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

Not sure why you got downvoted... this has certainly been established.

It depends on what types of things you're interested in!

Over time, you'll come to know certain people who research in different areas and you can go to their personal webpages and access their Curriculum Vitae. Through that, you can find all the work they've done and many times they link to PDF copies of their papers.

But psychology is a very broad field. Here are some suggestions I can come up with:

For dealings with moral political psychology (the psychology of how people on the right and people on the left feel about moral decisions - includes religions and other aspects to our deeply-rooted conceptions of 'self'), see Jonathan Haidt - He just wrote a new book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

For dealings with the extent and limits of human rationality, I'd suggest Daniel Kahneman. He also just wrote a new book called Thinking Fast and Slow.

Stuffisnice suggested William James. James' Principles of Psychology is remarkable and very fun to read. It's quite dated both in science and in language, but his writing is impeccable.


In fact, James didn't just do psychology. He did philosophy as well. His later philosophy was at odds with the picture provided by most mainstream psychology that takes the brain as the source of our mental experience. These philosophical aspects have recently been brought into the empirical realm in the branch of Ecological psychology. This is my personal preference for psychology reading as I feel it is much more willing to ask harder questions than traditional psychology; it is willing to do away with assumptions and premises that are generally taken for granted.

This ecological framework deals more with perception and the role of the animal's action in perception. Instead of the traditional way of looking at perception (cells react to stimuli in the environment, feed this encoded stimuli into the brain, the brain processes things and makes sense of them, recreating a picture of the world through its activity, and finally sending out directions to the body to move), the ecological perspective focuses more on how the animal perceives the world directly and does not require internal processing to make sense of the world. It's much cleaner and much simpler. The brain is still crucial for the lived experience, but it is not the whole story.

For readings in ecological psychology, I would recommend Ed Reed's Encountering the World and Eleanor Gibson's An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development.

After you get your bearings, then you can get into some really deep stuff that tries to synthesize biology, psychology, and the essence of human/animal experience (phenomenology). For that, Evan Thompson is my go to guy. His work is heavily philosophical and is sometimes overly dense, but you may find it interesting.

PM me if you have any questions!

Your observations are bang on, the extreme conservative values they hold are self defeating in the face of today's progressive societies. I'll get back to this.

The how: they're intentionally manipulated by people with an agenda who seek power. Either political power or physical dominance by force. They feel safe in their group because of the hive-switch. Jonathan Haidt goes into this pretty heavily in his book The Righteous Mind.

As for helping, you have to talk with them. I know it's easier said than done. I myself get nervous and intimidated when I come across someone with that mentality. They're scary. But they're also people. They sleep, snore, eat, laugh. They had a first kiss and experienced deaths in their families. See, I'm being empathetic. It's what allows me to understand other's viewpoints and put things into perspective. It's also what they lack. But that doesn't mean it can't be learned.

So the societies thing: imagine for a minute that the alt-right magically gets their demands: all "immigrants" leave North America and head back to their mother land. Also, no outsourcing of labor. This is the part when they rub their fingers in delight right? I mean, look at all the land with natural resources they're left with! Look at the potential. Well, let's just say the economy will collapse. It may be obvious but: major companies will have lost their talent, also their customer base. The labor force will have to be massively redistributed, new skills learned (which is already a big challenge for fixed-mindset people, whom from my observation are predisposed to being alt-right) to get essential services back in working order, Trade with other countries will suffer (for obvious reasons) so the nation will have to be self reliant. In the meantime progress WILL CONTINUE in other countries and will outpace this regressive, uncooperative and undiplomatic nation.

Seriously just writing this feels ridiculous. Okay, let's back track. "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change. And they sure as hell better be okay with being second class citizens. This here is not a meritocracy."

And there's that detail about the First Nations. Yeah the First Nations. When they demand all immigrants vacate, they don't include themselves. Is it really a matter of sovereignty or who came here first? Because... never mind. For arguments sake, let's say it's instead a matter of contribution to the making of modern society. Nation building if you will. Europeans came to this land on the premise of commerce. The Canadian fur trade. But these Europeans had associates in this business. Where the natives not contributors to the fur trade? Did they not help these newcomers with food, warmth, information? By the way this is completely ignoring their already existing society and way of life which, had someone asked them at the time, they might have said something along the lines of "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change." Probably.

I'll leave you with a fantastic book that will hopefully illuminate this topic better than I ever could: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics Check out Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks for a glimpse on what he covers in the book. The real bombshell I took away from his book is that: conservatism isn't exclusive to any one nation and it exhibits itself similarly across the globe. The real tragedy is that conservative groups hate each other when they belong to different nations, despite how much they have in common as far as the values they hold dear.

That sort of toxicity has permeated pretty much all discourse in the US. Everything about politics, race, sex, sexuality and equality. Much of it comes from alienation, much from lack of exposure to other viewpoints. The end result is that people tend to use inflammatory language to denigrate opponents. I could write a long essay about this sort of issue, and folks have written whole books on the subject.

A lot of the issue is lack of empathy for "the other side". If they aren't human, then it doesn't matter how they get treated/killed. This is one of the first things done in warfare - dehumanize the enemy. You can see it when the media has such intense coverage about beheadings in Syria or the riots in Ferguson - the intent of the media is to make the audience feel that those people are rabid animals who have to be put down. No coverage of how they got there, why the folks do what they do, nothing about their families - just horrible coverage to inflame the audience to support overwhelming and crushing violence against them.

> actually addressing the issues and engaging in good-faith discussions

To begin with, not everyone agrees that X is a problem, let alone that it should be "fixed". Or even that it is a bad thing. You can see that in the political debates over global warming.

Some books on having intelligent conversations (in no particular order) include:
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Helps identify BS in conversation/debates.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Explains how different people come to different political philosophies based on their values.
How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable. The author has written a number of books with "gentle art of verbal self defense" in the title. Most are about how to identify verbal attacks and to side-step them.
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. Gives lots of examples of bad rhetoric.
Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren. How to have a discussion with a fundamentalist without losing your mind. In German, I think I should do a translation of the book.

The formal subject of making arguments to convince others used to be called rhetoric. And it has been taught since the days of Plato and Aristotle.

I've got a book recommendation that covers your question in detail:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

The short answer (at least this evolutionary psychologist who has data to back it up) is that liberals are more concerned about harm, and conservatives are more concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Liberals being more concerned about harm explains why they're more opposed to guns. Conservatives being more concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity explains why they're more religious.

I don't really fully agree with everything in the book, but it's a decent place to start to understand the differences of values between the two.

Thanks for the encouragement. I did self-post here a while back on the differences between liberals and conservatives, and received some interesting responses, but the post as a whole was down-voted.

Since then Jonathon Haidt's book on the subject has been published, so I may post again, comparing and contrasting my position against his.

I don't think "knuckleheads" is the right word when our natural need to divide ourselves into fiercely competitive non-family groups is something that makes us uniquely human and successful at accomplishing grand things. Source: this book.

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt writes that when trying to come to an idea, we first decide how we feel about an issue based solely on intuition, then spend the rest of the time trying to rationalize it. This article is just that. It's saying "There are some things I want to use from the OT and some that I don't; I'm going to come up with a way of categorizing the OT's statements such that the ones I like neatly fall into separate categories from the ones I dislike." This isn't necessarily a deliberate act, but rather occurs at the subconscious level, but the result is "How can I defend the concept that homosexuality is a sin and still eat shellfish? Oh, here's how."

> The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all

For the book being reviewed: http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

I'm gonna post the most interesting two paragraphs of this essay, which basically blame Kennedy and his technocrats for ruining the whole political belief in liberalism after his expirament failed so miserably: data on the Vietnam war and new ways to better kill people.

That oversimplifies it, but Kennedy did try it. (My source here is an article from the Roosevelt Institute:

The economic problems of the 1960s, Kennedy said, are “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.” (Kennedy said this in 1962)

I'm gonna post the most interesting two paragraphs of this essay, which basically blame Kennedy and his technocrats for ruining the whole political belief in liberalism after his experiment failed so miserably:

​

Liberalism was discredited in part because of the Kennedy men’s faith in experts and their conviction that the choices were technical, not political. In the most narrow reading of the 1962 speech, JFK was embracing the view, held briefly by the American followers of John Maynard Keynes, though not Keynes himself, that “the practical management of a modern economy” involved “fine-tuning” fiscal and monetary policy, which would keep it on a steady path of growth. Keynesian fine-tuning failed dramatically, especially in the 1970s, leaving liberals essentially without economic tools and vulnerable to the alternative of supply-side economics. Excess faith in expertise is also held responsible for the Vietnam War (“The Best and the Brightest” were technocrats who could ask every question except whether the basic idea made sense) and failures of the community-based anti-poverty programs of the Johnson era. Above all, as critics of liberalism both sympathetic and hostile have argued ever since the late 1960s (most recently, Jonathan Haidt), the ideology of expertise-not-ideology put liberals far out of touch with the real stuff of life – morality, ethnicity, family, fear, tribal instincts. And to some extent it’s true – a classic example is the idea of overcoming residential segregation through more aggressive desegregation of schools, that is, busing – which surely created more conflict and racial antagonism than it resolved, and not solely because of racism.

But 50 years is a long, long time (check this video clip of Kennedy’s speech if you want a sense of how far away that era seems), and liberals have been apologizing for and backing off of their faith in dispassionate expertise for most of it while the contempt for expertise developed by the populist right has continued to build. When populist politicians like Sarah Palin denounce “elites,” we act mystified that she doesn’t seem to mean the very rich. But the idea that the real elites are technocratic experts empowered by government is now very old – so old that it’s not true. One of the first things conservatives have done consistently when they gain power is to cut the legs out from under any kind of independent source of evaluation – eliminating the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995, ending any independent analysis of the distributional effects of tax cuts in the Bush administration, challenging scientific consensus on climate change, and most recently, attempting to eliminate funding for the American Community Survey and the National Science Foundation’s social science research program.

Here's the full essay. It's not long.

To add onto this, something you might find interesting is the work of scholar Jonathan Haidt.

In essence, Haidt argues that human morality is rooted in evolutionary biology. Haidt defines Six moral foundations that are universally understood by humans. These foundations, such as who deserves care or harm, what defines fairness or cheating, and the right to liberty or need for oppression, are essentially biological roots for what we define as "rights." In essence, these are "natural rights."

As you point out, social construction is important and can determine the rules for these rights within society. However, saying that rights are entirely socially constructed is not necessarily true. As Haidt's research shows, several notions of human rights are innate and each human is born with an implicit understanding of them.

Some people (most people) will believe whatever makes them feel comfortable no matter what evidence they are presented with.

Here is a good book on the subject

Interesting.

He mentions Jonathan Haight in the talk. I highly recommend his book The Righteous Mind. It goes into great detail about how and why people believe and defend their beliefs as they do. It is a fantastic book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307377903?pc_redir=1397219270&robot_redir=1

> morality isn’t real


Morality is very real in the sense that it is a defining part of how we structure our society and decide how to interact with others. For a review of the moral psychology research and a fantastic summary of the implications of morality on our social interactions and institutional configurations, check out the book The Righteous Mind.

More to the point, if this is the stance that you choose to take, then expect to never have this conversation end. You’re having a different discussion than the people with whom I assume you disagree.

tl;dr Great post, OP! Everyone, no matter what "side" you might or might not be on, check out Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations, either in his book The Righteous Mind, or via his websites or TED talks.

Not going to read all the comments; just skimmed over a selection. My thoughts? First, I really like what OP posted. I think his assessments of each side are relatively accurate, and I agree that (not only with this issue, but with any issue, whether it's political or not, whether it's a "moral issue" or not) it's always a good idea to understand what someone who disagrees with you believes, to understand how they view the situation, and to understand why they view it that way.

The primary hurdle, though, is that people generally do not arrive at positions on political issues (especially if they're seen as "moral issues") by a nice, sound, rational, logical process of starting with data and axioms and reasoning their way to a nice, sound conclusion. This fact is something that has driven me nuts for most of my 50 years. Fortunately, last year I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Read it. Seriuosly. Everyone on this subreddit, everyone who wants to discuss political issues, must read it. (Or, at the very least, watch Haidt's TED talks.) But the gist of his argument, as relevant to this post/this issue, goes like this:

• There is a set of "moral foundations" that we humans developed along the way, presumably via evolution and the societies we created as early humans. (Although there's nothing wrong with believing that we instead received those moral foundations from God or someone/thing similar.)
  
• These moral foundations don't work at the rational level; they work at the subconscious level, at the emotional level, at the "gut" level.
  
• Typically, we think we're using reason and logic and data to come to our political or other opinions. However, what we're really doing is deciding on the position based on our emotional/subconscious/"gut" set of moral foundations, and then afterwards using reason and logic (and careful selection of which data to include and which to ignore) to explain, ex post facto, why we came to that decision. (Haidt suggests that our emotional/subconscious/"gut" reasoning is like an elephant, and our reason is like one who is riding on the elephant, and pretending to guide and direct the elephant. In fact, the elephant goes where it damn well pleases, and so the rider is instead left to explain why the elephant turned left here or turned right there; the rider isn't in control of the elephant, the rider is essentially the elephant's PR representative.)
  
• There are 6 moral foundations. People who self-identify as "conservative" tend to rely on all six roughly equally: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. People who self-identify as "liberal", however, tend to rely only on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations.
  
• And just to confuse things, self-identified liberals and conservatives often see and use the Fairness/cheating moral foundation differently. For example, a liberal might say "It's not fair to make it difficult for wannabe immigrants from Latin America to enter the US legally, and it's not fair to persecute and prosecute them once they're here," while a conservative might say "It's not fair for illegal immigrants to sneak in to the US when so many others follow the law and do it legally."
  
  Anyhow. Not just on this issue, but on any issue, examining it from the point of view of the moral foundations is a very good way to understand those who disagree with you. If you want to learn more, go to either or both of Haidt's websites moralfoundations.org -- which talks about moral foundations theory -- and yourmorals.org -- which has a number of tests you can take to understand your own moral foundations.

I suggest this book. Your commend about being "offended" above is key to the answer. Conservatives tend to value loyalty much more highly than liberals, which means that comments that may be true in the abstract become offensive in the concrete.

Anyway...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

If you want to know about tribalism and why we act that way, I suggest starting with Terror Management Theory, which is well explained in this award winning documentary(link goes to free viewing for Americans on Hulu, also streams commercial free on netflix for subscribers).

Then you might want to see some other social psychology findings, like you will find explained in Haidt's The Righteous Mind or Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain. It turns out we are not by any stretch of the imagination the rational beings the enlightenment thought, we are biased to a point that on identity related issues, more intelligence and facts actually leads to being more wrong rather than less. Part of the problem is we mistake our feeling of certainty for being actually certain, especially when it is related to ideas close to our moral and social identity, and therefore think we are justified in rejecting good evidence that goes against that we already thought. We are deeply biased, and that bias is not random, it has a group identity protecting motivation.

To round out your view, you're going to want to see some cognitive science of religion. If you're not familiar with some of the terms, this video explains them well.

We need shared rituals, beliefs and norms to create large-scale societies, whether they come from the state, from religion, or from some other cultural source. In rejecting religion, we have not rejected our humanity and all our foibles that lead us to motivated reasoning. We just apply them to different groups, and at best one less group.

Epistemic humility is what we all need, but we can't have that until we realize how deeply biased we all are, and in what direction. And that is the point of the article. Atheists as a group aren't super-rationionalists just by virtue of being atheists. We're all biased apes, with remarkably evolved but very biased brains.

Before you challenge your father, or anyone on this, read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion There are multiple ways of perceiving morality, probably hardwired into the primate mind, liberal western values emerges only from the most cerebral of these moral systems. I can't speak for the more basic ones nearly as well as the author, I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand conservatives better.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is a great book that makes pretty much your exact argument. Highly recommend it for people who want to better understand the origins of morality.

Sounds like you could use some enlightening reading

I've found The Righteous Mind is a good book to help understand where people on various sides of the political spectrum (conservative, liberal, and libertarian) are coming from and how their values differ from each other.

Please don't cheapen that word "consensus" with frivolous usage. The origins of religion is a highly contentious topic, and those who study it are absolutely not in full agreement with each other. You are trying to prop up your arguments with the authority of science while denigrating my intelligence. You don't convince people by arguing that way; you only satisfy your urge to crush an opponent.

Here's where we agree, and where you think we disagree:

1. Religion is a natural phenomenon.
   
2. Religion has been a part of human behaviour for tens of thousands of years.
   
   There. Half your post wasn't necessary, Mr./Ms. Read-More-Carefully.
   
   Where we disagree:
   You think religion... "exists because people believe the immaterial intentional entities (minds without bodies, gods.)" In a related concept, you indicate that we naturally ascribe agency to the natural world.
   
   Just so this is abundantly clear: I was arguing that gods are not required for religion. You misread Buddhism is but one example. "Most" Buddhists isn't "all" Buddhists, and "involves" is a far cry from "being the central element of the religion that defines its existence." Many totemic religions from tribal societies also lack gods. You end up having to redefine "gods" to "any supernatural agent" just to get this idea to work.
   
   But let's focus on the idea that it's natural for us to impose agency to things in the natural world, and this leading to the formation of religion. This also is not done in every religion. When it is done, it isn't relevant to every aspect of the religion in question. Even among Christianity, a great deal of worship is devoted to the saints, who were entirely human. Ditto with ancestor worship in Taoism.
   
   We have also seen the rise of new religions, and we know for a fact this idea of ascribing agency to the natural world was not involved in the creation of many of them: Scientology, or the various cults that are centred around extra terrestrials, or people from the future, or not eating (seriously!)
   
   Finally, it doesn't explain why we have the ability to feel transcendence; that feeling we get when our individuality melts away and we "give ourselves" to something greater. Where does that come from? How does that evolve?
   
   But for the sake of completeness, you would likely need to hear an alternative, so here is where I'm coming from. I ascribe to Emile Durkheim's theory of religion. He's a classic sociologist, and formally founded the field of sociology itself.
   
   Just to provide the brief gist:
   
   His definition of religion: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
   
   The faithful believe in a force that is outside of themselves, and greater than themselves that enters into them usually during moments of collective ritual, giving them the feeling of transcendence. All religions have this force. It is often called a "god," though other terms are used (mana, ch'i, etc.) This force is the "energy," if you will, of the society of the faithful. In other words, god and society... are one and the same. Society is exterior to the individual, and greater than him. If you denigrate this symbol of their society, you are denigrating the society itself, and they will react accordingly. The morals preached by the religion are the morals that the society unifies under. They hold rituals to reinforce this collective bond, and that is really its purpose. Some things are made sacred (objects, values, people), and the community collects around those things, which become a sort of emblem. Rationality will serve the purpose of the community's religion. And, as I initially stated in my first post, the religion of the day will change as the needs of the society changes. Sometimes the religion itself alters, and other times it is simply abandoned for another one.
   
   We see religious behaviour in cruder moments all the time. The feeling of transcendence occurs among soldiers that fight and die together. They often describe their individuality melting away and becoming "whole" with their brothers in arms. They create a small system of morals and beliefs that are specific just to them. And they even sometimes have rituals.
   
   The same religious behaviour can be seen in revolutionaries who rationalize their oppressors as the ultimate evil. Or in nationalistic patriotism (why does a flag make someone cry? Why does it matter what the founding fathers thought?). Or college fraternities with their initiations and pledges. Or the obsession with all things natural and organic, and neo druidism, and Gwenyth Paltrow getting people to stick odd things up their vaginas. Or Trump supports who see Donald Trump as their saviour from the evils that plague them.
   
   We have evolved the innate ability to unite under an emblem and operate as a cohesive whole. That is religion, and no other animal seems to have it. It's the evolutionary trick that made us the dominant species on earth. It's utter shit for finding the truth of things, but it massively serves the purpose of our survival.
   
   Now, if you want religion to just go away so we can have a purely secular society based on reason, then what you want to believe is that religion is just some kind of fluke originally made to explain the world (and it clearly does a poor job of that). I admire that cause, but I doubt it's viability, and I certainly doubt the premise that's justifying it. Or perhaps I'm just making assumptions about your point of view. A purely rational society is one that I think a lot of skeptics dream of, and you are in this subreddit.
   
   Further reading, if you're interested: Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious LIfe." Also, Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion."

Don't choose a side. If you say to yourself "I am an X" your brain will find itself completely compelled to irrationally defend X, wasting precious brain cycles that could be better spent on other things.

Read a book on moral psychology if you want to give up political tribalism. Here are some suggestions:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605

You may want to check out a recent book analyzing moral undercurrents and how it relates to classic left v right dynamics. The Righteous Mind

I'm not overly sold on the framing he takes on the analysis but it is interesting none the less.