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  • The Righteous Mind

  • Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
  • By: Jonathan Haidt
  • Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
  • Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (1,510 ratings)
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The Righteous Mind

By: Jonathan Haidt
Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
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Summary

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens?

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong.

Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures.

But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim - that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2012 Jonathan Haidt (P)2012 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"Haidt is looking for more than victory. He's looking for wisdom. That's what makes The Righteous Mind well worth reading…. a landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself.” ( The New York Times Book Review)

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant! Well researched, accessible, convincing

This is a highly intelligent, yet accessible book, beautifully read by the author himself.



If like me you are puzzled by the stupidity of other people's beliefs and values, then I urge you to read "The Righteous Mind". At its core is a message of reconciliation; an enlightened liberation from the "Filter Bubble" of our own confirmation biases to see ourselves & those we most profoundly disagree with as belonging on the same continuum.



Haidt's thesis is controversial :- that Western liberals (e.g. him & me) are "WIERD" outliers, using just three moral foundations of harm, freedom, and fairness, when for conservative & non Western cultures, morality includes a far broader spectrum of sensibilities, including hierarchy, loyalty and sacredness.



Our own values feel like 'The Truth' and the more moral we are, the more self-righteous in imposing our own moral framework. Moreover, we are all moral hypocrites, acting to maximise our good reputation, with our moral rationalisations serving as press officer to our emotional prejudices.



Haidt cites a ton of research (including his own), underpinned by psychology, anthropology, neuroscience & evolutionary theory: the latter an elegant mix of Selfish Gene, Multi-Level selection and Dual Inheritance Theory, summed up in the sound-byte that we are 90% chimp and 10% hive mentality.



Yet it was in his uncritical advocacy for the "Durkheimian Hive Switch" that I started to dissent. Anyone who knows the film "The Wave", the deindividuation of rioting crowds, Milgram's Experiment, or phenomena such as scape-goating or "corporate groupthink" will be wary of the dangers of the "Hive Switch", and the potential madness of crowds. The Enlightenment was about liberation from our hive mentality and the benefits of Mill's style individualism and secularism.



However, that said, I consider Haidt a hero, and I hope this excellent book will help heal the animosity between good people who differ only in the hyper-goods they value.

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It's like taking the red pill :)

I wonder if political polarization would go down across societies if everyone had a chance to listen to this book?

I wished I had taken the survey on yourmorals dot org before reading/listening to The Righteous Mind.

Anyway looking forward to Jonathan Haidt's coming book on capitalism.

I would recommend listening to The Happiness Hypothesis prior to The Righteous Mind.

Once you've taken the red pill, it's never going to be the same :)

Good luck to you

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a left wing academics journey to the centre ground

Whilst there are a few good ideas here it is mostly evidence light assertions like an extended TED talk. His defence of religion bypasses the atheists main point that it is a highly unlikely hypothesis for the creation of the universe. He swings by group selection without looking into the genetics of it, has the requisite politically correct view of cultural relativism.. the native peoples I met were quite happy with their values so who an I too judge... failing to see that in almost every oppression in the past there have been oppressed people who defended the status quo.
there are also the ridiculous assertions...
apparently suicide bombing has been conclusively proven to have nothing to do with religion by an academic - well clearly that settles it then! criminality in the 60s, 70s and 80s and it's decline in the 90s was caused by leaded petrol - nothing to do with abortion rates, decreased use of cash, decreased cost of consumer goods etc
Ultimately it's just the story of a left wing academic realising that conservatives are not baby eating monsters but people with a less utopian (more realistic?) view of humanity. The depressing thing is that this is news in the 21st century West.

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15 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars

One of the most influential books I've ever read

This book is purely incredible. I think I'll listen to it or read it once every year. Truly eye opening, and the narration of the author just elevates the experience of understanding these relations further. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who is just barely puzzled by what is happening currently around us.

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An Awful Book Based On Flawed and Biased Research

I will give just one example to show how Haidt uses flawed and biased research to attempt to manipulate the reader to buy into his rather transparent agenda.

Haidt claims that libertarians give the “care/​harm” foundation very little weight.

He tries to show that libertarians care mostly about the liberty foundation (true) and that this comes at the expense of the care foundation (false).

His basis for this theory is his own flawed research, based on loaded questions intended to get the results he is looking for.

For example, one of the questions from his website that he bases this idea on is the following:

"Do you agree that the government should do more to advance the common good, even if that means limiting the freedom and choices of individuals”?

He uses these type of biased and loaded questions to evaluate how important the "care foundation", one of the six pillars of his "moral matrix", is to the respondents.

It's well understood that libertarians (and conservatives) are far more caring about other people than liberal progressives are. This can be seen in who donates the most to charities and in most other aspect of life.

However, for libertarians caring means that you have to make a genuine effort to actually help people, rather than just virtue signal how much you care. Results are what matters when you claim that you want to help someone.

Of course libertarians believe the welfare state harms the liberty foundation, but we also know that it harms those it’s intended to help.

The reason libertarians and other conservatives want to reform welfare and entitlement programs is not some selfish agenda, but because we care about the recipients, and everyone else.

Social Security for example doesn’t just mean the government stealing your money and deciding what to do with it for you. It also makes you poorer than you would have been if you had invested that money yourself.

Government programs intended "to help" have the worst track record of all care efforts. Yet Haidt uses the government as "the vehicle" for the caring effort in his questions, in order to get the results that he wants. He fears libertarians and therefore want to make it look like they value the care foundation less than liberals and progressives do.

To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the intellectual leftists like Haidt,  whose imaginary vision casts him in the role of "rescuer" of people treated unfairly by "society".

As Thomas Sowell so aptly puts it:

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are seen among leftist intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God."

It's common among liberals and progressives to believe that unless you favour their particular solution you don't really care about the people that they claim they want to help.

Haidt however knows better than that, but he has an agenda, and therefore he uses the same illogical arguments, backed by his own flawed research to try prove the point.

Ever expansive centralized government programs not only harm far more people than they help in an economic and creative sense, they also result in a world that is less caring and less fair for everyone.

People like Haidt don't want independent people voluntarily working together, (the "hive switch" in his book) when it makes sense for them to do so.

No, what they want (and need) to further their agenda are "dependents".

The big word on the left is "compassion" but their big agenda is all about "dependency".

The more people who are dependent on government hand-outs, the more people there are to support their ever expanding welfare state, and the more control they have over "their people".

Haidt is part of the dangerous global "elite" who are pushing for a centralized one-world government with total control over the people, and an eventual elimination of all private property rights.

He is a truly self-righteous author and researcher who would fit in perfectly with the extremists at the Tavistock Institute.

Be afraid, and start to speak up against these people and their nightmare vision and totalitarian agenda, before it's too late.

If you listen carefully, Haidt is rather transparent in manipulation attempts, and if you decide to buy this book you will see this as clear as day.

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Excellent analysis and research based approach

I'm a big fan of Haidt, he's very open to divergent views and has an excellent approach to teasing out data and spinning convincing, possibly even true, narratives. He should be one of the leading voices on the left debunking radical critical intersectional social justice types. If you can't learn from this approach, you're likely to be unreachable.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in religion, culture, anthropology, the debate around Darwinian group selection, psychology, comparative sociology, millennial internet culture, social justice etc.

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understand people who don't agree with you

Jonathan Haidt had given my new perspective on views that I disagree with and people who I don't understand.

This book has opened my mind and served up a big slice of humble pie to my self righteous ideas.

I now look forward to learning more about people I have disagreed with!

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It’s positives and negative’s

On the positive side, it is well researched, insights books studies and experiments which are delightful, it is very well performed in the first half of the book I would almost coharacterise as invaluable. The last part I could do without so on the negative side, it oversimplifies things that should not be simplified in order to make a choice. Still, it has its merits towards trying to sympathise with the conservative side.

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  • Mr
  • 08-07-13

Good Book

Where does The Righteous Mind rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The author is an excellent narrator, it made listening a pleasure. The book was well structured with summaries at the end of each chapter.

As a liberal the book made me think about myself and why I am the way I am!

I did not agree entirely with everything written, it certainly challenged my ideas as to what is right and wrong. This makes me want to find out more about the subject to find more answers.

Who was your favorite character and why?

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Which scene did you most enjoy?

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Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

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Very relevant at the moment

A brilliant book that takes you on a journey through moral psychology and the formation of the human mind. It touches on very relevant points about understanding eachother and how no matter what our values are, we Are all connected and all act in the same way - though many will refuse to believe this.

I would highly recommend to anyone who is struggling to understand why everyone is so angry at the moment and why it seems like understand the other point of view appears to be a dying and forbidden trait.

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