This morning my colleague at the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, Jason Marsh, talked withRighteous Mind author Jonathan Haidt about how psychological differences between liberals and conservatives fueled this election's partisan divide and what we can do to overcome it. Here is an excerpt; you may also wish to read the entire Q&A at Greater Good magazine.
Obama won. Romney lost. Now what?
Now, of course, begins the hard work of actually tackling the countrys many social and economic problems a task made even harder by intense partisanship. How can liberals and conservatives respond to climate change and fix the economy when it doesnt even seem like they can have a civil conversation?
To get at an answer, we turned to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. For years, Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, has studied the psychological bases of our moral and political views. He has been especially interested in why morality varies across culturesand even within the same country. This interest has led him to consider whether ideological differences between liberals and conservatives in the United States reflect deeper psychological differences between them.
Through studies with tens of thousands of people, Haidt and his colleagues have identified six distinct moral foundations that underlie the moral and political judgments people make around the world. And, sure enough, Haidt and his colleagues have concluded that liberals and conservatives build their political views off of these foundations in different ways.
Liberals, studies show, place greater value on the moral foundations of care for others and fairness; conservatives, on the other hand, care more than liberals about the moral foundations of group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity, meaning an aversion to unpure or disgusting things. (Both groups rely on the foundation of liberty, though in different ways.)
So does this simply mean that liberals are from Mars and conservatives are from Venus, doomed to conflict and misunderstanding? Not necessarily. Along with highlighting our differences, Haidts work has also suggested how liberals and conservatives can bridge these differences and learn from each otherideas he explores in his recent book, The Righteous Mind (and which he also shares in a New York Times op-ed published today).
I spoke with Haidt this morning to get his morning-after-Election-Day analysis of how the country can move forward in the wake of an intensely partisan election year.
Greater Good: You've written extensively about liberals' and conservatives' shortcomings in understanding the moral psychology of the other. In light of what you saw this past election year, do you believe liberals and conservatives are getting better or worse at understanding and talking to each other?
Jonathan Haidt: Id say worse. The survey data on what people think about the other side shows a consistent downward trend. Liberals have always thought negatively about conservatives and vice versa. It wasnt so bad up to the 1990s, but then it started going down, and its actually gotten much worse in the Bush and Obama years. Theres no sign of improvement, and there are plenty of signs that things are getting worse.
GG: Why do you think that is?
JH: It all begins with the purification of the parties. The two political parties were not liberal versus conservative until after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and that started a long process of purification, when the Republican party became all conservative and the Democratic party became all liberals. Once the two parties became pure, then it became much easier to hate the other side because they really were different.
Now, for the first time, the two parties are really different sorts of people with different personalities and different valuesits not just collections of interest groups, its really much more of a clear moral split than it ever was before.
GG: You've said before that you think liberals are worse at understanding the moral psychology of conservatives than the other way around. Is there any evidence from this election year that has made you reconsider or feel more certain about that assessment?
JH: No, no sign that it was wrong. The reason why I say that is not that liberals are more narrow-minded. Theyre not. Theyre slightly better at perspective taking than conservatives in general. But in this case, because conservative morality rests on moral foundations of group loyalty, respect for authority, and sense of sancity these are three moral foundations that many liberals reject, or just cannot simulate in their own minds.
Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I ran a study testing this, and we didnt know how it was going to come out. But it really came out clearly that people on the far left were the worstthey could not pretend to be the other side. Moderates and conservatives were the best at pretending to be the other side.
Now whats happened is that the culture war used to be about loyalty, authority, and sancity, up until the Tea Party. So this lack of understanding really put liberals at a big disadvantage. Now, the culture war has shifted to more economic issues issues of fairness and there the problem is not simply that liberals cant understand what conservatives mean. Put it this way: Now the liberal difficulty of empathizing with conservatives is less of a problem on economic issues than it was on social issues.
GG: For conservatives waking up today to another Obama administration, what advice do you have about how they can communicate their ideals effectively to liberals to make themselves understood, feel less culturally and politically marginalized, and try to create a less partisan political climate?
JH: Well, I think that the polarization in Washington, at least, has been very asymmetrical. The Democrats went through a period in the 70s and into the 80s where they spun out into left field in a moralistic spiral that made them more blind to reality. But they came back to earth in the 90s.
And now its the Republicans turn. The Republicans have spun out into a moralistic spiral that puts them at a disadvantage in understanding reality. And I think theyre going to have to stop that. Theyre going to have to have some kind of reform movement. There are very few Republican moderates left, but until theyre given a voice, I think the Republicans are going to be marginalized, and will deserve their marginalization.
GG: When you refer to a moralistic spiral, what are you referring to specifically?
JH: So a basic principle of morality is that morality binds and blinds, and the more a group circles around its sacred value, the blinder it goes. So when the left was circling around civil rights and womens rights, that made them unable to think about empirical findingsfor instance, about sex differences.
The Republicans are now in that kind of crazy moralistic spiral. For example, theyve got certain economic assumptions that are just falselike, if you give tax breaks to the rich, they will stimulate the economy. That simply is false. But theyre circling around it, and until they give that up, they will neither have their ideas heard nor deserve to have their ideas heard.
Read the rest of the Q&A at Greater Good magazine...