'The Righteous Mind': Why Liberals and Conservatives Can't Get Along

well we're here to talk with dr. Jonathan hight from New York University about his book that came out last year the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion it's great to have you here John thank you great to be here at Wharton for joining us one that one of the big questions your book wrestles with is is why is it so hard for liberals and conservatives to understand each other why why well the very nature of morality that the big thing that it does that I think isn't sufficiently appreciated is that it binds us into groups that can do things in the world and the animal kingdom the only time you get cooperation is pretty much kinship you get pairs of individuals occasionally but elsewhere in the animal kingdom it's just family and human beings have this incredible capacity to come together in groups and do big things and when you look back the early history of cooperation you always find temples gods religion people circle around sacred objects that binds them together at the same time it blinds them they can't think for themselves they become partisan they become members of the group liberals and conservatives in America now each country has its own particular battles liberals and conservatives are bound around different sacred values sacred principles and they absolutely cannot understand each other they are forbidden from understanding each other lest they be kicked out of their tribe and you published a book last year has anything happened to change your mind let's see well since publish in the book not really I've the book has gotten a good reception right left center libertarian except on the far left some people have far left hate it and the New Atheists hate it but those are groups that I criticized in the book so that's not surprising I changed my mind a lot while writing the book and when I started writing the book I still consider myself to be a partisan liberal and I actually began the project I began shifting over from just studying morality across cultures to studying morality across political cultures as though they were different nations I started that after the 2004 carry loss to George W and I wanted to grab Kerry and the Democrats by the lapels and say don't you know how to make a moral argument why do you keep appealing to self-interest and my policy will do more for you can't you make a moral argument so I got into the political psychology business originally to help the Democrats and along the way in really trying to to get inside the head of people from different moralities I came to see that each side sees certain truths and insights and threats that they're right about so you've been on an ideological journey of your own and it is possible for people to change their minds yes all you have to do a study morality for 25 years and try to write a book in which you state the other side's case sympathetically it should be possible they ask the question about the possibility of changing your mind because you do embrace in the book a fairly strong version of the moral intuitionist theory of how people work through puzzles of this sort could you say a few words about that sure that's what moral intuition ISM is and and its implications for our capacity to change that's right so a dominant thread in the history of philosophy is rationalism the idea that we are or at least could be reasoning creatures and if we can cultivate our reason then we will rise above the fog of emotions see the truth we can talk to each other and we will find light and truth when my book is the sustained argument against that I side very much with David Hume the 18th century Scottish philosopher who said that reason is a dot only to be the slave of the passions and so what I believe the empirical evidence from psychology shows is that our reasoning tends to be post hoc or reasoning about moral issues tends to be something we do after we already know which way we want to go and we send our reasoning out like a press secretary the president sends the press secretary out to say justify this position he doesn't say go look at the notes about how we came to this position and explain that to the people he says justify this position using whatever arguments you think would be most persuasive and that's the way a reasoning is and this is why we are so good at giving each other reasons but then the other person doesn't change their mind and we think well they must not be sincere I mean this is a great argument why are you changing your mind the trick to changing people's minds is to first get them leaning your way first make them see a conclusion feel it think about think about Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech it is a kind of argument but it's an argument couched in metaphors and soaring rhetoric it opens your heart first and then the metaphors can get in and then you see the logic of it so I actually do believe quite a lot in the importance of reason for persuasion just it has to be reason that follows intuition not excludes it so if you were president of the United States right now what would you do to encourage more civil dialogue between liberals and conservatives that the current president the United States is not doing it the number one top priority for this country is political reform to get our political institutions working better everyone agrees that Congress has gotten much much more polarized since the 1980s there are a lot of reasons for that the people have gotten a little more polarized there's plenty that we could do as citizens but the real problem is the dynamics of one institution in particular the US Congress so there's a group called No Labels org which has a great set of solutions we all know that we need campaign finance reform we need electoral form these things are going to take ten or twenty years that we ever get them at all they have some simple fixes with the most important which is change the legislative calendar back the way it was before Newt Gingrich which is Washington is in session four five days a week and then it's off for one week a month when Newt Gingrich came in he told the incoming freshmen don't move to Washington prior to then they all lived in Washington they served on committees together on school boards or their wives and or spouses did they knew each other they named each other's kids they had personal relationships now think about it politicians what do they excel at they're warm incredibly socially skilled people that's how they got into this business they're able to make deals with each other that's that's their great skill and you take an institution that that has trouble as it is that has all these divided powers as it is and then you say how about let's separate the two sides they no longer know each other no and ships they don't ride on the same little buses under little train cars underneath the capital anymore there's a separate separate cars for each let's end all personal relationships and now have them work out difficult issues it can't be done so that's where we are so there are a lot of simple fixes to Congress that will go a long way towards basically getting it to work better and if Congress wasn't so polarized that would that would dampen down the messages out through all the polarized media that we all have to hate each other and that the other side is going to destroy the country so John at the end of chapter 4 of your book you write that no one has ever invented a net business ethics class that has demonstrably changed the behavior of the students after the classroom experience and now at NYU Stern you have begun teaching business ethics what why well yes they because they asked me to and I couldn't say no and because I made it sound kind of hopeless in the book and I stand by that that a single standalone course meeting twice a week for a semester can't put ethics into people's heads so that when they go out into the work world and they're faced with requirements or pressures to do something falsify something hide some information from a customer they're going to remember their ethics classes at all but this is wrong there's no evidence that that can happen the evidence in social psychology about the power of simple situational pressures is so overwhelming that I don't think an ethics class can really do that much what I'm hoping we can do at Stern is is make the class just a part of a two-year process in which we are socializing them into professionalism what does it mean to be a business professional when they first show up at ed Stern like students all over the country at every school there's a period of openness where everyone trying to figure out how should I be what school what's the right way to you know what's the way to be successful here we teach our ethics class in the middle of the second year it's way too late they already know how to be a stern student and so what we're trying to do is get a lot more the content into the very first week move the intensive class into other parts of the first year and then get some of the content in every single class we're there we'll discuss norms of professionalism but even more important than that because I think that we're so limited in our ability to behave ethically in the face of situational pressures I want to teach our students how to do ethical systems design how to take all the flaws and weirdnesses of human nature and work with them to design organizations startup companies where people are always concerned with reputation people are concerned about reputation even more than money in most cases how can we set things up so that people will in a sense guard the reputation by doing the right thing that's the most important single principle so did these liberal-conservative differences that are so pronounced in the political sphere manifests themselves in the domain of business ethics are there some aspects of ethics that are trans ideological and other aspects that that polarize people just less political issues ative yes the core issues of business ethics again I'm new at this but from what I'm picking up some of the core issues are things like fiduciary duty you have an obligation to people who are hiring you to do a job you to fulfill a contract to put their interest first I don't see any partisan difference there other issues like corporate social responsibility are clearly partisan issues one of the hottest topics in business ethics is how can we get companies to honor or maximize the triple bottom line not just a financial bottom line but also social benefit and ecological benefit obviously this is going to appeal to students on the left and not on the right let's say I don't know of issues that would appeal more to students on the right conservatives tend to focus more on personal responsibility liberals tend to focus more on victims and the poor but the core of the courses seems to be not ideological so the the Friedmann it-- libertarians for example tend to view any deviation from fiduciary responsibility of shareholders as a form of theft de facto theft that's that's a strong position that is that the you have you come across that position that yes you yes I I read I read the article where Friedman lays that out it's a very persuasive case and I think if we truly had efficient markets in which there were no externalities in which there was no despoiling of public goods in which there was perfect information and people weren't allowed to deceive and cheat then I think the Friedman argument would work and I believe Friedman was very aware of that and and wasn't saying oh just maximize shareholder value no matter what the situation if we had if we had such good markets where few companies couldn't be foisting costs onto unsuspecting victims then I think there would be a lot to be said for it but we don't have such a compass uh CH a such a system government regulation is necessary for to achieve much of that and that's what things are so polarized about what's the role of government is it you have a maximal view in which government has to straight restrain the corporations or you have a minimum view in which government is the problem and the more we can shrink it down the freer business will be to create value you don't see very many companies though overtly endorsing the Friedman I position virtually all companies I've come across seem to endorse some form of CSR corporate social responsibility as I've been your experience also I mean well predicting of TJ Rodgers and so forth but most people are in favor of motherhood and apple pie I mean they have to say something there's no cost to saying it I would want to know how much they put in the way of resources towards backing that up and I'd be surprised if it was uniformly the case that or overwhelming to the case that companies are sincerely committed to CSR okay so let's let's circle back to the press secretary metaphors that you used earlier when you were describing more on tuition ism are you able to distinguish what fraction of the embrace of corporate social responsibility is purely press-secretary posturing as opposed to genuine internalization of a moral priority I can't I don't know how to do that the main thought I've had so far in my one year in the business world in the Stern School of Business is that whatever you want to say about business it varies a lot by sector so a company like Nike or Starbucks or Google which greatly prizes its reputation with consumers and has a tremendous cachet because of that reputation those companies are really susceptible to boycotts public criticism they care about reputations and so I think they do especially when their feet are held at the fire they really do make a sincere commitment to corporate social responsibility companies that don't face consumers so just from reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma the big agribusiness companies you know Archer Daniels Midland and the other ones that people don't even know their names so I would be very surprised if they took corporate social responsibility seriously there's not much economic incentive for them to do it so again cycling back to the the press-secretary metaphor which is really an intriguing one you've got the president United States and you has you have his press secretary and the press secretary is there to explain and defend what the president does he's not a policy maker / side he's a secondary justification function let's do it that's quite explicit so but yet you're optimistic about attitude change within a moral intuitionist framework it would be as though the press secretary were telling the president what to do as opposed to the president telling the press secretary what to do so if you look at it just as an individual we are also flawed we are all such so bad at reasoning when our interests or moral values are at stake so we're not going to get better reasoning and change just by helping individuals to reason better but when you put us together into networks and systems and companies and juries and and legislative bodies that we can correct each other's flawed thinking basically the big problem is the confirmation bias we're also good at confirming what we want to believe but if there are other people out there to dis confirm it if we have no relationship with them we just hate them and disagree with them but if they're members of our company if they're friends if they're fellow scientist this is why it's so important of ideological diversity in the sciences because if everybody shares certain assumptions and there's nobody there to question them then yet you get bad reasoning so I'm a big fan of thinking about institutions ways that we've developed to put people together in ways that correct for or cancel out our flaws we see plenty of moral change over time it's not because of logic I think if you look at for example civil rights interracial marriage these were disgusting to many people in America 50 years ago but over time the attitudes change is not because of arguments it's because you get used to it there's a lot of research now on gay marriage why is gay marriage where attitudes about gay marriage changing so fast it's not because the arguments that were made back in the 80s suddenly people understood oh I see it's because people saw Will & Grace it's because in the 80s most gay people in the closet but since 5% of all people are gay and now they're mostly out of the closet suddenly everybody knows seven gay people and a lot have one in their family when you get used to something you it loses its shock value it loses disgust value and now you're just much more open so moral progress is possible and if you take an intuitionist view about how you got to get the intuitions right first you got to speak to the elephant as it were not the rider speak to the elephant first get get him go on the right direction then the rider will come along and that's what's happening on gay marriage you might might have a problem with mixing metaphors here we've got elephant and rider got president and press secretary and I'm fixated on President to press secretary at the moment but okay so the president might the press secretary might come back to the president and say I can't sell this anymore that's right the reputation will cost you mr. president are just too great they're going to have to change that would be one feedback mechanism that's right or exactly press secretary Mike wid yep that's how that happens that's right so it's not so when Hume said reason is the slave of the passions that's too strong a metaphor a slave doesn't talk back to its master that's why I like press secretary or lawyer a lawyer does his clients bidding but he can say excuse me sir I will do this if you insist but this is a losing case and you will look bad and it is my fiduciary duty to advise you so there are feedback mechanisms like that and again I think we're seeing that on you know on gay marriage and other issues people in certain social circles people would feel ridiculous arguing for things that they could easily argue for 10 years ago so what your book has been widely read and widely praised what's the best critique you've seen of your of your position well one critique is that I'm pretty critical of liberals and I'm not critical enough of conservatives and I think that's true when I wrote the book because I had been thinking so much about what liberals don't see that conservatives that's sorta what I specialized in so I really tried to help liberal and no and the only people I meet are liberals and the people that mostly read these books are liberals so I was kind of addressing liberals and I should have said some of the things where I think conservatives are wrong one of the main ones is that while liberals I think are too quick to try to take apart the law of karma liberals kind of want to stop bad behavior from leading to bad consequences and that's a bad thing to do Society decays when you don't have Swift punishment but conservatives act as though the law of karma is actually true that is people who are suffering now are suffering because of something they did in the past and that is sometimes true liberals have a complete ban on blaming the victim which means they can't figure out a lot of a lot of social facts but consumers I think a little too quick to blame victims and to not see how a disadvantage can accumulate and lead to a downward spiral so I do wish I'd been more even-handed in my criticism and praise of both sides I do praise both sides so the concept of deserving displace a pivotal role here in absolutely in producing ideological divergence and you're suggesting that conservatives believe too much in the concept of observing us and liberals not enough or deserving this are just words with the difference deserve deserving us going forward is is a great idea a lot of people realize this as I did when you become a parent you know of course I will never spank my child but you want to be loving and gentle and you discover that you get a bratty kid and what my wife and I found very quickly was when we used the 1 2 3 magic method which is when he's misbehaving you say that's 1 that's 2 that's three timeout automatic quick rapid punishment doesn't have to be severe rapid punishment for do you get behavior change and a lot of our liberal friends are trying to reason with the kids they don't want to impose power they don't want to punish they said is that a wise choice or an unwise choice so I think over and over again conservative stand up for equity that is if you do something bad you should be punished if you do something good you should be rewarded in fact I show some signs in the book and in my talks sign from the Tea Party stop punishing success stop rewarding failure that's about as direct a plea for the law of karma as you could have conservatives of sorry liberals in contrast we assign tax the wealthy fair and square how can they let us go hungry so we'll see if their people are hungry well then of course the rich should pay more taxes we need to be equal so liberals value equality and if you push for equality that often requires you to violate equity and we see that infirmity of action we see that in title nine which mandates almost equal outcomes in sports so that all of our schools are desperate to try to get women into sports and they're trying to push men out they don't have enough money to pay for the men so we don't have equal access to sports in a lot of our schools because title nine is an effort to get equality of outcomes conservatives are livid about that and liberals think well why isn't there quality of outcome it must still be sexism so you're able to weave together these conflicting strands of argument in a very sophisticated integrative ly complex way how but most people don't think that way right if you're a partisan you cannot think that way the press secretary tends not to say well on the one hand the Republicans are right about this but the Democrats are right about that if he does that he's fired so if you're partisan you cannot think in an integrative and that's what your research shows the further you are after the extremes the lower integrative complexity tends to go on most issues and you know most Americans are not that extreme most Americans will put themselves on one side or the other but they're not that extreme our political life is dominated by more extreme elements bolstered by the media which has a business model that also does not cater to integrative complexity so we're bathed in arguments from people who are not integrative Li complex I think it takes some doing some seeking some effort to find ideas on on the other side and when you do I mean that to me has been the great enlightenment I'm very familiar with liberal ideas I've been reading them my whole life when I started reading conservative ideas about social order about the value of tradition about how easy it is to lose social order they really struck me as a revelation and I same with libertarian ideas for example here's this is such a simple formulation I heard the other day libertarian philosopher David Schmitz said a free-market society is a giant game in which you win by making other people better off and that was such a simple and clear description of the way libertarians see the free market and how basically free markets really do encourage us all to create something that other people want and will pay money for and then we're all better off because of it so insofar as you believe the country would be better off we'd be better off both as individuals and as a society if more people could think in these more integrative ly complex ways what specific things can be done educationally and politically to induce that so you get people to socialize more with each other in Congress is one thing you've had other other suggestions could we I think as we conclude it would be useful to work through the most specific suggestions you have for how we can get out of this and share tricks and we've seen it again let's look at what can we do as individuals and in education there's a line from one Shakespeare play first kill all the lawyers that's not what I'm recommending its first kill all the math classes beyond algebra stop wasting so much of our students time learning math it's not useful it's not helpful teach them more civics and in those civics classes teach them the history of liberalism conservatism teach them ideological history make the get them prepared to treat these long idea among intellectual traditions with respect second teach them statistics cut the calculus I mean sure if students want to take it fine but everybody should learn statistics that actually helps you understand the data that's coming in from social sciences and other places so even in high school we can do a lot more to prepare students for citizenship not for 19th century notions of an exercised brain that can do math and Greek in our universities it would be nice if we could have more open honest debate and be a little less sensitive about people claiming hurt feelings I think our universities should be places of debate and discussion and our culture is so litigious and has fostered the idea that everybody has a right to not have their feelings hurt this is a bad thing this means we never get to talk with people who differ from us we run away from such discussions so it's a lot we could do to help our thinking but I don't think we we don't need to all become more integrative Lee complex to get better outcomes our political institutions could put together simple minded thinkers in ways that get integrated with complex outcomes as long as they don't demonize so that to me is the key I'm not out to change people's minds and move every bit of the center I'm out to make people stop demonizing the other side to say I disagree with you you know you and I disagree about the right way to help the poor or whatever the issue is with the environment but I see that you have ideas that draw on certain that your site is sentient certain threats that that my side doesn't see very well so I would urge viewers to go to asteroids club org website I started that helps people see that each side perceives asteroids coming towards the Earth that the other side just has its head in the sand it won't even acknowledge so I think there is a lot that we can do to stop demonizing and come to at least respect our intellectual differences thank you thank you so much John for joining us on the book is the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion it's been free talking with you and we wish you well thanks so much you

Channel: KnowledgeAtWharton

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Keywords: The Righteous Mind (Book), Jonathan Haidt, Philip Tetlock, Liberals, Conservatives, Politics, Religion, Conservatism (Political Ideology), political partisanship, Democrats, Republicans, Knowledge at Wharton, Wharton, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion, Liberalism (Political Ideology), Liberal Conservatism (Political Ideology)

Id: qN42ZLwNFBY

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2013