Morality check

Perhaps you saw Steven Pinker’s long treatise on morality in Sunday’s NY Times magazine. We read a little about the evolution of morality when we read "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal in ’06, although I think his book "Good Natured" is better in that respect. Anyway, I wanted to single out Pinker's citation of Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology University of Virginia, because Haidt makes two really important points for this political season.

First is that emotion trumps reason. Coming from the world of advertising and marketing, that is no surprise to me, although I continually find people who insist that their decisions are entirely rational.

Second, he touches on what divides liberals and conservatives. Research I have been involved in has shown that liberals tend to identify a problem in society and say that “we” have to do something about it. Conservatives see the same problem and say “they” ought to stop doing whatever it is that causes the problem – speeding, having children, taking drugs, whatever. Haidt gets more sophisticated. He identifies five primary kinds of moral sense: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. They continually appear in cross-cultural surveys, including our own. Pinker quotes Haidt thus:

The ranking and placement of moral spheres divides liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

The lesson is that if you’re trying to convince a liberal of something, argue for fairness; if you’re talking to a conservative, try group loyalty. Haidt gets way more sophisticated than this, of course. Here’s an interview with him: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200508/?read=interview_haidt