[inaudible conversations] time [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> next on booktv jonathan hayes presents his thoughts on the current political and social divisions that he contends separate the left and right. ..

i'll tell you about the history of sixth and i. the building opened in 1908, and it was home to a synagogue for 45 years, and then when they relocated, the building became home to turner memorial ame church. then after hey rely indicated the building was put up for sale and the highest bid was someone who wanted to buy and it turn it into a nightclub. thankfully that did not happen, and it was turned into a nondenominational, nonmembership, and nontraditional synagogue and a host for culture to host events like this one tonight.

we have great lineup of authors stopping here on their book tours this season. next weekend will be a new cookbook, a.j. jacobs is copping, madeline albright, and john irving among others. we're so happy to have jonathan haidt here tonight and i want to congratulate him on the release of "the righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion." it's always fitting to have an author speak about politics here given we're in d.c., and i say the same being an author speaking about religion given this is a synagogue. so i feel like we have hit the bull's eye in having you here. "the rich chows mind" it getting great reviews. you can see the book reviewed in the "new york times" this weekend. jonathan is a professor of psychology at uva and a visiting professor at the nyu school of

bins. often mentioned in david brooks "new york times" column and probably heard him on npr talking about his studies in moral psychology. jonathan is a popular speaker at the ted talk. and i saw a video with over a million views. his research focuses on morality, he hopes we can learn to be civil and open minded. he began his career studying negative moral emotions and then moved on to the understudy, positive moral emotions. this move got jonathan involved in positive psychology and to write his first back, finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. so i will invite him up here in a moment. there will be time for y & a, and for that we ask that you please come to the microphone in the center of the room because we are filming. and following the program we'll have book-signing in that

corner, so we ask you line up along the back wall. that is it from me. if you can please join me in welcoming jonathan haidt to sixth and i. [applause] >> thank you all for coming out. my book just came out last week, and the cover was designed by a graphic designer in new york, and i'm thrilled with it. the original version of it actually was supposed to be a literal cut, slit in the book. at the last minute, three weeks before press, the sales team said, we can't do that. it's going to rip on some people and amazon will stop selling it. so we had -- well, you have an optical illusion. it captures what it feels like to be an american. feels like something is torn and ripped and wrong and we have to fix it to put it back together. the book comes out in one week in the uk, and i think the uk

coveralls perfectly captures what it feels like to be an american. so, yeah, it could work just as well. and sometimes as i'm walking around with it, i don't want to be -- i'm glad it's in the uk and not here. anyway, i'm just going to give you a very brief overview of the book and then i'll draw out implications for policy and politicsment how many of you are involved in a fairly direct way in politics or anything about policy. please raise your hand. wow, about 40-30% of you. how many of you have vague interest in politics or policy. okay, well, it's go that you're interested in policy because we're about to face the largest policy challenge in our history. i don't know if you saw the news this afternoon. i've been tracking this story.

astronomers at arizona state university, who tracked the asteroids that cross the earth's orbit, and today at 4:00 the went public with one they have been tracking, an asteroid 85 miles across. much larger than the one that did in the dinosaurs and it's expected to hit the earth on april 24th, 2022. now, they estimate there's a 90% chance of impact and it will not destroy all life. they expect that we'll be able to have breeding populations of humans, a couple thousand people on every continent, underground, for a couple of years, because this is what it is going to look like. what they estimate the impact would look like. and then after a few years, humans will be able to come up above ground and this is what they estimate it will look like when people more than from their holes in the ground. now, there is one hope, the

scientists say if we embark on a crash course right now, don't delay, we can build a fleet of new heavy lift rockets using new technologies. we can create a new kind of space bomb, nuclear bombs that will blow up in space. if we create 200 of these rockets, launch the nuclear weapons in space and get them beyond the orbit of jupiter and blow them all up at the statement right next to the asteroid we can deflect it by a tenth of a death and it will miss the earth. but if we don't get started and we wait the year it will increase the cost and odds of success will drop. what i have just given you is a very easy public policy problem. it's new jersey -- huge in size. by the way, i made up the part about the asteroid. don't worry.

i gave this example to an audience, and i saw people on the cell phones, sell, sell, sell, or buy nuclear bomb stock. so this is an easy problem because basically it's a technical problem. if we know the odds and the costs we can work on it, and it's actually even easier than that because from a psychological perspective. it's a public policy problem that solves itself. if there really was going to be an asteroid hitting the worth, we would all pull together, all the nations would chip in lefting are right, center, everybody would be behind this and we'd get the problem solved. that would be a very easy public policy problem. now, i'm going to give you two harder problems because there really are two as steroid headed for the earth, and really metaphorically, not really, but two asteroids headed for the

earth and they don't unite us. they divide us. each side of the political spectrum sees one and recognizes the danger and the other side is blind to it. so, the first, you might have guessed, is global warming. i gave a talk at ted two weeks ago, and we retreated to a number of doom and gloom talks. jim henson, the nasa scientist who published a paper in 1981 predicting co2 was rising and that's what happened. he is the scientist who was -- his words were edited heavily by the bush administration, leading him to object and for him to become somebody who was sounding the alarm. he told us -- you have seen versions of this graph. this is the rise in co2 predicted based on different scenarios, the top line being if we do nothing and the bottom line is if we could stop the co2

right now at this level, then that's where things would be. but the expectation given that the earth's track record at doing something about this is not zero but close, so we're looking at near the top line. if that happens scientists are estimating a five meter rise in sea level. actually -- let me read this quote from hanson. he said, -- at the told us as co2 goes up, ice caps melt, and there's less white surface and more dark water to absorb more light so you get feedback loops. he said that the ipcc predict is one meter sea rise by the end of the century but he thinks five if you take into account the feedback loop. so if we get a five meter sea rise, this is an artist's contention of florida. basically all have parts where people live would be underwater and everybody would have to go on to the roller coaster at

disney world. now, let's see. so, what do you guys think? do you think we should embark on very costly sustained programs? to do something about this? to change our economy, our fuel sources? do you think it's worth investing trims -- trillions of dollars to address this? before i ask your opinion, let me first see, please raise your hand in this audience if you would say you're liberal or on the left. a strong majority. among those who just raised their hand do you think we should take very substantial and expensive steps to avert this from health please raise your hand. and just the liberals, if you don't think we should take expensive and difficult steps to do something. one, two. okay. so, it's almost perfect predictor on the left. raise your hand if you consider yourself to be conservative oren

the right. 15 -- okay. i know your answer. okay. so, just the conservatives, raise your hand if you think we should take very expensive and costly steps to avert this. raise your hand? one. two. and raise your hand -- three, four. and raise your hand if you think we should not. not embark on a drastic program? it's not perfectly predictable, we have a very strong party effect. you can predict people's opinions. liberty tearans, raise your hand. you know, libertarians are the least tribal people in the world. why are you sitting together? this is weird. >> we're all friends. >> all friends? i didn't know libber tearans -- no, never mind. libber tearans, raise your hand if you think we should take quick and costly steps to avert this. and raise your hand if you think we should not. okay. i knew your answer.

okay. >> i'm not a saying those who say we shouldn't do anything are deniers or wrong. i think my sense is most people acknowledge global warming is caused by -- i'm sorry most people acknowledge there's warming but there's debate in terms of what we should do about it. i don't want to tell anyone they're wrong. i want it to point out there's a very good chance something bad is going to happen and we are completely divided by politics what to do about it. here's another problem. so i got that from the ted conference, and three days later i went to a dinner party in washington. i'm in new york this year so i took the train down and i knew i was going to meet a man who is the editor of a wonderful journal called national affairs and contributingedded for for

national review, and i read this article called beyond the welfare state, and i will just read you the first paragraph of it. all over the developed world nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. the reason is partly institutional. the administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive. the reason is also partly cultural and moral. the attempts to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. but in practice, it is above all fiscal. the welfare state turns out to be unaffordable, dependent upon dupeus economics and also dupous and the demographic model of aby gone era. perhaps your unpersuaded by that one paragraph. perhaps you think we can simply raise taxes on the rich to make

the books balance, but you are wrong. i gave up any sort of fight against his thesis when i got page three and saw this graph. this graph shows the percentage of -- if you look at the national debt as a ratio, percentage of the total gdpo the nation goes back to the revolutionary war you see a rise. so it starts off high like 25-30% of the revolution, a lot of debt, and then they pay it off, and then the civil war, even bigger rise and then they pay it off. then world war i. about the same size as the civil war, and then they're beginning to pay it off. then the depression hits and then the big spike is world war ii. so world war ii created a monstrous rise in debt, up to 11 18% of. ... -- 118% of gdp but and then the retirement of the baby-boomers with a become guarantee of all healthcare cost at taxpayer

expense. dwarfs all wars. it is unsustainable and cannot be done. this is an artists of what the streets of american cities are going to look like in 2030. we will have adopted greek as our language. and from there, things get worse and worse, and this is an artist's conception of what american cities will look like in 2050. okay. now, -- let's see. so you might actually notice that the graph i showed is actually the same as the hanson graph. they're the same graph. not in terms of the x and y axis or anything like that but in their moral implications and what they portend, and doom, and up affordable costs and also similar in that the two graphs

point the finger tee side. the global warming graph says, and i will translate loosely: we have to act now and the longer we wait the more costly it's going to be. what wrongive you conservatives. if you won't help, get the hell out of the way. that's what the top graphs -- if graphs could speak, that's what it would say. the deficit graph on the other hand has a very different message like this: we've got to act now in and the longer we wait the more costly it's going be. what's welcome if you area liberals, entitlement bankruptcy denears. if you won't help, get the hell out of the way. a very different sort of message. both of these public policy problems are hard because they don't activate the psychological systems that lead to a solution. they do the opposite. they activate the psychological system that leads to tribal warfare so we're going to sit here and fight about them while our planet and our treasurery follow out those curves. that's at least what is destined

to happen if we can't change what is happening. so, i think both of these problems demonstrate the need for us all as americans to learn something about moral psychology, to understand the game that we're all playing -- and it is a game -- politics is a game. morality is a game. these are -- it's a game that -- well, i'll explain to you what i think i'm figuring out in terms of -- me and my colleagues and many others -- what we're learning about moral psychology i think can help us talk to each other and understand why the other side is so blind to what we see so clearly. so, on to the book. so the book is actually very simple to summarize because it's divided into three parts based on three principles of moral psychology in 1975, edward o. wilson, the evolutionary -- the antievolutionary expert. in 1965 he predicted that some

day there would be a new inthat sis in ethic, that ethics would be taken out of the hands of the philosophers and hand it over the scientists and social scientists who would have a crack at and it he predicted come up with a much better story. so, when i entered graduate school in 1987, -- i'm sorry. i should have had that up. the first one is intuitions come first. strategic reasoning is sing. when i get graduate school in 1987, moral philosophy and more psychology were very much on a play tonic rationalist footing. the assumption was morality is something we think and reason about and we need to understand people's reasoning and then we need to help them reason better. the met afor that plato gave us of the soul or the mind is that the soul is like a charioteer.

the charioteer is reason and if he is strong and firm and well-educated and trained in philosophy, he can control those two unruly horses, the passion, the noble passions and the base passions. and so that was the model we got from philosophy. and other dissenting voices but the dominant thought seems seeme worshiping reason and the one if we could just do more of, we could do well. when i was in graduate school i resonated much nor a very difficult philosophical tradition, the smaller strand, from david hume -- i'm sorry to show shows arrows for labeling. so david hume famously disagreed with this rationalist approach and said, reason is, and will need to be a slave to passion and never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. so hume rejected the emphasis on

the glories of reasoning. hume argued that reason is good at one thing, good at serving the passions. if you want to do something, dispatch reasoning and it will figure out the best way to do it. so i think -- let's update his metaphor. it's awful to speak of a slave but reason isn't a slave. more of a servant. a bit more dignified setting but a servant. takes its orders from the parks or intuitions more broadly. now, it's not just a servant like a butler. the best metaphor is it's a servant like a press secretary. so this is robert gibbs, president obama's former press secretary. his job is to explain things. his job is not to explain why president obama decided things,

his job is to put it out there in a way to explain it to people. you will never see a press convincey someone case doesn't what you say today contradict what you said yet and you'll never ever hear the press secretary say, you're right, should rethink this. i will tell the president. it cannot happen. that's just not the way the political system is set up. all right. so the first part of the book is' hume is right and an enormous amount of evidence on reasoning and it's not pretty. i'll summarize it with this passage, i'll read a page and a half from the book. this is a section called "reasoning and google can take you wherever you want to go." when my son max was three yours old i discovered he is allergic to must. when i would tell hem he must get dressed so we can go to school, and he loved to go to school, he would scowl and wine. the word must is a little verbal

handcuff that triggered in him the desire to squirm free. the word can is so invitetive. can you get dressed so we can go to school? to be certain that these two words were really night and day, i tried a little experiment after dipper one night. i said, max, you must eat ice cream now. and to which he said, but i don't want to four seconds later, i said, max, you can have ice cream now if you want. i want some, the difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning and also the way to explain many hoff the strange beliefs people believe, ufos and quake medicine. a simple formulation is when we want to believe something we ask ourselves, can i believe it? then we search for supporting evidence and if we find even a single piece of pseudo evidence we can stop looking because we

found evidence. we have a justification. if anybody asks we have something to say to back ourselves up. we have permission to believe in contrast, when we don't want to believe something, we ask yours, -- ourselves must i believe it? then we search for contrary evidence and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim we can dismiss it. you only need key to unlock the handcuff of must. psychologist now have file cabinets full of findings on motivated reasonings, showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach. when subjectses are told intelligence tested gave them a low score and they're given the choice of what to red while waiting for the next step of the study, they read studies criticizing iq tests. when they read about -- undergrad walts are given a stud and and told, is it a good study any flaws? who do you think finds flaws,

men or women? women. all women? or just women who drink a lot of coffee? so, if you're threatened by the result you say, must i believe it? oh, there's a flaw, small sample size, maybe -- you find something. you can always find something. the difference between a mind asking must i believe is versus can i believe it is so profound it affects visual perception. subjects who thought they would good something good if the computer flashed a number rather than a letter would likely see this as ambiguous but if they're reinforced or paid everytime the spotted a number they would call that out as 13 because that's what way thanked to see. if people can literally see what they want to see, any wonder that scientific studies fail to speaker weighed -- fail to persuade the general public? it's always possible to question the methods, or question the honesty or ideology of the

researcher. and now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost every conclusion 24 hours a day. whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or if a fetus can feel pain, just google your belief. science is a smorgasbord and google where take you where you want to go. so, the first point is, you can't persuade with reason and evidence if people are leaning intuitively the other way. if they really don't care at all, have no preexisting attitude, you can reason with them. but if they are leaning one way, and you give them reasons, they're going to ask, must believe it or can i believe it? so you should change intuitions first for those who read my previous book, the happiness

hype moth this. i talk about the mind being divided in parts, the rider and the elephant, and you have to talk to the elephant first to give reasons for the rider to grab on to. the second is our reasoning is not very good at finding the truth as individual. good thinking -- we are blind to our biases. good thinking comes from well constituted group processes and institutions. this is why science works so. we scientists are not -- they have high iq and not they're more rational or better reasoners. it's that the institution of science was invented in europe in the 17th century and developed in the 18th snuff and it's a system in which everybody is trying to prove themselves right despite the -- we all try to prove ourselves right but we have peer review and argue against each other, and there are other people to ask, must i believe it, when you're saying, can i believe it? so if an institution is well set up, good thinking and rationality can emerge from

flawed, imperfect, irrational, biased individuals. it's crucial for thinking about our courts, our college, -- congress, and the courts were aware. they set up institutions to challenge each could now we have to talk, are they working? which ones are working and which ones are not performing the function of creating good reasoning. that's the first prim of moral psychology. here's the second. there's more to moriality than harm and fairness. since this is a mostly liberal audience, i think i can summarize the most important principle of your morality by saying, it has something to do with care or compassion or not hurting people or helping people or protecting people. george lakoff said, behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value, empathy, and to the extent there's a religious leader that is widely loved on the left it's the dalai lama because he has basically a

liberal morality, an ethical act is one which does not harm another. now, this is a very important moral value, very important virtue, but in graduate school i began by studying the world's moral diversity. i read a lot about other cultures and it's hard to find place on earth whose morality is focused on care and compassion. what i set out to do is identify the best candidate for being the innate foundations of human morality. what do societies tear about, talk about, and punish each other for and then you look at evolutionary psychologist, and i set out to identify foundations and we identified the six

candidates we think are the best candidates for being the infoundation. these six can do an awful lot of work. the first is care. we are mammals, and being a mammal means your brand and body is specialized for taking care of young humans for a long, long time. so, we're sensitive to signses of suffering especially from creatures that look childlike. this virtue, these virtues are overwhelming evidence at -- these are pictures at "occupy" wall street. even though the dominant theme is fairness, there were so many signs about come. passion, emthe, free hugs, empathy center, compassion center and it's huge you don't see anything like that's at the tea party. the second foundation is fairness and cheating. and here originally we thought that fairness included equality but now we're finding equality

seems to go along with compassion. the clearest meaning or fairness from an evolutionary perspective is proforcallity. fairness is an important psychology that allows to us engage in cooperative endeavors and monitor each other for cheating. anybody works in an office, anybody who works with other people, knows there are some people who don't pull their weight. they're slackers. they are the free riders and we are good at detecting them and banding together against them. this i think is the central moral concern of the tea party. at "occupy wall street," you don't see much of that. you see things like, this state, the 1% own 43%. now, that doesn't really connect with fairness directly. it's just a statement and you have to -- the statement is inequality. and on the left that will be seen as a sufficient moral statement. it is clearly wrong for there to be such a discrepancy but people on the right say, you have to

tell me more. neerm who have 43%, did they work harder, produce something more val snowball you can't just say there's a difference and expect that to convince me to change the economic system. so, on the right, you find a tea party rally you find fairness all over the place but it's this kind of fairness. stop punishing success by taxing productivity. stop rewarding failure by bailing out losers and cheaters and lays lazy people, by supporting people's bad decision. and that's the rant that launched the tea party with the famous rant, how many of you want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't afford it. so everybody cares for fairness but the right really focuses on fairness' proportionality. in the uk, let's cut benefits for those who refuse work. sounds perfectly republican. so, the third foundation is liberty and oppression, all

americans care about liberty but they care in different ways. the breakthrough for me was fining this wonderful book by christopher bomb. he studded hunter-gatherers groups, and chimpanzees, and the question is what is human nature egalitarian? and he says, we're not. i if you look at hunter gathererrer groups they don't like equality. what's true is they hate being dominated. they hate alpha males and when one guy tries to rise up and say i'm the better hunter, listen to me, the other guys band together and take them down. first with gossip and if he persists, then with violence. so we're not innately egalitarian but we're innately opposed to be bullied, and once you understand that response, the band together to take down the bully, now you can understand that how many of you live in virginia? raise your hand. okay. so i'm uva. don't we have the weirdest flag in the word? it's bizarre.

until you understand. how many flags in the world have murder on them? virginia celebrates murder but it's not murder. it's tie ran nas and that's what the conspirators shouted when the murdered julyous cease sir, what john wilkes boothe shouted lincoln, and what tell the mcvey had on his t-shirt when he was escaping the oklahoma city bombings so the urge to use violent means if necessary to take down a bully underlies our feelings about liberty. liberty is related to the urge to ultimately kill opressers. very point for the history of our country. so, now you can understand this image from "occupy wall street." most of you, i assume, support "occupy wall street" but did it ever give you pause, images like this, if the 99% can get together they-crush the #% like a bug. not a very good sentiment but

it's exactly chris was talking about. the 1% of bullies, they're dominating and we need to band together to take them down. of course, the tea party is all about this reflex. don't tread on me. big government equals less freedom. so everybody cares about liberty but ended up being very important in different ways on the left and the right. so here's the situation. i have a web site. you can take all kinds of surveys and here's the data we have. our main stuff is the moral foundation's questionnaire, and it's got a whole bunch of questions on each of the foundations, and here's an item for care, comp packs for -- come. passion for those who are suffering is the motor virtues -- so the x axis is liberals on the left, conservatives on the right. and the x axis is how much you endorsed those items, so compassion is the most crucial

virtue. it is above the average for everybody but liberals endorse it much more strongly than conservative. here's another item. employees who work the hardest should be paid the most. what do you think? do you think pay should be proportional to work or should everybody be paid the same regardless how hard they work? on the left -- even liberals agree mildly, ambivalently, and conservatives agree with strongly. it's obvious to them. and here an item been economic liberty. people who are successful in business have a right tone -- to enjoy their wealth that's see fit. if it suggests sexual liberty, then the left does because gay marriage and homosexuality are crucial issues for the left but both sites care about liberty but different sorts of issues. so opposite you understand this, just from these three lines, you can understand a hell of a lot about the new culture or the one

that erupted in 2009. so you have liberals who prioritize care, and conservatives who prioritize fairness and liberty. everybody values all three but when push comes to shove and they contradict, which one do you go with? and if you see that, now you can understand this amazing moment from that famous tea party debate where wolf litter poses the question about a young man who decides not to bay health insurance and he has an accident is in a coma, going to be very expensive should we just let him die? who should pay, and ron paul says that's what freedom is all about. the idea you have to take care of everybody, blitzer says are you saying society should just let him die? paul didn't say yes. to his credit he thought -- give a knew -- nooned answer. -- nuancedmeter, but the point is that during the poise, some

in she audience yelled out yay! so they love killing people? no. once you injured what i showed you on the graph you can understand the story is the ant and the grass hopper. you the fable. the ants are toiling away all summer long, dragging grains into their nest and the grass hopper is fiddling and say, come join me, and the ant says, no, no got to save up for winter and then the winter comes and the grass hopper is freezing and starving and he knocks on the ant's door and he says, care? and he ants say, no. fairness and liberty. so, this is one of the central points i think liberals need to understand about the tea party. not that they hate government. they like social security. they like other programs. they hate government that they see as subverting fairness and

liberty. in other words, the welfare state. that's what they hate. okay. so that's in the new culture war. that ran from 2009 until january 15th or so of this year when the obama mandate on catholic hospitals went into effect, and then we had to replay the old culture war. remember that one? the religious right verse secular left. the three remaining foundations are really about binding groups together and keeping them strong and coherent. one is loyalty. there are a number of animals that can hunt in packs but they're usually small groups, usually ten. only humans can create very large groups of nonkin. we work together beautifully with people that we're not related to and often we have never met before. those who work in corporations, you, work great with people you have never met because you're part of a team, part of a tribe. virtues that go with this. we love group verse group conflict and competition so much we invented sports, costs a lot

of money, creates injuries, doesn't accomplish anything, but it's fun because our minds love that sort of stuff. in fact we love that sort of stuff so much with created fan dom, and people do stupid things that don't do anything and makes them look foolish but it's fun because we hoff that thing. and what we find over and over at our web site is that the right really values this and does it well. the left is quite ambivalent about loyalty. so i couldn't believe this. this ad appeared in a lot of journals in the month or two before the mid-term elections. obama has been in about a year and a third, facing devastating losses in congress, and a bunch of leading liberal intellectuals, noam chomsky, crimes are crimes no matter who does them. obama is still killing children in iraq. he is just as bad as bush. okay, liberals are great at this thing. tearing down their own because especially if obama is still hurting people well, if morality is care and obama is killing

children here, just as bad as bush. right? contrast that to the republican 11th commandment. that shall not speak ill of any republican. with an asterisk, until after the election. and in general we find that conservatives val all the virtues of group loyalty much more. which job would you rather have, democrat whip or republican whip? here's the fifth foundation. two displays of respect from two closely related species, chimpanzees and humans. on the left, authority is a bad thing, question it. if there is an authority, you should question it. and often subvert it. so, here's -- up to -- tongue in cheek, says insubordination. on the left, it's a virtue. a good thing. whereas on the right, this is a church in charlottesville, the

sign out front said god is in charge so shut up. i assure you've it was not a unitarian church. >> so we get that left-right difference on authority. lastly, the idea that the world isn't just material. there are certain things that must be treated as holy, sacred, and set apart. so the al -- al gory of charles it, the virgin mary locked up in rock with a stream of pure rather, the symbolism is over the top but speaks to the ideal of female chastity, and this is from madonna's book celebrating all kinds of sex, if it feels good, do it. here's a photograph i took in charlottesville, a bumper sticker that says you body may be a temple but mine is an

amusement park. i took this roof, no sin is sacred. if have no idea what it meant but you would never seive that as tea party rally. here's the data i showed you before. everybody values all three but there's a difference. with these other things foundations the story is very different. it looks like this. people on the right, people say they're very conservative. they value all foundations. what that shows is basically -- there's small differences but essentially people on the right say all six of them matter. whereas people on the left say, well, three of them matter. three don't. and of the three that matter, care matters most. okay. so, the metaphoreye in the book, which i think you might find helpful, especially if your advisors to democratic party, the takehome message of the evening. this image is not literally

true. many of you learned in school there are receptors, taste bud. sweet is in the front and sour, salty, bitter -- they're scattered around the mouth but pretends the older math is true. imagine these six foundations are like six different kinds of taste buds and now imagine the tongue, the moral tongue, their moral mind, is prepared to taste care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. but what do the democrats serve in they say, well, you know, sweetness is the most pleasurable taste, so, let's offer the voters sugar. let's talk constantly about care and compassion in helping victims and try to get them to vote for us. and 20% define themselves -- 20% of americans identify themselves as liberal and 40% roughly ascofer advertise. the conservatives connect with the moral foundation. liberals have trouble understand

them or respecting them but republicans, since reagan, are doing a better job of connecting with american moral sense. so, implications for politics and policy. american has great moral diversity. learn about and it try to respect it. if you're on the left, be particularly careful about policies that violate loyalty. if you are constantly challenging authority, stating what the students can sue their teachers, saying that -- focusing on the rights of the accused rather than the police and the prosecutors -- there's reason to do this. i'm not saying it's wrong to say. i'm saying if you're constantly subverting the forces of order you've get more -- choose and -- chaos and the right is sensitive to that and this is a mistake the left often peeks. the third -- i just want to point out, there's some many efforts on the left to do

framing by using conservative words and concepts and they just show the left has a tin ear. here's the sign during the iraq war. support our troops, bring them home now. violence is bad. i support them. i want too bring them home. that shows you, you have no clue, no clue what it means to be fighting a war. you have no clue what it means to support your team when it's playing an away game. come home, we don't want you do break your ankle on the basketball court. okay. so, the third principle of the book, morality binds and blinds. okay. so, it's often said the world residents greatest wonder is the grand canyon or all these wonderful amazing things on the planet. as a social scientist i think this is trivial. the grand canyon is trivially easy, just wind and water and a lot of time, and you get the grand canyon. not all that interesting to me. what's leally -- really

interesting to me is there were people surviving in it and climates all around the world and people found a way to cooperate with each other even beyond family. so you get between about 4,000 years -- well, 5 or 6,000 years ago and 2,000 years ago you get things like bably babylon. gigantic cities coming up. these are amazing. how did cities health why did civilization happen? why are with sitting here today? if you look at the history of life on earth there's no way we should be cooperating peacefully but we are. how did that happen? well, we humans have this amazing trick never before done by any animal on our planet, which is we have this ability to -- i'm sorry. the other great builders on the planet are the bees bees and the

termites. they can build big things but they're all sisters. they have kinship as their mechanism. our answers we developed morality. developed the ability to live in moral communities where we have norms and we can punish each other but a lot of it is positive. and one great ability is the ability to come together around sacred objects. if we circle around them, we trust each other and we can accommodate. so here's an animation showing what happened when people first came together around camp fires, we find the first evidence of campfires. you get campfires. that means is they had a division of labor among men and women. that means the men were hunting, working together, with nonkin, and the women were tending the fire and cooking and tending the children. and there was a division of labor and there was trust, and you had a large group that wasn't just a nuclear family. 100 gatherers, not all family.

so when we got this bability to -- ability to work together, that was a giant leap forward, and a big part of that, i believe -- there are many others, new athiests who don't think this but i'm part of a group that believes religion is an adaptation and i believe it is for cooperation. we build a issuele around -- astill, around a sacred object. a rock in maybe car a box with a rock inside of it. warfare would be impossible if we were just self-interested crete toward but we circle around sacred objects, flags, standards. sacredness means no tradeoffs. it means you defendant the thing that you circled around. so this whys the flag and the bible are so important on the right but the left has its sacred objects, too. how many martin luther king jokes have you heard? probably zero and if i told you

one now you would hate me because that would be sacrilege. so i will just read one paragraph from near the end of my book. morality binds and blind. this is not just something that happens to people on the other side. we all get sucked into tribal moral communities, circle around sacred values and then share arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. we think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talk can about their sacred objects. moriality binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as if the state of the world depended on each side winning the battle. it bottom lines us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say. so, just to close up this section on the talk, implications of policy, follow

the sacredness. around it you will find a ring of ignorance. if you know what group holds sacred, you know what they cannot think straight about and you will then find them denying the age of europe. if you take the bible as a truth, you're committed to thinking badly about geology. and if you sack railtime earth, i predict with almost perfect certainly at the left will make a lot of mistakes, things like climate gate because people insist it's an issue that's going to bind the left together. so follow the sacredness. and lastly, politics is more like religion than shopping. you have to understand the sacred elements of politics. so if politics is like religion, there is anything we can do to get us all into the same congregation? >> well, yes, i'm hoping we find that asteroid.

thank you. [applause] >> we have time for questions. please come up to the mic if you want to ask anything. this is being recorded for book tv on cnn -- oops, let me say that again to you debt it on camera and edit that on. this isn'ting recorded for book tv on c-span. [laughter] i've done this sort of thing before. all right. question. >> so given that all 20 libertarians in d.c. right now are thankfully in this room, i was wondering how libertarians fit into the big graph. >> i'm glad you asked. we have the world's best data on libertarian personality tholes bay fort you to say left, right,

they don't give you the option of saying libertarian and we have 200,000 people of which we have 14,000 liberty tearans, and here's the answer. on original surveys where we asked about the five foundations other than liberty we found they didn't care about morality. they scored low on everything and when we add the liberty item, it's through the roof. so one foundation is moriality. you value liberty -- here's the cool finding. so there's this really important personality variable calls systemizing verse elm thighsing. systemize is the ability to this rationally. libertarians are highest on that. and then there's the ability to emfa thighs, feel what other people are feeling, liberty

tearans are the lowest. so libber tearans emerge as the most rational, cold-hearted, low-emotion people, and the really cool peoplees when i tell them about this, they love it. they say, yeah, that's cool. >> a lot of other comments. so we take that as a compliment. so, i didn't have time to say this my general view -- when i started i was a liberal but i'm now a centrist. the left and right and libertarians have a piece of the puzzle and i like to reading thises from all three perspectivetives. thank you. >> in your book you use provocative statements and comments and stories which really, the reader, myself in this case, -- was that a

deliberate effort? >> i'm an intuitionist. i don't believe we persuade each other just by giving reasons and evidence. so something i learned from teaching psych 101, if you want to be a good teacher, don't just lay out the facts. you have to we've -- weave it into a story and make it memorable and have people feel -- for example, the same -- when if started talking about the asteroid, raise your hand if even for two seconds you thought i was serious raise your hand. i guarantee you ten years from now that's what you're going to remember about me and this talk, is that. so emotions really help make things memorable. so i put a lot of care in the book, into -- basically everything i know to manipulate the readers for the purpose of getting the idea across. the second question? >> 2012. i saw -- >> i don't know, i have no idea.

i've seen the name. i don't know anything about that case. >> i was just going to say, i've seen people on both the left and right who were attuned to this on video, who supported it, and i was just wonder -- >> i haven't soon the video so i can't comment. >> okay. >> i was wondering, if you're talking about six foundational moral principles, how do you explain some people have certain affiliations with some and not with the other, and just based on your own mentioning of your transformation, how do you explain, then, when people move from having one group of these moral beliefs -- >> those are the million dollar questions in chapter 1 -- 12 of the book i try answer those questions. and the way to think about politics and personality is to take what's called a life span developmental perspectivetive. we know that whether you're a liberal or consecutivety is

inheritable. so identical twins, one raced liberal, one in a conservative family, they will look the same in high school but when they go off to conditional they will converge so whether you're on the left or right -- environment matters more overall but it's close. so, what has been found is that people jess whose genes build brains that are high and open to experience, they love to try tex maybe thai four, restaurants while hanging upside down. they like new-under andance verse those who like to eat at applebee's. that will predict who they're going to vote for. so there are psychological differences that irinherittable. but that is your predisposition, not your destiny. so people will start off on a certain path and typically people with a liberal disposition with gravitate to

artists and professors and sort office people who live in certain ways that and that makes them more liberal but they might have an experience that leads them to a different group of people and we are socializedby our peers. so in miscase, i am dispositionally a liberal and it really was -- well, is a say in the book, it was spending anytime india and trying to understand a very traditional segregated culture that dish tried to emfa thighs dish hated the religious right in 1993 when i was in india but i was trying to understand a different society and that experience allowed me to be empath thick, and when i came back to america, i could at least understand the religious right. didn't think they were crazy and evil. so we can have individual life-threatening that can change it. i don't individual live trajectories we can change with. you can move away from what you might say is your

predisposition. >> start by saying this may be somewhat of an unfair question because it's lisping to -- listening to your presentation, i may be asking about your next book. >> what should we do about it. >> yes. the framework -- and maybe you just in your last answer provided a hint, which may be emergent therapy. be put into a situation where you're not around people in a like group that reinforce these ideas but the concern i have is that the -- based on the last slide or two, so closely related politics to religion, talked about the 'sacred, where the irrational beliefs are, and it's hard to have a discussion and convince someone of your point of view if their beliefs are irrational or if yours are. so, when -- i think of it as talking in religious terms, when you meet someone who is very

religious and they say to you, no matter what you say to me, you're not going to shape my faith in jesus, for example. >> that's right. >> it seems to me at that point the conversation is over because someone has said, i don't care what you say. i'm not really listening. do we have any chance to have a dialogue? >> absolutely. so, the way you putt it is very good. if you think about arguments as rider to rider, the odds of agreement are very poor. ...

see you can no longer have a liberal republican teaming with the liberal democrat. so when the way it had to have been. there's cultural changes for the 10 to 11 lifestyle enclaves now. we don't need to ever meet anyone on the other side. but there are some things we can reverse. the key thing to keep in mind here is that we don't need to agree. but we need to do escape to the point where he can interact with each other and disagree civilly and respectfully that happens during direct means when you have human relationships. so i've human relationships people in india. that enabled me to say, cannot believe there's something good about having sex segregation.

i can understand what they're doing because how did the relationship start? the relationship to come first. for those of you who want hope and something to do commuters to websites we could do no labels.org. there's 12 for getting congress to work. my favorite is change the calendar so they have to stay here in washington three weeks at a time and then they go off for one week at a time. they knew their families here. that doesn't happen anymore, so there's no relationships and of course they hate each other. they used to drink together. they say about the problem is the kind of bourbon. [laughter] they used to drink together. and they don't do that anymore. so we can do a lot to improve congress. secondly, site is called living room conversations.org. go there. that is a group that has scripts and all sorts of things to get a person to invite their friends for many of the conversation with with each other. especially if your old neighbors

and things in common and that's really important duties together. if you have a relationship, then you can listen to each other. he won't change your mind necessarily purchase that demonizing and that's what i hope we can do. >> i very much enjoyed your talk tonight. my question is just a little more thinking a little bit of talking about group selection and some of the dynamics of group selection under the chin coming around to an adaptive trait to make groups work together. i just wondered what your what your thoughts are in the services for something where it's genetic and a group. is that a norm? is that something to environment passed down. in particular, what if any will do you think adam smith scenario ascended the pace in nine. is it totally at odds in a separate row or is there a way to think about this in group cooperation or in terms of

sympathy? >> that could take about an hour to answer. where are we on time? where should we start? very good. group selection is a very complicated and can i won't get into it here except to say the general story here is that in the social science there's been a lot of effort unless 40, 50 years to simplify things ended up the methods of the physical sciences instrument for sprint posts, individuals maximize themselves and build up and show how individuals might collaborate. you can get pretty far attack, but i don't think all the way. and i both explain why you need to see evolutionists working on multiple levels. she commuters genes, individuals are individuals and groups with groups. but the idea that groups compete with groups and we are defending the winning troops has been a heresy in scientific circles the 1960s. very few evolution theorists will talk about that.

very good reasons for saying that doesn't happen. there's so much new evidence in new ways of thinking of history and i try to cover that in the book and explained what i think it is clear where triable purplish creatures. it is not mere selfish. we are often quite selfish and a lot of people say were not selfish. roster mistake. really what we are selfish and group-ish. a really good at cooperating. bernard sands, but we are good team players. as for sympathy, i'll say darwin, adam smith, a lot of people point to cynthia's foundation and then liberal state the foundations don't differ we can build everything on sympathy. you can't get the loyalty to send that the. so sympathy is one foundation. i think there are five others. >> i have a question that has puzzled me since grad school about 40 years ago and i wonder if your work might shed any light on it.

the question is why strip policies so immune to reason? there's essentially no correlation between how dangerous the drug is and how it is treated by the law. that has been confirmed by many commissions and studies. there's no scientific disagreement that marijuana is the farthest dangerous drug than alcohol or tobacco. but it remains illegal. >> which principle of moral psychology should we tell this gentleman to try? [inaudible] what principle? if you want to understand this crazy rationality, why on earth did they do this? what is wrong with them? are they on same? followed the sacredness. and on the right the body is a temple. on the left come in the body is a playground. so drunk i doesn't hurt anyone it feels good, what could possibly be wrong with it? is all kinds of ideas that the

body is sacred. this in not the exclusive preserve of the right. have you been into a natural food store ever? those people are wacko. the idea that the body is a temple. [inaudible] [laughter] a lot of people believe in essences, tocsin, invisible substance is and of course since many drugs involve a lot of self control. on the right self-control is a very virtue. on the left, it is ambivalent. that is my answer. >> last question. >> i was a psychology major. >> what you did you graduate? >> a while ago. [laughter] >> avenue a question for you. i think it was the fairness question. i noticed the structure of the question, which is should people who work the hardest be paid the most clicks i was struck by the

spirit i grew up in the blue-collar households and white-collar professionals who of course might others an electrician and worked very, very hard and should've been paid much more than he was. is there any sort of definition in the terminology or deep and that affects how people grew up in a answer to their questions? been a great question. you say it's narrow, but it's very deep. fairness is the most loyal questions. it's where most of the action is these days at least. there are many criteria for saying something is fair. psychologists often set up a puzzle or something. bob contributed the most, but bill sacrificed the most. his country is them are painful to them. but sally tried the hardest -- there's lots of different criteria. you can do all kinds of versions of that question. one could be within such a sentient company and people doing the exact same job, bob

works harder than bill and should be paid more. another way to put it would be people should be paid according to the values that they produce to the overall economy. that would be the common sense economic libertarian view. it's not how hard you work. it is you're putting something out there and are you being paid market rate for the? family talk is market research? that's what the debate on left and right is. it's a good debate, and import debate. their social class differences who is naming finding in my dissertation is the differences between brazil and the united states were smaller than between upper and lower social classes in each country. lower social class people are much more interdependent. much more vulnerable and therefore absent towns tend to be stronger ties for his wealthy people are much for independent and autonomous, individuals and selfish. which people are more likely to cut other people off in traffic.

money does all sorts of things. not all bad, but many class are hugely important for understanding morality. thank you all. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this is really a book not just about sending johnson, but about robert kennedy and jack kennedy and the interplay of their personalities.

and it's a very complicated story, but i don't think people know of two very complicated people and robert kennedy and lyndon johnson and i had to really go into that and try to explain it because it is part of this story all the way through the end of johnson's presidency. that is done and i suppose chronologically at the moment johnson is passing in 1965 voting rights that and that is stored as one-way ran up to now. >> he was in a silver opel, whether cars in f1 in iraq and no one in america knows about. but again, the suspicion was raised whenkn i realized the bak

of the car was a little slower to the ground than the front.r o given the rules of engagement, you can't just shoot someone because they look suspicious. someone well,be sir, why did you shoot him? well, i got scared.? you've got scared so you killed a man? well, yeah, sir. like i have a gun. you can't do that. li given the rules of engagement come you can't shoot someone unless you know they have a weapon, you know they are aimint theyyou know if they've killed someone or i should say they are in the action. so given the rules of engagement, i just couldn'tso ge shoot someone that looks suspicious. so i need the best thing to do d this to yell at him to get outsi of his car. get out so as i said a subpoena from hii left shoulder kind of facing hir

vehicle, had metal basically up to my neck, i was inside the stryker standing up. i still had my m-4, my oakley m frames on, i was looking cool. had my kevlar on. doing everything that i was supposed to do. looked at him and said, hey, get out of your vehicle. and i knew he heard me because he looked over his shoulder straight at me and raised his hands off the steering wheel and then put 'em back down. nothing happened. i was like, okay, well, maybe he understood or maybe he's saying i don't know where i am, i'm lost. i didn't know. so i yelled at him again. he raised his hands up again off the steering wheel and shook his hands no and let his foot off the brake. i then had to make a decision. so i shot two rounds in front of his vehicle with my m4 and, boom, my world went black. i woke up a week or so laettner

walter reed army medical center, my life forever changed. my world went black not only physically, being blind the rest of my life, the shrapnel had cut my left eye in half, entered the frontal lobe on the left side of my brain and metal went through my cornea and taking out my optic nerve. i saw nothing but blackness and was told by the ophthalmologist that you would never be able to see again. so my life went physically black. that day. but it also went spiritually black. i no longer believed in god. everything that i'd done, everything that i believed in now no longer meant anything to me. i remember one of my best friends, edward, coming into the room. i think it was before one of my surgeries and said, hey, scotty, why don't you say a pra