

u/jub-jub-bird · 30 pointsr/PoliticalDiscussion

You might be interested in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt which has to do with the moral psychology of the left and right.

The main gist of the book is that people have several different hard wired foundations for morality... things that we are predisposed by human psychology to see as good vs. evil. He tentatively identified five of them as: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation (and he later added another: Liberty/Oppression). He ran a variety of studies to get people to rank how important each of these foundations were to them and discovered that people on the left prioritized Care/Harm over all others (Fairness/Cheating was also important to leftists but less so... the other three were not important at all). The right surprisingly was almost as compassionate ranking Care/Harm only slightly lower than the left did but they ranked all others much higher to the point where all five (and later six) moral foundations are ranked roughly equally in the right wing world view. In instances where left and right disagree there is almost always one or more of the other moral foundations which the right is balancing against compassion and which the left is disregarding as unimportant.

The book is of course much more involved that that discussing where and how he came up with his thesis, the experiments he did and his speculation about the social utility of each of the moral foundations and why they appear to be hard-wired in our heads and changes he made to his theory along the way. It's definitely worth reading.

u/stonerbobo · 27 pointsr/politics

oh man.. just read /r/AskTrumpSupporters.. its depressing.

It really doesn't matter what arguments you make at all. Their intuitions come first, arguments come second. Intuition says Hillary is snobby/rich/evil and Trump is not, end of story.

There are people justifying Trump Jrs collusion with Russians! Anything can be justified with enough mental contortion and denial.

Really, the sooner you realize critical thinking means nothing to a huge group of people the better. Arguments don't form opinions, they are formed after the fact to justify them. Social pressures (what do my friends think?) & intuitions inform opinions.

EDIT: If this is interesting, checkout The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Its where i stole most of this from. Theres also other related stuf in behavioral econ & psychology - Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Its the tip of an iceberg

u/Crest_of_Tull · 26 pointsr/booksuggestions

Hey, no problem: Here's a couple I really enjoyed that helped me learn how to really articulate what I think and understand what others were saying about politics in those sorts of discussions:

  1. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. This contrasts how liberals and conservatives think about politics in a way that I think makes sense of what can often be really frustrating arguments.
  2. Justice by Michael Sandel. This walks you through different ways you can reason about politics so that you can develop sharper and more consistent opinions.
u/pinksphinx · 24 pointsr/philosophy

The most insightful/mind-blowing book I've read in the past few years was "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It was phenomenal and challenges the long discredited in academic debate idea of cultural impact on our genes. How the success of certain religions/ideas/cultures has directly altered our genes in a far faster manner than had previously been thought.

The book also does a phenomenal job at describing the fundamental moral differences between the most divided people out there today in such an amazing way.

Highly recommend.

u/imVINCE · 23 pointsr/atheism

Religion probably served a really important evolutionary function, as well, by ensuring social cohesion around a shared set of beliefs and identities, allowing for tight group bonding which gave some groups a selective advantage. Of course, in today's world this can actually become harmful- particularly when the shared beliefs require a suspension of the sort of objective and reasoned thinking necessary to function in this modern society, or when they inform or motivate antisocial economic or political activities- but I'm not sure it's fair to say that humanity would be better off without it. Maybe on net today, but it's also possible that we may have relied on it in our evolutionary past.

Source, a wonderful book which can really aid in understanding those with whom our worldviews disagree.

u/peenoid · 19 pointsr/KotakuInAction

I love Jonathan Haidt. His book "The Righteous Mind" is, I think, one of the most important books written in the past century and should be required reading for all high-schoolers and then read again yearly for anyone going into the social sciences or humanities.

u/witchdoc86 · 19 pointsr/DebateEvolution

Well. Like humans that we are, we do human things. Some of us make fun of creationists here, and some of them make fun of us at /r/Creation.

I try to be civil, as I like to be nice, and hopefully get someone with an opposing view to read what I write, but like most IRL debates, one side swaying the other is very rare.

Beliefs do not occur in isolation - see the foundationalist or coherentist models of knowledge, for example. To change one, often it is necessary to also change other beliefs.

For example, to change one's views on gay marriage, one may need to change one's beliefs on biblical inerrantism and whether sex is dualistic or a spectrum.

To change a YECer's point of view, again, it may be necessary to change their view on biblical inerrantism/belief that Satan in in charge of this world, clouding scientist's eyes/what the context and purpose of Genesis 1&2 is.

To flip my view (back to creationism), YECers need to change my beliefs on the evidence, purpose of Gen1&2, and biblical inerrancy, amongst others.

This is difficult as this is complicated by confirmation bias and the backfire effect which are very real phenomena.

In addition, although we think we are rational, we [are not] (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777) ; our passions direct our beliefs to a great extent.

u/kumay · 18 pointsr/suggestmeabook

May not be exactly what you're looking for, but I read this book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion) over the summer and it really helped me get into the heads of people with different ideologies than my own (liberal). Worth a read!

u/idkydi · 17 pointsr/Ask_Politics

Alright, it's not a "convervative" resource, but I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind and it made me less politically angry. What I previously saw as callousness and bitterness I now see as responding to different moral cues. Here's the TED talk summarizing part of the book, and here's the Amazon link.

u/mulch17 · 17 pointsr/ShitPoliticsSays

Asking redditors to explain conservative goals and values is the perfect political Turing test. The answers are always awful.

The more time I spend online, the more I keep agreeing with Jon Haidt's research. He's a self-described liberal that uses his moral foundation theory to explain the underlying moral values of each party, and why it leads to the "Conservative Advantage" - that conservatives are way better at understanding liberals than vice versa. In other words, conservatives generally think liberals are naive and misguided, while liberals generally think conservatives are evil, insane, etc.

He wrote a whole book about it called The Righteous Mind, but this is a good intro if you're interested in learning more. I've never been able to look at politics the same way after reading Haidt's work. He was a life-changer for me.

u/streamentry · 16 pointsr/slatestarcodex

The Perilous State of the University: Jonathan Haidt/Jordan B Peterson
>I recently traveled to New York University to talk with Dr. Jonathan Haidt about, among other things, disgust, purity, fear and belief; the perilous state of the modern university; and his work with Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/) an organization designed to draw attention to the lack of diversity of political belief in the humanities and the social sciences. Dr. Haid is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business and a social psychologist. He studies the psychology of morality and the moral emotions. He has been described as a top global thinker by both Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. Dr. Haidt is the author of three books: The newest is The Coddling of the American Mind: How Bad Ideas and Good Intentions are Setting up a Generation for Failure (http://amzn.to/2AN87a6). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (http://amzn.to/2yOOQnU) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (http://amzn.to/2hJ0TzT) His writings on diversity viewpoint for the Heterodox Academy are at (http://righteousmind.com/viewpoint-di...)

u/Bilbo_Fraggins · 13 pointsr/progressive

We have one of if not the freest healthcare market in the developed world. The systems that are much further from free market health care are the ones that are 1/2 the cost with better outcomes. When you can only fathom applying more of what doesn't work, you're stuck in an ideological bind.

"Watching politics" is about the least accurate way of understanding why people act the way they do. You might try reading moral and political psychology where they actually study why people believe and push for the things they do with scientific methods. I highly recommend picking up a book like The Righteous Mind or Moral Tribes if you want to begin to understand current political realities more deeply.

u/checkChaCheckItOut · 12 pointsr/atheism

While these videos are very good at explaining real experiments and citing them, I'd like to point out that they vastly simplify the psychology of beliefs.

For further detail you should check out Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion", or for a tl:dr, check out his interview with Stephen Colbert.

u/BadLaziesOn · 11 pointsr/JordanPeterson

Yes. This was my first Haidt content ever - and I'm into his work ever since. I also highly recommend the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

u/nilstycho · 11 pointsr/AskSocialScience

You might be interested in Jonathan Haidt's Moral foundations theory and his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He finds that both progressives and conservatives value fairness. Here's his TED Talk if you prefer that.

u/alecbenzer · 8 pointsr/ShitPoliticsSays

I wouldn't claim that conservatives are universally logical and rational, but all people resort to emotion. We're more or less built to deal with morality and politics via intuition, not reasoning (see The Righteous Mind). And I'd say this applies to liberals quite a lot as well.

u/Amp4All · 8 pointsr/AcademicPsychology

There are a few titles I really love. I hope you like a few things on the list, if you have any questions let me know.

u/kodheaven · 8 pointsr/IntellectualDarkWeb

Seeking Truth

Do your best to stay away from YouTube reactionaries or YouTube Personalities, the truth is rare there and often distorted.

Some other recommendations:

u/puppy_and_puppy · 7 pointsr/MensLib

I'm not sure if this would work or not, but I would try redirecting people who have conservative or right-wing leaning views at least toward better thinkers than Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and toward optimistic views of the future of society, to cull some of the us-vs-them and zero-sum thinking that plagues these discussions.

Sometimes it feels like men, especially, feel existentially threatened by other modes of thought, so being at least sympathetic to the good bits of their ideas and offering something similar but that promotes openness and liberal ideas may help.

Hans Rosling's Factfulness presents a pretty optimistic view of the world. It's all getting better! Seriously!

Jonathan Haidt (and Greg Lukianoff for the first book)

u/TheAlchemyBetweenUs · 7 pointsr/CollapseSupport

I think this book might help sort out political differences.

Trump was surprisingly cogent during the election. He mentioned that the US economy was in a bubble. He pointed out that not provoking war would be a good thing. On the other hand, his energy policy and circumlocution on climate change should have made him a non-starter for most humans. He tapped into the despair and sense of betrayal that many Americans rightfully feel.

But then he started bombing Syria without adequate proof, applying reverse Robin Hood policies, and rolling back years of hard fought environmental regulations that protect the greater populace.

You might be able to get through to your SO. I mean Trump is probably collapse-aware on some level (esp. with Bannon on board), so maybe talking about collapse topics would be fruitful. If he's a climate change denier and can't fix that after an intervention, it suggests a level of infantile stubbornness that will be a challenge in other areas.

Bottom line, is this someone you want to raise a child with? If you listen to your intuition and the answer is no, move on. If yes, perhaps it's a viable project.

u/permanent_beta · 6 pointsr/SocialEngineering

[Edit : Formatting, links]

Well, it's hard to do this over facebook/online, especially if the other people are already feeling defensive. "Once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open minded thinking" J. Haidt.

But in general:

First, you have to understand the other person and your own beliefs. And you have to appeal to intuition (emotion) as much or more than to reasoning.

This article is a good introduction to understanding this approach: Reasons Matter (When Intuitions Don’t Object)

Haidt wrote a book, The Righteous Mind, that covers this topic in depth. What's good about his approach is that he uses experiments in Sociology and Psychology to explain and understand ourselves and each other.

He did a TED talk before he finished the book so it's not as complete, but it's also a good introduction: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives


---

Here's a review of The Righteous Mind:

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

...

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments. ...

u/ScienceBreathingDrgn · 6 pointsr/politics

I'm reading a really interesting book right now that talks about the origins of morality, and how they likely have come about because to flourish we need to be a society, and to be a society, we need to think about the greater good.

I know that probably wouldn't go over well with some religious folks, but I'd take it back WAY past prehistory (which some religious folks might also find objectionable), and talk about early man working in groups.

I really enjoy trying to come up with a reasonable and rational argument that at the same time isn't offensive. It's a unique challenge, but I find the results pretty beneficial for my own thought.

Edit: Dur, the name of the book is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

u/potatoisafruit · 6 pointsr/TrueReddit

> I think there's not enough writing out there taking a look at the totally understandable emotional reasons why people engage in identity politics.

You're looking for Jonathan Haidt. There's also a TED talk.

Haidt points out that there are six moral "receptors", similar to senses, and that conservatives experience all six, while liberals focus primarily experience only two.

Each of these moral receptors can be exploited. We are hard-wired to respond to these set-points and base our decisions on those gut feelings. We use our intellect (especially on Reddit!) to justify those emotional decisions, not to question them.

Liberals are not going to change their settings. However, they can become better at this game and learn to trigger the four missing receptors to better bring conservatives over to their pet causes.

For example, why don't conservatives respond to the statement: "Trump should release his taxes?" Liberals see this as an issue of fairness and pretty much only fairness - everyone else did it, it's good for the majority to have the information, why is this even a question?

Conservatives bring in a whole host of other moral flavors. They are loyal to Trump. They respect his authority. They believe fairness is about proportionality, so because Trump is rich, he must also be good (those with the most assets have earned a right to lead). All of these cross-currents prevent them from supporting something that is obviously beneficial to society.

Until liberal learn to trigger those switches, they will continue to lose elections. We are ultimately still monkeys.

u/Enginerd · 6 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Since nobody seems to have mentioned it already, I would recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. There's a lot in there, part II is most similar to this essay, he comes up with a theory of moral foundations, for which classical liberals essentially use 3 (care, fairness, liberty) and conservatives all 6. The "care/harm" foundation sounds a lot like empathy, "authority/subversion" sounds a lot like discipline.

u/hindu-bale · 6 pointsr/IndiaSpeaks

> I see what you are getting at -

I'm unconvinced of arguments involving game theory and utilitarianism. Although, it's easy to latch on to them. Going down a path of "articulated objectivism" in a world dominated by new atheists touting Science as above morality and philosophizing, there isn't much else to fall back on. So I understand why one might want to base their arguments such.

My own break from this approach involved (1) reading "The Evolution of Cooperation", which is as Game Theory and Dawkins as it gets, with its thesis based almost entirely on computer simulation, then simultaneously reading (2) Greg Mankiw's piece on "When the Scientist is Also a Philosopher", which to me was largely an admission from a top Economist, then finally (3) reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" that showed me the possibility of an entirely alternate perspective. Particularly impactful were his citing of Fehr & Gachter's Altruistic Punishment in Humans, his case about Kant and Bentham being autistic - implying they weren't socially capable of understanding how people actually functioned in social settings, and his takedown of the New Atheists including Dawkins.

> in part rhetorical :)

Yes, in part, the other part being sincerely open to being convinced otherwise :) .

> I think there is so much more that ails the legal system today

What do you believe ails the legal system?

To me, Dharma is at the least evolved for India, in comparison to Western canonical law. Dharma is still well embedded in our cultural consciousness, we grow up on stories involving Dharma. If you're thinking in terms of Schelling points, Dharma should be an obvious solution to many of India's societal woes. It is at the least far more intuitive for us Hindus. Western legalese on the other hand is mostly about being "technically correct" "as per the law". Maybe it works for the West, probably because it bakes in their Schelling points, but I don't see how it's good for India.

Of course I'm not suggesting overhauling legal vocabulary, but instead, dumping vocabulary altogether. Being technically correct is not the same as being correct. Subjective judgements should be acceptable. The Western legal system, for all its rhetoric about living "by the rule of law", never got around subjective judgement of judges.

u/sasha_says · 5 pointsr/booksuggestions

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s books those are good; he reads his own audiobooks and I like his speaking style. He also has a podcast called revisionist history that I really like.

Tetlock’s superforecasting is a bit long-winded but good; it’s a lay-person’s book on his research for IARPA (intelligence research) to improve intelligence assessments. His intro mentions Kahneman and Duckworth’s grit. I haven’t read it yet, but Nate Silver’s signal and the noise is in a similar vein to Tetlock’s book and is also recommended by IARPA.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was really eye-opening to me to understand the differences in the way that liberals and conservatives (both in the political and cultural sense) view the world around them and how that affects social cohesion. He has a few TED talks if you’d like to get an idea of his research. Related, if you’re interested in an application of Kahneman’s research in politics, the Rationalizing Voter was a good book.

As a “be a better person” book, I really liked 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey (recommend it on audiobook). Particularly, unlike other business-style self-help about positive thinking and manipulating people—this book really makes you examine your core values, what’s truly important to you and gives you some tools to help refocus your efforts in those directions. Though, as I’m typing this I’m thinking about the time I’m spending on reddit and not reading the book I’ve been meaning to all night =p

u/japanesepiano · 5 pointsr/exmormon

I highly recommend reading "The righteous Mind" by Johathan Haidt available here. It does a really good job of explaining why we justify the religion while we're in and why we're so angry when we get out. I found it useful in processing what's going through my mind now as well as what is going through my TBM wife's mind. In the end, our "rational" minds aren't very rational at all. We are all very good at justifying decisions, but rarely do we objectively make these decisions. It may give you some needed perspective.

If you're shy of 30, I say you have a very good shot at making it out as a family and enjoying some great years whether or not your spouse makes it out. Look back to understand, but don't forget to look ahead and live the amazing life in front of you.

u/Arguss · 5 pointsr/AskAnAmerican

> In general though, trying to understand the left in this country just ain't worth it. I gave up years ago and my blood pressure has thanked me for it.

I expect more from you, Scrambles.

We gotta imagine the other side complexly, or else we run the risk of alluring tribal psychology, where everyone in our tribe is good and everyone on the other side is evil for evil's sake.

This kind of thinking is what leads liberals to conclude all conservatives are racists; if you don't want to be a mirror version of that, you have work to understand where the other side is coming from.

For more information to help understand the moral foundations of the other side, I suggest Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, which talks about how liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have differing moral foundations and what they are and how they work. Most of the ideas in the book, though, are available on YouTube, particularly his ted talk about moral foundations, him talking about morality binding & blinding, and him talking about the sacred victim. There's also a super long talk which I think basically talks about all of it, but it's an hour and a half.

u/Fuzzy_Thoughts · 5 pointsr/mormon

Thank you very much! These are some really excellent thoughts and I'm grateful for the additional context from someone who has not only been here for a while, but from someone who was a mod/head mod. I showed up on /r/mormon about a year ago when my faith transition started (I only used /r/latterdaysaints prior to that for a couple years), so that "battleground" context is probably very important.

The Righteous Mind comes to mind for all of us and whatever group we might generally align ourselves with.

u/Homeless_Nomad · 5 pointsr/GoldandBlack

A lot of them are written with the intention of "trapping" people into situations that they feel are morally wrong, but cannot explain why rationally due to a lack of consequence or victim. Haidt lays out where this particular line of moral psychology came from in his book, which I highly recommend.

u/unnamedstripper45 · 5 pointsr/askphilosophy

Absolutely! Maybe I'm inexperienced but it's equally as frustrating finding that from time to time I end up on this side as well. I feel kind of like an asshole after...

side note edit: Thought it might be worth mentioning that this is actually becoming a big interest in the field of moral psychology, (though most of the research I'm familiar with centers around moral debates). You might find Haidt's The Righteous Mind particularly interesting; it's a neat book that goes over some experiments about how arguments (especially philosophical ones) can become honorific and somewhat hopeless in the wrong contexts. I found it cathartic.

u/SMYFFL · 4 pointsr/Capitalism

What you've asked is an incredibly deep question that likely has no right answer. Having said that, there are probably wrong answers - one of those is assuming that all individuals are absolutely logical decision makers that will always try to make the most objective decision.

Rational choice theory is the fundamental underlying thought behind economics (and capitalism by extension). However, moral psychologists are starting to believe that human do not make judgments based on rationality, but instead run off of intuition and then use logic post hoc in order to explain why their gut was right. This may be the type of thought that you've stumbled upon, and if you'd like to read more on the idea, Haidt's book The Righteous Mind is a good place to start.

u/boothofthebeast · 4 pointsr/nba

I would say it's not dissimilar to the partisan fanaticism in most other democracies but it does seem it's become worse. Well, it's pretty bad in the UK too.

A great book on the topic of partisanship in general (and correlated issues):

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/00Qant5689 · 4 pointsr/atlanticdiscussions

>The key to understanding both Conservatism and the Conservative Media is to understand they believe they are at War, and "Liberals" are the enemy. Just like during a War, say WW2 for example, people will blindly follow their own governments propoganda not because it is true or not but because their side said it and to believe your own side is to support the war effort.

It's not just the whole "siege mentality" that makes conservative media so effective and widespread. Once you distill it down to the essentials, conservative media appeals to the base fears and underlying psychologies of many viewers in such a visceral and primal way that it overrides their higher reasoning. It's no surprise that a lot of what you see on Fox, Breitbart, and InfoWars, etc. is over-the-top, sensationalized, and fairly short on facts a lot of times: it's specifically aimed at stoking, reinforcing, or sparking the emotions and pysches of specific viewers who generally vote conservative. And as long as this keeps up, there would be very little reason for Trumpsters and those on the right in general to break free of these self-reinforcing loops or the groupthink bias and siege mentality of conservative media.

I've oversimplified this considerably because I haven't read this source material in more than two years by now, but Jonathan Haidt covered this in greater detail in The Righteous Mind. If you haven't read it already, I'd highly recommend it.

u/notmuchofaroller · 4 pointsr/videos

I recently read a book The Righteous Mind that covers this collective behavior from a psychological perspective. It's a great book and really helps explain this sort of "crazy" behavior in a way that gives me quite a bit more empathy for these people instead of just seeing them as others. Excerpt:

> But human nature also has a more recent groupish overlay. We are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of groups with other groups. We are descended from earlier humans whose groupish minds helped them cohere, cooperate, and outcompete other groups. That doesn't mean our ancestors were mindless or unconditional team players; it means they were selective. Under the right conditions, they were able to enter a mind-set of "one for all, all for one" in which they were truly working for the good of the group, and not just for their own advancement within the group.

Another example provided: concerts or raves. Although they don't have the same supernatural underpinnings, it is quite easy to get "lost in the crowd" and go crazy in a similar way.

u/pums · 4 pointsr/polyamory

OK. Great. So, embedded in what you're saying is a bunch of assumptions that aren't specific to this particular argument but are much more meta - they have to do with what counts as evidence, who gets standing, and even what kinds of values are important. For instance, you refer to "the basic idea of freedom in letting consenting adults choose their own private life." That frame is one that a lot of people would actually object to because the idea of "adults having maximum freedom to choose what they want" isn't how they frame issues having to do with family and marriage. In fact, framing it that way is a very contemporary/educated/western way to frame this sort of thing - another way of talking about these issues would be to reference values like personal autonomy way less, and you'd end up with different conclusions if you did that.
There's a lot to go into here, and (luckily) a lot of other people have already done it. I think it'll be helpful to get a better understanding of the values/assumption/narrative that lead to different views about marriage, in addition to reading specifically about this.
Some places to start include the "simple rules for simple people" discussion in Diverging Family Structure and 'Rational' Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice. I'd also recommend Jonathon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory work - I liked his book, but I'm sure you can find it packaged in smaller things. For work specifically on sexual ethics, I'd recommend Eve Tushnet and Rod Dreher, but they're both going to be a lot to get into initially, because, as bloggers, they're not really listing their assumptions each and every time they write.
With all of this stuff, you're going to be able to make counterarguments. But they can make counterarguments, too - it's never that hard. I would suggest that to understand other people's arguments, you apply the Principle of Charity. In this case in particular, because your argument seems foreign and clearly wrong to the majority of humans, I think it's especially important to understand their arguments.

u/w0wser · 4 pointsr/Libertarian

If you are interested in moral psychology and politics I'd recommend reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics & Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

if you don't have time to read the book, watch his TED talk or listen to the interview he gave on Econ Talk recently.

u/30plus1 · 4 pointsr/politics

Not All Conservatives.

Just because the right doesn't want grown men in dresses using the restroom with their daughters doesn't mean they want gays thrown from rooftops. They're on the side of traditional family values.

Really good book on the relationship between the right and left here:

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

Highly recommend it if you get the chance.

u/Shiner_Black · 4 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

To paraphrase David Hume, reason is a slave to the passions. Humans naturally make quick decisions from their intuitions and then use reason to justify those decisions after the fact. When you talk to the average person about anarcho-capitalism, their most likely response is to instantly think of one of the more common arguments against it (there will be warlords, who will build the roads, what will the poor do, etc) and then dismiss it. It can be difficult to overcome this when trying to convince people that our point of view is correct.

A good book I would suggest for this is The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. He goes over why human minds work this way, and the best way to get around it during arguments. He's also appeared on the Tom Woods Show and EconTalk before to summarize the book.


u/bguy74 · 3 pointsr/changemyview

The accessible version is covered by the book by Haidt (who I thinks is also an author of the study I'm about to try to go find).

And...here it is: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/manuscripts/graham.nosek.submitted.moral-stereotypes-of-libs-and-cons.pub601.pdf



u/wolfnb · 3 pointsr/goodyearwelt

>It didn't really change anybody's mind, and one's view on it was 99% shaped by what they were already thinking.

These books are about why they think that way. Hillbilly Elegy is about communities (mainly the non-urban communities that gave Trump huge support) that feel left behind and the recent history and thinking of those groups. The Big Sort is about the homogenization of social groups and thinking in the US, leading to why people feel comfortable throwing "grenades". The Righteous Mind is a book on the psychology of morality and politics in the US and why the ideologies are so different.

Trump may have won big with white voters of all stripes, but he also did better among Latinos than Romney, so it's obvious that it isn't just "poor uneducated whites", but if people don't try to figure out why the division is so strong and where the other side is coming from, what chance do we have for uniting and restoration?

I live in the most liberal district in one of the most liberal cities in the US. I have no difficulty in understanding that perspective and its driving forces. The other view is not so well illuminated

Edit: though I shouldn't have said anything in the first place. This is the one place I can go to avoid all the cross-talk about politics and ideologies. I like all of you guys and our light conversations about shoes. I'd rather not ruin that for myself.

u/cyberhistorian · 3 pointsr/vegan

I think that the problem with non-monogamy is not just the act itself, but principally the effect of dishonesty with one's partner. Being transparent about what and why one holds a specific diet and acknowledging its effects addresses a similar, if more minor, concern.

When Peter Singer talks about the "Paris exception", he isn't describing an epicurean whim as a moral good, but rather arguing that the moral criticism should be grounded not in a purity principal but with respect to animal welfare. In the same way, there is a puritanical ethical argument against non-monogamy that while nearly (but not entirely) universal, is less cogent than a critique of the likelihood of an affair impairing one's family's happiness.

Ethical feelings are grounded in evolutionary traits, the purity principle is grounded in taboos around what is healthy. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind acknowledges that vegans have a similar response to eating animals, as many conservatives to do homosexuality or Orthodox Jews do to eating pigs. While this purity principle isn't necessarily wrong, grounding ones ethics in Utilitarianism and animal welfare allows veganism to have a much more universal ethical appeal.

u/garcia_reid · 3 pointsr/Nodumbquestions

Matt's comment about the White House, (paraphrasing) "people want the same end result but just have different ideas about how to get there" made me think of this book I just listened to.

It's not the easiest read in the world, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

And of course, it fits very well with the NDQ attitude.

It's by Jonathan Haidt.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NbC0DbWTAKPA9

Check it out and enjoy! And most importantly, share it with people who need to hear it.

u/keylimesoda · 3 pointsr/latterdaysaints

I keep saying, atheists need a church. The social support structures provided by a healthy church group is incredibly valuable to the community.

That said, I also agree with the article's author (and Jonathon Haidt) that it's hard to motivate such organization in the absence of religious guiding principles.

u/retrogamerpenis · 3 pointsr/exmormon

Read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_zJpGzbMWYB548
It turns out humans are expert at justifying their own actions.

u/Tall_for_a_Jockey · 3 pointsr/news

Now that is some Jonathon Haidt-level shit right there! Thank you for sharing the full text of her message. I'm relieved to find that nowhere in the text does it say "you should be able to do or say whatever you want without social consequences," and I'm disappointed to hear that there's a new label for people we disagree with. "Regressive left" seems pejorative in the extreme. My hope is that people who believe different things will actually do what she suggests and talk to each other about what they believe. That is a very hard, but very necessary, thing to do.
Anyway, I wanted to share something that the letter reminded me of that was written at a time when America was even more divided. Here are the last few sentences of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address:

>I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

u/allinallitsjusta · 3 pointsr/changemyview

>If President Trump is ideologically Conservative, why do his positions change so frequently?

Nobody makes decisions ideologically. This is why it is seemingly so difficult to convince people to change their minds with just information. You only change people's minds by influencing them socially / appealing to morality, etc.

Trump tapped into a moral framework (like most conservatives candidates) that covers the things that people than lean conservative care about. Conservatives, even people that are super far right, or super religious, voted for Trump and sincerely trust Trump because he appeals to the things they care about. This is why many conservatives will openly say that they will never vote for a Democratic candidate -- they don't feel that Democrats care about the things they care about (and they are right)

>My understanding is that he doesn't support any ideology

He certainly leans conservative but he is generally pretty moderate and does things based on what his supporters want.

>is there an implied hierarchy in the numbering?

Nope, all 6 are equal. But Liberals literally only care about (1) and (2) while conservatives tend to care about all of them relatively equally.

If you want to read a book entirely about this:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Really fascinating read, especially in today's political climate. It humanizes the other side because right now liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think liberals are insane. But if you realize that they are just working with different starting materials you can understand why they value the things that they value, and why it is so difficult to change a person's mind with facts.

u/lev_spark · 3 pointsr/booksuggestions

I'm working my way through The Righteous Mind right now and it has lots of fun insights into why humans react the way they do to various external situations.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/moderatepolitics

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I'll try to address all your points.

> My problem here is that I find some aspects of Conservative culture contemptible, having been directly exposed to them. I expect I'm likely to get some nods from social conservatives - I know they feel the same way about me and I'm suprisingly ok with that. I know why they feel as they do. But the reasons are not interchangeable nor do I find the reasons equally compelling.

I was raised in a very conservative area myself so I know exactly what you mean. If you're like me, you've seen an environment openly hostile to gay people, racial minorities, and ceaselessly preoccuppied with others' reproductive rights. Trust me, I know what you mean and I do think that a big problem is that rural/conservative America has not been held accountable for the way it creates the necessity for people to agitate for their rights.

But the reason you do not find them equally compelling is because you have a differing moral palette from a social conservative. I don't share them, either, but reading Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind opened me up a lot to the possibility that there's more to it than just closed-mindedness.

This is not to say that I think homophobia and racism have value. More that I think if we are to adequately ensure the equal treatment of all people, those who do not prioritize that goal need to understand why others think the way they do.

Unfortunately there's nothing to say that social conservatives must understand the way others think. Is that fair to liberals? No. But it's work anyone must do if they want their ideas to be made material. But persuasion and slow change are incredibly important tools in a democracy.

> Since I do believe in individual liberty, I tend to respond to social conservatives saying that "liberals are trying to redefine male and female" for everybody with a derisive snort. I'm in fairly good touch with that sort of liberal - and it's all about being allowed to define your own self. That's a conclusion that is trivially established by asking a few people.

I wish I could agree with you that the goal is about personal liberty, but in a world where Obama's reinterpretation of Title IX materially changes the experience of women and children in bathrooms and locker rooms, it is regrettably not so. Trans people should of course be free of violence, harassment, employment, and housing discrimination. But redefining male/female to be subjective identities rather than material conditions impacts everybody in a huge way. It can take away the right of a woman to eject a male (regardless of gender identity) from her changing area simply because an internal gender identity cannot be proven or disproven. There are non-conservative reasons to rankle at this, that have a lot to do with liberty.

> My childhood brand of Conservatism meshes will with that. But then, it took Classical Liberalism as a given. Individual liberties are sacred and government exists to enforce them against those who would take them from us. Those who violate them are wrong. To the extent that any small trespass is needed in order to achieve some goal, compensation is due.
> It's not a violation of anyone's liberty to respect the needs of the transgendered. If anything, it's a universal increase of liberty.
> Attempts to force other people into a gender binary are being judged harshly. But then, IMHO, force is bad. I cite the Non-Aggression Principle. Nobody is being judged for being gender-conforming and heteronormative. Most people are, to the extent that it's silly to think that the exceptions could be any threat to the general rule.
> This is gay marrage redoux - the idea that gays getting married somehow "ruins" marriage, when all it does is allow another group of people to exercise their individual rights fully.

I understand the comparison between feeling threatened over "redefining marriage" and being skeptical of attempts to "redefine male/female." But marriage has been defined and redefined by the government with a bunch of laws before. There's precedence. Expanding the legal definition to include same-sex consenting adults doesn't change what marriage is (a contractual agreement between consenting adults).

Redefining male/female to be a subjective identity rather than a physical reality is much more complicated. On the grounds of individual liberty, adults should absolutely have the right to dress themselves however they want, and request that others address them how they desire. Absolutely.

But Obama's Title IX letter openly makes clear that sex protections are actually reflective of gender identity. That is redefining male/female in a way that is essentially reflective of a religious belief. And it's not one that everyone shares, or should have to share.

You are entitled to behave and dress and act and think however you want in terms of gendered presentation. That is the right of all people. Females should absolutely be able to be assertive, dress in trousers, and occupy positions of power. Males should absolutely be able to be delicate, wear frilly dresses, and do all the housework they please without being harassed or discriminated against.

You are entitled to all these things. But you are not entitled to your own facts, and there is no scientific proof that internal, innate subjective gender identity exists beyond people saying "I am male/female." Acknowledgment of this claim people have of themselves should not be legislated in the same way acknowledging God should not be legislated. As with religion, it would be absurd if people should be forced to cooperate. The saying goes, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Consider that there is a nose here you're not seeing-- a woman or girl's right to facilities free of penis isn't just uppity, bigoted Christians with an irrational fear. Women fought hard for sex-segregated public facilities. Before them, they were much less able to access the public sphere.

Bear in mind that passing trans people (or those with consent from their communities) have always been able to use the facilities of their identity. But to put into writing that subjective identity trumps all regardless of other factors is redefining male/female for everybody.

> But clearly, this is a clash of moral visions. And clearly, I feel that my consequentialist ethical foundation is far more defensible than a Deontological "Because God Said So."

> I support the right of individual self-determination and reject the notion that I can be expected to sacrifice my own best interest in the name of supporting a social vision I fundamentally object to. I also support those who feel that god says something quite different than what Pat Robertson says they say. I find it difficult to conceive of a god worth knowing that would give Pat Roberson the time of day.
> I should point out that with a few radical exceptions, liberals are not demanding the same thing. They are perfectly willing to accept Conservative self-descriptions. Speaking for myself, I may not believe them, but I'll accept them. It's no more difficult than accepting and tolerating those people who believe they are transpeciated.

I will, too. But not as their gender identity. I might on a case-by-case basis. But that is not the current stated political goal and it is not what the Title IX letter did.

You might accept, love, and want all human rights and housing/employment discrimination protections for a person who believes, with 100% conviction, that they are a dog. But if a great number of dog-folk start lobbying to change the legal definition of a dog to be a subjective state that has nothing to do with bodies? There are far-reaching implications. A lot of noses, so to speak.

> My response is a simple "if you say so." It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Now, I don't have to think of them as strangely compelling either. Nobody is asking me to. If I do, that's my issue and since it is - it's not something I can blame on "liberals."

In many situations, what you're saying applies. I don't think people should be mean to transgender people. I just also do not think that legal definitions of male and female should be changed to reflect their beliefs.

Acknowledging someone's preferred subjective identity is easy and ideal in passing! But it's a bit different when there's an obvious male in your wife's gym's locker room, armed with legislation that prevents her from using common sense to deduce that this person is a man with a fetish. Or an obviously male teenager dominating your daughter's female athletics division.

These may seem like petty concerns, but things like these don't affect you until they do. I encourage you to think about having no recourse if you were in these situations. There's a big difference between being accepting of gender-non-conforming people and redefining male and female to be subjective identities, and that is exactly what the Title IX letter sought to do.

Again, none of this is to say trans people are bad and deserve any sort of harm. It's just to say there are perfectly valid reasons to find some of the recent specific legislation pertaining to gender identity to impinge upon their rights.

u/svefan · 3 pointsr/Suomi

En voi muuta kuin suositella lukemaan, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Ihmiset eivät keskustele rationaalisesti, vaan pyrkivät selittämään tunnereaktiot rationaalisin argumentein.

u/RedditJusticeWarrior · 3 pointsr/ShitPoliticsSays

This may not be the exact one I'm looking for, but it looks close thumbing through it.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266

The works of Jonathan Haidt are what you wanna focus on though. As he said in his book, The Righteous Mind,

> In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

> The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] 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.

u/bananab33 · 3 pointsr/The_DonaldBookclub

The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt really improved my debating skills with liberals. I don't know why the author is a liberal, I feel like he might be secretly conservative.

u/Ohthere530 · 3 pointsr/atheism

I didn't figure it out myself. I read about it. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is a great source.

u/chrises67 · 3 pointsr/exmormon

You are absolutely right – there is no one true way. Good for you for not falling into that trap again. Here is an amazing book I’ve been reading that explores morality and has helped me better form my own morals while understanding morals of others. I highly recommend it.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_AXtYBb10FZHXD

u/Shaneydev · 3 pointsr/changemyview

What do you mean by politically disingenuous?

Associating political beliefs with the values of individuals is the primary research focus of Jonathan Haidt, one of the world's leading social psychologists. He wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion which goes into deep detail about how a person's underlying psychology and subsequent value system (as well as a certain amount of environmental upbringing) form their political beliefs. So a lazy association? No.

The same guy, Jonathan Haidt, himself a liberal professor at NYU, is one half of the pair who wrote the most widely cited non-academic piece on Victimhood Culture, bringing it from academia and into the mainstream media with this article, called "The Coddling of the American Mind", which he further expanded upon in his own website here.

Though Professor Haidt says people on either side of the right/left spectrum can be prone to getting 'sucked into' victimhood culture, he says that "the narrative of oppression and victimization is especially congenial to the leftist worldview (Haidt 2012:296; Kling 2013; Smith 2003:82)".

But I want you to explain what is "politically disingenuous" about my above comment.

u/unpopular_speech · 3 pointsr/OutOfTheLoop

RE: actions are mischaracterized, I’m going to go with the low-hanging-fruit example of FOX news. Wikipedia has a great entry over FOX news controversies:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies

Of course, FOX isn’t alone in this. MSNBC will exaggerate the words and actions of the right, too. And many other organizations. I only offer FOX because it’s the easiest.

RE: tribalism preferred over truth, there are a plethora of example, and tangent examples (like the echo chamber model) which support this, but for an actual source, I could go with Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind.

Haidt explains that our tendency to form social groups enforces a expectation for social conformity, which favors group ideas and beliefs over external views and information even when that external information is demonstrably true.

We can see this behavior in religion as well. People insist that men have one less rib than women despite our ability to count them in xrays. Faith over fact.

u/oiuyt2 · 3 pointsr/worldnews

Of course, I suspected as much from your user name and my response is taylored to account for that.

I too have taken several asian studies courses, Asian philosophy courses, asian language courses, I've read the sandard literature such as Journey West and Three Kingdoms and I've tried to apply all of this to my life as lived in Korea for 8 and a half years.

No matter how I tried to twist this conventional wisdon I found myself constantly rewriting everything I knew every month. There would always be discrepencies, inconsistencies and hippocrisy. There was never a consistent narrative from which I could draw a predictive conclusion. Until about several years in when I realized in my attempt to learn about Korea culture I instead learned more about American culture and that everything they did that was some how different and confucian was something we did in American we just thought of it differenlty cause you know, 'murica.

Now if I had those biases what about people around me? It finally made sense why I could never trust a Korean to give me an honest account of Korean Culture, or someone from China to give an honest account of Chinese culture. or even trust myself to give an honest account of American Culture.

Then I read a good book on moral psychology, and it made even more sense.

> I can tell you there is definitely a cultural difference from the 6 years I have been here in my experience.

I can tell you there is a definite contectual bias in being amongst people you consider a different culture. Especially when you expect it.

> What you seem to be suggesting is that all differences are a fantasy and that there is no Confucianism or Judeo-Christianity.

What I am suggesting is that Confuciansim and Judeo-Christianity ultimately turn into tools for the lazy who want to make facile post hoc explanations for things and be done with it. You'd be right more often if you just treated people as people and pretended the concepts didn't exsist.

If we want to talk about instances where we can find differences in a controlled scientific setting (as opposed to uncontrolled instances on reddit of throughout ones day to day experiences) I would again suggest the book by Jonathan Haidt. His model of Moral Foundations Theory does a much better job of accounting for differences in a unified model instead of constantly going back to the drawing board for every culture.

u/Ahaigh9877 · 3 pointsr/forwardsfromgrandma

I think a great deal of unnecessary trouble is caused by people on both sides being unable or unwilling to try to understand where those they disagree are coming from. (I'm speaking generally here, not about your particular situation—I'm not accusing you of a lack of empathy!) Understanding people's reasons for holding views that you disagree with won't necessarily make you agree with them (and nor necessarily should it), but it might let a more meaningful discussion take place, instead of people just talking over each other.

I recommend reading stuff by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on this subject, in particular his recent book The Righteous Mind which explores the psychology behind political difference. His main thesis is that conservative types base their worldview on different foundations than do liberals. For example, they tend to consider things like obedience to authority, ideas of purity/sanctity, and loyalty/patriotism to be far more important than do liberals. Both groups care about fairness, but they have different conceptions of it: roughly, liberals are more concerned with equality of outcome whereas conservatives care more about a more "sporting" sense of fairness: if you've earned it you get to keep it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and so on.

So it might be that your colleague might have had that conception of fairness: he might have considered it "unfair" for the government to take away his money to help people he might feel don't "deserve" it. I personally disagree pretty strongly with this viewpoint—it seems to ignore the role luck plays in people's success, as well as narrowly aligning a person's worth with how much they earn for example—but it's interesting and I think very worthwhile to try to understand where people you disagree with are coming from.

Alternatively of course he might just have been a run-of-the-mill bonehead. And apologies for the long post and/or telling you shit you already knew!

u/CascadianArms · 3 pointsr/Cascadia

For everyone that's intimately following this thread, I recommend the book The Righteous Mind . It meets at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and theology. If anything; I think Cascadia needs some sort of moral compass that everyone in the region can align themselves with.

u/Xenomoly · 2 pointsr/Documentaries

Yeah - that's what I was trying to convey. Jonathan Haidt wrote a lot about the phenomena in [The Righteous Mind](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307455777).

​

I was a Democrat all my life so I remember the programming well. Around the middle of 2016 I decided to learn the Republican arguments so that I could deconstruct them and convince the Republicans that they were delusional and wrong about everything.

​

That backfired.

​

I ended up red pilling myself accidentally and when I talked to my progressive friends about it - their "wrong think" alarms went off and they went ape shit. Purged a lot of FB friends that summer. But I would not go back to the ignorance.

​

There is certainly still ignorance on the right and the left -- but the blind media bubble acceptance - the John Oliver parroting, the Bill Maher parroting --- that all seems so fucking hollow and stupid now. I would love to sit myself down decades ago and explain reality to my younger self before the shells of media bullshit were installed.

​

Thankfully - both the red pill and black pills have fully peaked and I see the whole travesty for the sick farce it is. Honk honk.

u/guymn999 · 2 pointsr/SandersForPresident

I think when talking about politics with ANYONE it is good to remember that all humans are emotional first, and rational second.

Rider and the elephant.

book recommendation on the subject

edit: check your local libraries.

u/CptGoodnight · 2 pointsr/AskTrumpSupporters

There's a book by a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt called "The Righteous Mind." I found it there. Here is the excerpt:

From page 334 of The Righteous Mind (emphasis added):

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] 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 that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:

>Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm)

One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds.

u/bluebearepeat · 2 pointsr/audiobooks

A righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt

You can find the audiobook Oh the pirate Bay of you're so inclined. It's worth purchasing though imo.
http://righteousmind.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307455777

u/thomas-apertas · 2 pointsr/Christianity

It's nice, right? I stumbled across it in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, but IIRC it's not original to Jonathan Haidt either.

u/GettingReadytoLive · 2 pointsr/exmormon

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research on the ideas of religion, morality, empathy, biases, villifying others, etc. He approaches morality from an evolutionary perspective. Watching and reading his work really helped me have more compassion and diffuse some of the anger I've felt. Haidt is a liberal atheist, but he acknowledges the value that can be gained from certain conservative ideals and traditions. I felt like he validated my Mormon experience and the experiences of my loved, while at the same time deconstructing them.

Book:
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

TED talks:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence?language=en

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_how_common_threats_can_make_common_political_ground


In any case, I've gained a lot of empathy from this stuff. It probably saved my marriage and family relationships. It made me feel OK with my family as they are, even if they never change.

u/uncletravellingmatt · 2 pointsr/atheism

I never read that book, although it seems well reviewed. I just saw the author's TED talk (again, I now remember seeing it on reddit several years ago):

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en

If you're in college and disagree with the outlook of a book or of a professor, you have the option to transfer to another class, depending on how much you like the subject matter you'll be studying. If you just disagree with some things in one book, though, you might sharpen your best points through a little research and save them for class discussions.

u/diamondshamrock · 2 pointsr/INTP

For me, it's really just wanting to be able to change the world and impose what I believe to be logically sound on others. My love of politics stems from my love of history.

In the words of Dennis Van Roekel, "For anyone who cares about the direction of the country, engagement in the political process should be a lifetime commitment." In other words, you should ALWAYS vote. Many people never take any action because they believe their voice is so minuscule that it will not matter.

Here are some books I'd recommend if you really are wanting to start up.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

http://www.amazon.com/World-Order-Henry-Kissinger/dp/1594206147


u/frackaracka · 2 pointsr/ABCDesis

The one book that I recommend to every single person I run into is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion".

The book is a summation of research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt that really changed the way I thought about how different people arrive at different moral values and perspectives, as well as articulated and crystallized what I already intuitively understood.

It had particular relevance to me as an Indian-American because when it comes down to it, the culture clash between Desi and Western values really revolves around different moral values, and the book really helped me understand the nuance and approach behind both.

u/litatavle · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

For a bit of social psycholohy try The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Gives som good food for thought on human nature.

u/Syracuss · 2 pointsr/belgium

You've now handwaived my entire response, the question I posed is one neither one of us can answer, so I'm a little bit confused at how you came to a conclusion.

This might be a bit too forward of me, but if you ever have the time, I'd highly recommend this book. It doesn't take political stances, instead it showcases research on why political debates never end. I massively enjoyed reading it years ago, and gave me some introspection into why I took the positions I did back then, and my immobility of changing my point of view at times.

u/michaelrch · 2 pointsr/samharris

Yes, I listened to the podcast. It was good albeit, as Chris said, a bit harrowing.

The best book I have read on the psychology piece is Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. I highly recommend it. Fascinating and devastating in equal measure.

It's also definitely worth reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion as a backgrounder on moral psychology.

After reading these, I found that my sense of humans as uniquely rational and intelligent was pretty much entirely put to one side... Now I rather see us as apes with technology and pretensions of greatness...

u/cassander · 2 pointsr/PoliticalDiscussion

What's the matter with kansas is simply left wing intellectual masturbation. its basic premise, that left wing economic policies are so obviously beneficial that there must be something wrong with people who vote against them, is astonishly arrogant and completely wrong. Those policies place a larger burden on poor whites than any other group, that poor whites vote against them is not surprising. If you really want to know why conservatives care about the issues they do, read this, and stop assuming that everyone agrees with your economic calculations.

u/cornybloodfarts · 2 pointsr/worldnews

this book may give you some insight into why many folks do think there is a strong genetic component to ideological leanings. It's an interesting read, regardless of if you agree or not.

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777?tag=askcomdelta-20

u/thexfiles81 · 2 pointsr/milliondollarextreme

> often times the answer seems self-evident at a certain point, even if it would be difficult to convince someone else

I feel this way a lot too. Sometimes it feels like even if you were to find an absolute truth, nobody would want to listen anyways.

>For what I'm working on tonight, trying to develop ideas of how belief systems get constructed in people, and what it takes to make them change or shift them.

I've been reading a book on this sort of thing lately. Here's a link. I'm most of the way through and it seems to be a pretty well put together book that makes some good points about how and why people end up believing the way they do. You might like it.



u/Dookiet · 2 pointsr/Libertarian

A great book for a truly in depth description and a far more nuanced one than you get from a short TED talk is Johnathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.

u/RacyOldDottist · 2 pointsr/politics

If you're also interested in more contemporary study of morality, there is "Moral Minds" by Marc Hauser. And I heard a lot about Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind" when it came out, though I still haven't read it.

u/pseudoLit · 2 pointsr/writing

One thing it really drilled home for me is just how important our physiological state (if we're tired, hungry, stressed, etc.) is to our emotional reactions. That's an easy thing you can thrown into a story for added realism. It also helped me pin down what an emotional reaction actually is in a way that makes it easier for me to think about.

It doesn't really help with motivation, though. I think that's a separate topic. For character motivations, I find Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory and his model of social intuitionism really useful. His book The Righteous Mind is a nice introduction.

u/Tangurena · 2 pointsr/AskMen

I've changed careers a few times.

> What made you do it, did you have to retrain

In my 30s, I was basically a combination auto mechanic and electronics technician. More and more tasks around the shop needed to be computerized, so I was starting to do more software development on the side. When I got run over by a car, I could no longer bend in the middle so I had to stop being an auto mechanic. While it was expensive and painful, I was fortunate that I was already transitioning towards a different career only because there were gaps in what the shop needed that could only be filled by computerized tracking and databases.

At this time I was also working on my 2nd bachelors which was mostly intended as prereqs for a masters in computer engineering (my first bachelors is in electrical engineering). The second bachelors also included lots of fun courses like statistics, women's studies, music theory and Japanese. I never finished the masters degree.

Software development is an industry where having actual credentials, especially degrees, are considered negatives. That said, I continued to spend a lot on programming books over the years in order to keep up with changing technology.

I've been a programmer for past 15 years. I just completed my 3rd bachelors (this time in accounting) because there is too much age discrimination in software development. My estimate is that a CPA with a background in IT should have a good career in auditing (and a few other things).

Looking back, one of the good things I did were to always be learning. People who treated education as a vaccine (once they've had it, they never needed to do it again) ended up unemployed in their later 50s.

Some books I recommend are on this post at a programmer specific site. If you aren't in IT, then the books to read from the "being a better programmer/employee" section are: The Passionate Programmer (this is about keeping your mind and skills up to date). Corporate Confidential, Death March and Spreadsheet Modeling. All the other sections I still recommend reading (your library should have many of these books), although I usually tell folks to read The Righteous Mind instead of Moral Politics (while still good, Haidt's book gives a better framework for understanding the differences between "liberals" and "conservatives" and why they think differently).

Other books that may help you find what you want to do:

Zen and the Art of Making a Living. About how to figure out what you want to do and how to turn that into a career.

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. About learning on your own and how to give some structure to it so that it isn't "all over the place". His website.

Tell Me About Yourself. One good way to get your message across in interviewing is to be able to answer questions that start "tell me about a time when..." or "how do you..." . Those questions tend to get asked more commonly these days in the competency based interviewing style. It is much harder to slide through that type of interview by claiming knowledge you don't have.

> I'm starting to find the culture of the organisation a bit toxic

Generally, when things get tight, the struggle for power and resources (commonly called "office politics") gets very ugly. I've included some suggested books on office politics in the link above. If you don't learn at least how to recognize and deflect it, then you may as well have WELCOME tattooed on your forehead because you're gonna become a victim of it.

When it comes to office politics, this joke should be your motto:

> Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve starts putting on his tennis shoes
> Mark says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!”
> Steve says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear—I just have to outrun you!”

http://boyslife.org/jokes/6953/you-cant-outrun-a-bear/

Finally, I'd recommend learning some programming. Every field of industry has been affected by software and automation. I call Access and Excel "the gateway drugs to programming" because so many developers got started by automating some spreadsheet to make their job easier and as the thing got more complicated it also got more essential to getting work done at the company.

u/Trumpy_Poo_Poo · 2 pointsr/AskTrumpSupporters

It has nothing to do with America and nothing to do with politics. I’m a huge fan of Johnathan Haidt, who wrote an entire book explaining how “us vs. them” is hardwired into human beings.

u/twitchKeeptrucking · 2 pointsr/politics

What is not opposite, and why it makes sense, is that it is the brain throwing arguments after something it has deamed good for me. Read Jonathan Chaits The Righteous Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/anechoicmedia · 2 pointsr/texas

>Things that don't match their values are evil or sinful.

This is language typical of someone who can't conceptualize right-wing ideas in their moral system.

I am immersed in the right and I've never seen someone call transgenderism a sin or an evil. It is usually seen as a sad diversion, or maybe a mental illness, a confusion they do not want to see spread to nearby developing minds.

The right does not want non-passing trans people using their non-biological bathroom because they don't belong there. Public infrastructure is built to suit the needs of normal people, and they're not normal. Someone is going to be disappointed so it may as well be them.

u/BeetleB · 2 pointsr/changemyview

OK, you've suddenly made me want to write a lot. I think I'll split my response into multiple comments, addressing different things.

>But the desire will never be satisfied, so long as conservatives cannot form logical arguments to support their beliefs, or form logical rebuttals of my arguments.

I think this is your biggest mistake. Over the last 2 years I've been diving into why people believe what they do, and why they are convinced by some people and not by others. Logic is almost always the weakest way to convince anyone - regardless of their leanings.

I strongly recommend the books The Righteous Mind and Influence which dive into some of the reasons why. I've also been reading up on negotiation skills, and while logic/reason is part of the toolset, it is merely one of a number of tools.

People will naturally listen to their ingroup, and be wary of their outgroup. The arguments you use do not work because you are in their outgroup. Were someone whom they felt were very similar in beliefs to give those same arguments, they're much more likely to listen. So you are already at a disadvantage.

Most people will listen to logical arguments, once they believe you are trying to explore mutually, and not merely trying to change their opinion. All change comes from within, and they want to believe you are equally willing to change your mind and understand their perspective. In reality, perhaps you are, but there's a whole lot of effort that needs to be performed to signal that. Just saying "Let's talk" is way insufficient.

A phrase often used "You should be able to state their world view back to them as they themselves would state it." Once you get there, they are much more likely to listen.

There are many other tactics to get someone to the point where they will listen to logic. But you have to do the legwork.

BTW, almost all negotiations/communications book point out: If you give up often and justify it with "They're irrational" or "They just won't listen to reason", then you are just looking for an exit and an excuse. You do not understand/know how to reach them, and so you are sleeping better at night by labeling the other person. To convince anyone, you have to do some leg work, and you're trying to shortcut that by saying "Logic should be sufficient". It isn't. Not for conservatives and not for liberals. Trust me - I've lived with both, and been treated as an outsider by both at various times. They are equally prone to not listening to logic. This is a human condition, not a conservative condition.

Now a lot of liberals do view scientists as part of their ingroup. And so they are much more likely to accept (usually uncritically) what the scientific community says. This is not because liberals are more likely to listen to logic. It is because they are more likely to listen to scientists.

>As long as conservatives continue to believe these things, without logical explanations, and are unable/refuse to rationally rebut my counter arguments, there is no reason for me to waste my valuable time and energy on them.

The truth is: They are likely saying the same about you.

I'll respond to the more specifics of your comment later.

u/generalT · 2 pointsr/politics

everyone does this.

i highly recommend this book.

u/Fortunate_0nesy · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

To answer this question, and really understand it, I suggest reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

Haidt has studied these things for several decades, and his findings blew my mind.

I'm not going to try to summarize as I will just mangle his findings, but you can listen to this in about an hour and get a pretty good summary.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/6341



u/jhilden13 · 2 pointsr/CGPGrey

This isn't technically productivity as much as it is the human condition, but I would absolutely love to hear your and Mike's take on The Righteous Mind (Jonathan Heidt)

u/nantesorkestar · 2 pointsr/amiugly

Except your assertion of them being "awful" is subjective, not grounded in objective fact. Sure there are awful Trump supporters but as you said yourself, you can't hate a whole group of people for the actions of a few. At your age, I was also very set in my ways and thought my views were morally superior to others. As I got older, I realized I knew a fraction of what I thought I did. I recommend reading [this book.] (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777)

I despise Trump and I'm as "Left" as you can get but it's very off putting to see liberals act in such an authoritarian and closed-minded manner.

u/EyesEarsMouthAndNose · 2 pointsr/exmormon

Read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. In depth analysis on this very subject.

u/kodadd · 1 pointr/svenskpolitik

Detta försök har i princip redan gjorts i vetenskapligt format. Ur The Righteous Mind:

>When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these 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.

>In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] 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 that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness.

u/francis2559 · 1 pointr/politics

Oh, I agree. Check out The Righteous Mind if you haven't already. Really, really, really good stuff. Helpful, even.

Edit: I should clarify, it changed the way I think so much that I've been slow to put it into practice. Yet every time I walk away from an encounter that didn't go the way I expected, I slap my head when I remember Haidt. The other thing that is helping me is Pope Francis' language of "accompaniment," which he contrasts with "proselytizing." Basically, spend more time listening then talking.

u/mnemosyne-0002 · 1 pointr/KotakuInAction

Archives for the links in comments:

u/Notasurgeon · 1 pointr/skeptic

There's an excellent book about how this works, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Reading it has made me a lot more empathetic towards people who disagree on controversial topics, and also has helped me guide discussions on these topics in healthy directions. One major takeaway is that people look for facts and craft arguments to support their intuitions and beliefs, they don't craft beliefs based on facts and arguments. Also we craft logical arguments mostly to defend our beliefs and convince others, not to arrive at correct beliefs in the first place. So challenging beliefs directly with counter arguments is usually actually counterproductive, since it is easilly taken as a personal attack and just puts them into defense mode

u/Sophocles · 1 pointr/TrueAtheism

If your friend thinks that he believes in some kind of objective morality, you might invite him to take some quizzes that test that idea.

Check out YourMorals.org and PhilosophyExperiments.com.

Also, Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is a great read on this topic.

u/ihaventsaidenough · 1 pointr/exjw

I can't recommend reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt enough.

u/wentwhere · 1 pointr/IAmA

I'm sure that Dr Aslan will have a more complete answer for you, but you may be interested in Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Based on your questions, I think you would enjoy the in-depth psychological approach that the book takes toward the problem of antagonistic relationships arising from misunderstandings.

u/Taome · 1 pointr/politics

I am old enough to remember the 1950s and the Red Scare mentality so dominant at that time. Anyone else remember, for example, the hysterical warnings that commies want to control every detail of our lives right down to the time we have to set our alarm clocks? I remember. I think that Bernie Sanders would have been totally buried under a massive red-baiting campaign by the Republicans if he had been the Democratic nominee.

Anyway, those struggling to understand this election might want to read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

u/N1ck1McSpears · 1 pointr/politics

You have to read (or at least look up) this book https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777 If you haven't used the audible free trial I recommend the audio book. It's read by the author

There's also this interview with the author. FANTASTIC http://billmoyers.com/segment/jonathan-haidt-explains-our-contentious-culture/

I recommend it all over Reddit every chance I get. It explains everything you're talking about here, but from a scientific standpoint. It's also really extremely enlightening. I just know you'll love it.

u/mistral7 · 1 pointr/dataisbeautiful

A carefully devised perspective: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

It's not a short sound bite. Rather, Haidt presents reasoned insights.

u/Religious_Redditor · 1 pointr/Ask_Politics

General

  • The Righteous Mind - OP, if you only choose one book, it's gotta be this one. Trust me.
  • The Fractured Republic - Written by a committed conservative, but very fair. Critical of his own side and empathetic of the positive traits on the left. Also one of the best writers in political history/theory imo.

    Conservative - I'm keenly interested in the intellectual history of American Conservatism and could make this this list could go on forever. I'll keep it to three, but if you want more suggestions feel free to ask.

  • 10 Conservative Principles - Not a book, but essential to understanding conservatism
  • Conservatism in America Since 1930 - A reader that guides you along a chronological and ideological path of conservatism in America.
  • Hillbilly Elegy - Less academic, but very well written and explains the support of Trump from the rural white working class perfectly

    Liberal - You may get a better liberal reading list from another user, but I'll give it a shot.

  • On Liberty - Modern political dialog from the left still echos Mill's classic defense of cultural liberty. A must read for all Americans.
  • American Progressivism: A Reader - As you can tell, I'm a big fan of reading political giants in their own words.
  • The Affluent Society - The controversial classic that underpins progressive economic policy.
u/LargeSalad · 1 pointr/politics

Companies use this Visa as a workaround. They hire trained foreign workers from poorer countries for lower pay which in turn drives down everyone elses entry wages. There are probably other examples but I have first hand experience with this one. It's not all about Xenophobia man. Also, no one said every single person voting that way is smart or informed. Ignorance does not make you automatically xenophobic.

If you want to talk about tribalism watch this and then read the book.

u/The_Dazed_Kuala · 1 pointr/AskSocialScience

[The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion] (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777)

u/coke_and_coffee · 1 pointr/povertyfinance

> The side you’re choosing blames individual actors for products of systemic abuse and exploitation.

First of all, I have no "side". Quit presuming to tell me which side I've chosen.

Second, "systemic" problems are often an emergent phenomenon, resulting from the collective actions of many individuals. By recognizing this and spurring individuals to take actions to remedy their situation, we can all improve our lot in life. This idea is the entire history of the USA, a country which has produced the greatest quality of life for the largest number of people in the history of the world.

>You can choose that, or you can choose a just path. You cannot simply dart back and forth between those sides.

I can choose whatever the fuck I want.

>There is only one that is ethically consistent and fair.

This is not true. You are so biased it isn't even funny. It's actually scary how deluded you are in thinking that only one side is ethical. You simply have different ethical priorities.

I suggest you do some reading on the psychology of politics before you keep trying to play this ridiculous morality game. Here is a good start: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/nychuman · 1 pointr/politics

Horrible mindset. Pasting in my comment from another thread:

Fair enough, but I have to address how misleading one of your statements are.

> Plus only the fringe right wingers are saying there’s going to be a civil war if/when trump is impeached, dont let the far right fear monger you into allowing a fascist to stay in office.

This is a very skewed view of it. Yes, extremist right wingers are antagonizing the idea of it, for sure (especially at this exact point in contemporary society). But there are intelligent people across the political and economic spectrum (remember, political beliefs are not one dimensional, see political compass 2 axis political scale) that believe and understand the gravity of not only the rhetoric on all extreme axes of ideology, but have taken into account real evidence such as racially motivated police shootings, federal government law enforcement standoffs with cults and farmers, skirmishes between ANTIFA and far right neo-fascist groups, as well as evidence of deep cultural divides between urban America and rural America (such that blame is distributed holistically across the populace), and so on.

I am not being fear mongered by any extremist group or set of ideals, but simply am observing the frankly disturbing yet realistic information in front of me. There are large swaths of valid arguments to made (especially in the psycho-political and statistical spheres) that we must take responsibility as individuals and groups to not let the fabric of modern society split in two or three as it has for millennia (including both world wars and basically every human conflict ever to be fought).

This is of course, not even to mention the ramifications of such an event. The power vacuum that would envelope following the demise of the US anchored system as we know it is exactly what adversarial groups across the world are looking for. Russia and China would have a hayday carving up society for themselves, not to mention nations like North Korea, Iran, Turkey, as well as more minor terrorist, religious, and private organizations.

This is why they're trying to divide us, be above it. Not just another who is unaware and succumbs to it, playing their game and blaming The Other Side™️. With that all being said, yes at this moment in history (frankly since the 80s) the Republican party has been leading us to this point, but not alone, we've just been there, not doing anything about it. Tons of cognitive biases come into effect here at the local level: bystander effect, tribalism, unconscious bias, duning Kruger effect, cognitive dissonance, etc.

Disclaimer: this is not me endorsing one side or the other, frankly I hope the Democrats are valiantly successful and change and fix the country forever and for the better. I've voted with them since I've been legal, but maybe one day that'll change too. Think for yourself and don't succumb to the us vs them, rationals across the world are begging you.

I highly recommend the following sources and revisting your mindset:

u/joethebob · 1 pointr/NeutralPolitics

There's an interesting book that attempts to describe this type of effect: The Righteous Mind
There are a few areas I thought he could have been more concise but they do help frame the context of his theory.

u/Zhuurst · 1 pointr/atheism

How about these:

u/littlenag · 1 pointr/LibertarianDebates

A book you might find interesting, and that I think answers your question on a somewhat technical level, is The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. See the sections on group selection.

u/elbowbrunch · 1 pointr/MarchAgainstTrump

No, you got here because you forgot about common-ground. You're also both brainwashed by your media and forgot to be individuals not swayed by the next news cycle. Someone pitted you against each other and you are both too blind with hate to see it. read this book, just read it.

u/DarthRainbows · 1 pointr/psychology

Well its a book. On Amazon or elsewhere. Here.

u/Trotskyist · 1 pointr/LifeProTips

I mean, literally all of us are driven more by emotion than reason. It's part of being human. The best we can do is try to be aware of it and develop habits to catch ourselves when it happens.

I highly recommend this book on the subject if anyone's interested.

u/YoungModern · 1 pointr/exmormon

The first thing you need to do is to integrate your shadow.

Learn how to avoid falling into inferior roles.

You also have to understand what motivates people. If you read the book above and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion you will be able to understand people.

And yeah, you should listen to that podcast episode on "true" worldviews. You'll learn a lot and he's easy to follow.

u/bunnylover726 · 1 pointr/politics

You should read work by the psychologist Jonathon Haidt. He wrote a book back after the 2004 election looking at how the etiology of morality affects people's political leanings. His PhD dissertation was on where morals come from and he's also given a TED talk and written a few articles here and there.

u/scarpoochi · 1 pointr/The_Donald

Great post and great book. I just finished reading Haidt for an ethics and moral class. He also talks about a 6th moral pillar: 'liberty/oppression' and a conservative advantage in using these 6 moral foundations. I recommend the book to everyone in this sub.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/JakeMakesSteaks · 1 pointr/books

This might be up your alley. I thought it was fascinating.

u/DonkeyOatie · 1 pointr/changemyview

I read the article; thank you for providing it.

There is a huge gap in our assumptions (a la Haidt) and I don't think it would be fruitful to continue. I appreciate your good faith interaction.

u/Necoras · 1 pointr/Christianity

I recommend reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it and just got to the portion on religion.

Haidt, the author, tells about a study that another researcher (I didn't catch the name) did on communes in the US in the 20th century. He researched both secular (largely socialist) and religious communes. He found that in the religious communes the likelihood of them still being around a decade or two after their founding was directly proportional to the amount of arbitrary rules imposed on the members. That is, when members were required to dress in a certain fashion, cut ties with their old family, obey imposed sexual norms, etc. then the religious communes were more likely to stay together than when they didn't have those rules imposed. This was not the case at all for the secular communes.

The shared ritual (singing, meditation, chanting, etc.) associated with religion literally turned off, or at least severely dampened, the self interested parts of the brains of the individuals. The members of those communes were more likely to consider themselves part of a whole than as self serving individuals. They did not question the arbitrary nature of the imposed rules. It allowed the group to solve the free rider problem. That is, people were just as willing to not question working in the fields (or whatever) for 10 hours a day as they were wearing head coverings (or whatever). Contrast that with the secular communes where people would (quite understandably) look at being told to wear X thing or give all their food to the community pot and say "screw this, I'm going home."

Now, that sounds horrifying from our western individualist moral standpoint. We often claim value autonomy and liberty above all else. But that's not always true. Consider the arguments we're having in the US about healthcare. Those on the Right are frequently complaining about forcing men to pay for maternity care. Or complaining about covering abortion. Or whatever the complaint of the day is. They don't want to contribute to group retirement plans, or public schools. Every man for himself! The brains of our citizens are acting as individuals, not as part of a cohesive whole. Many of us do not see others in our nation as contributing parts of our nation, but as free riders, sucking resources away from them as individuals via our tax dollars.

I'm not saying that these attitudes are due to the decrease in religiosity in the US. Far from it; many of those making these arguments are the most religious people in the US. Rather, I suspect that their increased religiosity is having the exact same effect you'd see in communes; they're pulling into a smaller more insulated group that is interested in themselves (Republicans, good, moral Christians) rather than identifying primarily as Americans. It also helps explain why the more crazy X politician acts the more his constituents stick with him.

Note, this happens on both sides of course. Those on the Left use new-agey hand wavy pseudo-religious bonding mechanisms with no grounding in science as well. There's always some new fad, be it anti-gmo, yoga, green tea, safe spaces, etc, etc, which is used to self identify liberals as a cohesive group. It's not as strong as the pull on the right because people don't meet every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening to discuss and sing about racism, but it's still there. And it turns off parts of their brains too. Go read any leftwing blog to see that.

My point in all of this is that religion, if it truly provides for group bonding among non-kin individuals, as Haidt argues in his book, is very useful to a culture. If it provides a way for groups to pool their resources, then that could have a huge impact in times of hardship or famine.

u/FantasticMikey · 1 pointr/Liberal

I highly recommend the book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" - it's about this very thing. About how we usually make up our judgements based on feeling, then justify our judgements with reasoning. When we go to talk to someone else about it, we're using reasoning, but they're still on feeling.

u/lesslucid · 1 pointr/AskALiberal

My answer to this is a bit complicated, but the short version is: it's important to try to keep an ear open for the the best arguments made by reasonable conservatives, but one shouldn't expect to hear any of those arguments being made by the mainstream of American conservatism, who have essentially expelled reasonableness from their ranks.
~
For a longer version, I'd say, watch CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry", read David Roberts on NYT conservatism, and read Jon Haidt's "Righteous Mind", maybe also Yglesias on "The Hack Gap".
~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/15/17113176/new-york-times-opinion-page-conservatism
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777
~
I'd explain more but that's probably a whole essay of stuff. But yes, you shouldn't be at all surprised that your efforts to engage in good faith with the best arguments your "local republicans" have to offer end in frustration.

u/Not_Pictured · 1 pointr/PoliticalDiscussion

I've been reading The Righteous Mind and find it incredibly enlightening.

I come from a conservative background and am now a right anarchist (anacho-capitalist) and it helps explain my own moral journey in a way that fits global trends and humanity in general.

I really think liberals stand to gain the most from learning about the differences you talk about.

Good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmz10uQsTYE

u/hackersmage · 1 pointr/Republican

It sounds like you would be very interested in this book.

u/travisdy · 1 pointr/ffxiv

Human nature isn't a matter of opinion--modern psychology and associated disciplines show humans to genuinely care about behaviors that show good will toward most strangers. The idea of humans as having a selfish core with a friendly exterior has been labeled "veneer theory" by the leading primatologist Frans de Waal and thoroughly debunked in that form. The idea that humans are generally unsociable and won't be nice to strangers if given zero motivation to do so has been shown to be incorrect by social psychology. The "Lord of the Flies" view of humans as unable to self-organize in uncertain times is also false as argued by cognitive psychologists. Humans are severely interested in being nice to other humans, according to the latest multicultural research in moral psychology.

I could give scientific articles instead of books, but these books are actually fun to read!

u/_Zer0_Cool_ · 1 pointr/Libertarian

Any theories for why this is the case?

I’m thinking it’s that people view us as double-agents looking to water down their beliefs while simultaneously siding with the enemy.

I call it the “Anakin” syndrome. E. G. If you’re not with me then your my enemy.

Because the Sith on both sides seem to only deal in absolutes. IMO It’s due to the climate of extremism and tribalism caused by the two-party system gone rampant.

Like... “How dare you have a moderate view? Can’t you see that [other political party] is Hitler!? They just want to murder puppies!”

Lol. Uh. No. They’re Americans with different moral values that believe the are doing what is right.


I’d like to take a moment to plug Jonathan Haidt’s work on Moral Psychology theory —

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/whitethunder9 · 1 pointr/exmormon

>You accused the left of not being patriotic

Wrong. I did not. Let me re-phrase: It is when left-of-center folks shun patriotism (especially where all can see and hear) that they lose all influence over the right-of-center. This does not imply that the entire left is not patriotic. I am left-of-center and consider myself patriotic. But it seems to have become cool in liberal circles to publicly hate on the US, and that's how we end up with someone like Donald Motherfucking Trump as president. Moderate conservatives were won over by such a dipshit because all he talked about was "Make America Great Again!" If you haven't read the book I recommended, you need to.

>Three examples that clearly don't bother you

Wrong. You are assuming. Please note that I said nothing about Russians whatsoever. Don't pin that shit on me.

I get the feeling that what you're thinking of patriotism and what I'm thinking of patriotism are not the same thing. Is colluding with Russians to win an election anti-patriotic? Of course it is. However, so is saying things like "my country is arrogant and the general populace is stupid". Totally an over-generalization and I guarantee you if any democratic candidate says anything of the sort, moderate conservatives will be turned off.

u/CaptainH0ok · 1 pointr/The_Donald

Did it ever occur to you that I didn't vote for Obama either? Seriously, why does it seem like 75 percent of trump supporters get their political education from click bait articles. All you tards have this "If they're not 100% with me, they're 100% against me". There is a fucking middle ground you anti-intellectual cock goblin. Ugh... That is all I have to say. I don't even care who the President is. Nothing is going to change. The only thing that will change is instead of Obamas SJWs all over the fucking web, it's you fucking trump-tards. Ugh...

Fuck it. Here is something that may help some of you not be condescending fuckwits and help restore a very divided country.
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

u/atticusw · 1 pointr/videos

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religions -- something I have on my reading list that talks specifically about this. I think we all need to read it.

u/BeeperProud · 0 pointsr/TraditionalCatholics

Take a look at The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haight. He proposes that we are all lead by our feelings and then justify them with logic. We actually make ourselves blind to evidence to the contrary:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307455777?selectObb=used

There’s probably no changing this guys mind - the book I’m recommending will help provide understanding to why he believes what he believes and will not budge despite evidence to the contrary. It taught me about myself as well.

u/k995 · 0 pointsr/belgium

> You've now handwaived my entire response, the question I posed is one neither one of us can answer, so I'm a little bit confused at how you came to a conclusion.

Because we were talking about de roover not about hedebouw. So either de rover made a comparison and then laughed with himself as everyone wrongly saw that as a joke, or he made a joke where people and himself laughed with.

​

> This might be a bit too forward of me, but if you ever have the time, I'd highly recommend this book. It doesn't take political stances, instead it showcases research on why political debates never end. I massively enjoyed reading it years ago, and gave me some introspection into why I took the positions I did back then, and my immobility of changing my point of view at times.

Recomending a book is never "too forward in my opnion.

​

And i'll check it out, thx.

u/Koolaid76 · 0 pointsr/datingoverthirty

I think Liberals and Conservatives alike could benefit from understanding a few things. One, personality usually dictates political leanings. So very likely many of the good things that you like about the man are some of the reasons he leans Conservative politically. Things like conscientiousness, work ethic, being protective of society at large and those he cares about can be part of a Conservative's mindset. You're a woman, so you're more likely to lean left/liberal from the get go. Women are higher in openness and empathy (in general).

I recommend reading this book, it's good science on how good people different in politics and religion: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521426339&sr=8-1&keywords=the+righteous+mind

But my personal take is as a society we've become so polarized that we won't just listen to each other without immediately thinking someone that disagrees with us is the enemy. I think if we could be more open minded, we'd find wonderful people that choose to vote differently but complement each other because we bring different qualities and perspectives that can balance each other out. The alternative is seeking a sycophantic partner that echoes our beliefs and doesn't challenge us.

u/lukeman3000 · 0 pointsr/videos

> Crazy to see how many people arent interested in watching a 42 minute video where someone disproves allegations on them, but would happy read and believe short twitter posts with cherrypicked evidence.

Yeah, this is one of the big points of the book I'm reading right now: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Here's a relevant quote from the book:

>“Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach because we ask “can I believe it” when we want to believe something, but “must I believe it” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always “yes” to the first question, and “no” to the second.”

I've still got a few chapters to go, but the overarching theme seems to be that we, as humans, operate primarily on implicit associations/preferences/biases, which we are mostly unaware of. We then use reasoning to justify our automatic reactions to various stimuli.

Did you catch that? The book suggests that, in general, our reasoning is not responsible for our positions on various subjects, such as moral beliefs. Our reasoning is a post-hoc justification for the subconscious and automatic reactions that we have to those things. Chew on that for awhile.

Bonus: Extreme partisanship may, literally, be addictive (you get a dopamine hit when a member of the opposing party is found to be a hypocrite, for example).

u/Lowbacca1977 · 0 pointsr/politics

Just finished reading a book on this, http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

In a nutshell, one of the things discussed is that when you look overall, there's 6 qualities people use when defining morality. Care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

When you look at a very narrow subset, like, say, progressives, you find that they only consider 3 of those important (and even then, primarily care). So much so that they don't comprehend that there could be any other values beyond that, and when experiments have been run, they simply don't know how to answer as if they're conservative. While moderates and conservatives can evaluate questions the way a liberal would pretty well.

Also does a really good job of looking at the biological motivations for this stuff.

u/imstartingtogetangry · -1 pointsr/europe

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a nice book precisely on this subject, The Righteous Mind. It's a pretty good read, you should give it a try. My answer is going to be based on what I got from reading it.

> why? Consider happiness and lack of pain of people as the moral compass.

We don't just choose our moral compass, we're born with it. It's a biological tool for social life which evolved through millions of years, and it's not just about pain and happiness: ask a million people whether there is something wrong with incest between a couple of adult, consenting, simblings who use perfect birth controll and are never discovered; 90%+ is gonna tell you it's wrong, even if it doesn't cause pain and does cause happiness, even if they don't know why they find it wrong. See this for a better approximation of our moral compass.

> Now tell me which choice would be wrong following this simple rule...

At the individual level, it would cause anomie. That's just too simple a rule, and the human mind needs to be constrained by a social enviroment; too much liberty is unhealty. Then people start thinking they're cats...

At the social level, it would create a society of individualists who only ever follow the rules if they're afraid of being punished, without internalizing them; they would definitely not make self-sacrifices for the common good, since they'd have no concept of a common good (the common doesn't feel pain or happiness); and since they'd expect the same from others, they wouldn't trust each other very much. Expect mass tax evasion (sounds familiar?), little charity, low level of social capital, a lot of social conflict. Such a society would be very fragile and weak, and in the long run it would lose out against stronger societies.

u/adamchavez · -2 pointsr/latterdaysaints

Edit: downvotes, eh? I'm not sure how to take that! :) I didn't expect it from this community. The gist of what I was trying to say is said better by Pres. Hinckley in a different talk.

>"Women who make a house a home make a far greater contribution to society than those who command large armies or stand at the head of impressive corporations."
-Gordon B. Hinckley


--------------------------
My original comment:

The talk is beautiful; though I think you're confusing what he's saying with the modern dogma of "equality" that has become so popular.

The modern equality movement argues for equal roles that assumes that individuals are the most important players in society; this line of thinking typically leads to calls to get more women into traditionally male roles. While I personally will encourage my daughters to pursue their goals, whatever they may be, I'm hesitant to argue for equality in the way it's currently understood: equality of roles in one's career.

The reality is that the family unit is much more important, for society as a whole, as well as for the individuals who are influenced and raised by said families.

Often, having a strong family unit means having (at least) one person responsible for full-time teaching/training/loving of the little people in the home. My personal opinion is that it can be a man or a woman (though typically women are more willing and more able to fulfill this vital role).

American individualism can make this all seem very cloudy; I was recently reminded of this when I read this book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, which I highly recommend.

Read the book if you haven't; I'm not sure I can do it justice. The basic idea is that there are three moral categories: the divinity ethic, the autonomy ethic, and the family ethic.

For many secular Americans, the only kind of morality that is "allowed" is the ethic of autonomy, which asks "is it fair? Does it harm any individual?"

But there is a much richer moral fabric, that includes divinity (ie allowing some things to be sacred) and family (ie putting the needs of the family/tribe before individual needs).

Also see a TLDR slideshare on the book edit: removed the Colbert video because it doesn't touch on the ideas from the book that were relevant.

u/TuCraiN · -3 pointsr/politics

What are you guys even fighting anyways? Are you trying to say that every Liberal is smarter than every Conservative? Are you trying to say that Liberals never participate in shit throwing? Are you trying to say that calling huge swaths of america racist misogynists HELPED your political cause? Or are you just mad because someone disagreed with you and posted a study that says you don't understand the motives of the other side as well as they understand yours?

Here read this book and tell me this author has a conservative agenda and that his studies are just plain false and extremely biased.

u/dante662 · -5 pointsr/boston

I haven't voted GOP or Democrat in the last few races, either.

But if you really want to know why Libertarians tend to lean right in elections, read "The Righteous Mind":

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

Libertarians tend to value solely individual liberty over all other considerations. Democrats tend to value Care/Social/Fairness, but "fairness" to a Democrat is that everyone gets equally in the share of the wealth, while Libertarians (and ostensibly republicans) believe "fairness" is defined as "everyone gets what they work for themselves, and no one else (individual, group, or government) can take it by force, morally".

This one association, even though plenty of Libertarian concepts are left-leaning (pro-choice, ending drug prohibition, eliminating the power of police to oppress minorities, ending immigration laws, ending incarceration of non-violent "criminals") is the primary one for most Libertarians and hence, they vote republican.

Because Libertarian candidates have no shot at being elected for office. Some of us vote for them anyway, in hope to break the two-party binary system, but most look at it pragmatically and want to "minimize the damage", from their point of view.

u/meetinnovatorsadrian · -5 pointsr/ancientrome

I disagree completely. This poster got it right:

>Won’t people be saying that about today’s writers in a few centuries as well. Everything that’s written is colored through the current events and while we may be able to see the flaws in older works doesn’t that just mean we’re now free to draw our own conclusions from it. Idk what I’m trying to say I haven’t even read the book or heard of it before I just wanted to pretend to be smart.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/bobq4y/how_historically_relevant_is_edward_gibbons_book/enefsri/

You may want to spend some time reading Haidt, to learn more about why so much ivory tower academic research is off base
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=haidt&qid=1557807843&s=gateway&sr=8-2

u/TroyStackhouse · -12 pointsr/news

Here’s why this is simply a terrible, terrible idea... crickets

Actually, if you want more insight into why this might just feel wrong to you, I highly recommend you check out this book by Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Edit: If you’re going to downvote, please at least comment to explain your disagreement.