The Hyper-Activation of Our Ancient Tribal Moral Psychology

I've previously shared quotes from a book by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind. Recently I came across a lengthy, wide-ranging interview related to the release of his new book. It's fascinating, with the best parts coming in the second half of what I excerpt below:

The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on politics, morality, and the coddling of the American mind.

I think that there are certain fields that are colloquially called the grievance studies departments. Fields that are not focused on doing basic research or on understanding social dynamics, but on activism, on changing social dynamics. In general, trying to change things and trying to understand them don’t go well together. The mission of a university I believe should be to understand. And if you do a great job of research, that can be the basis for all kinds of activism later. But if you start with a commitment to a certain way of seeing the world, and you start with a belief that some people are good and some people are bad, I think it makes it very hard to understand real social systems. . . .

I believe that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you need to commit to really studying the world. Don’t get caught up in a group that is so passionate and so committed that it’s going to basically be blind to counter evidence. . . .

I think the most important lessons that we can take for child rearing now are that we have grossly overdone the protection and the academic pressures in elementary school.

Kids need to play. They need to play without supervision. They need to play. I’m not talking about 2-year-olds. Two-year-olds you can supervise; they can really hurt themselves. But by the time they’re 5 or 6, they need some time unsupervised. And we keep taking that away from them thinking it’s more important that they learn to read, that they do math. So the most important advice that we can give to parents is: Back off. Let your kid play. Let your kid grow. Don’t over parent. . . .

What we found . . . what we were able to show is that conservatives can pretend to be progressives and they can accurately fill it out as though they were one. But progressives can’t pretend to be a conservative and fill it out accurately because they don’t really get the group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity or purity. They don’t really get those so they kind of dismiss those and they assume that conservatives just like to kill puppies and things like that. . . .

We have a lot of problems in our society brought on by the hyper-activation of our ancient tribal moral psychology. We evolved for life in small-scale societies that were frequently at war or in violent skirmishes with nearby groups. Somehow, we managed to grow into gigantic prosperous societies that are generally peaceful. The trend on that has been amazingly wonderful as Steven Pinker has shown in his books. But I think the arrival of social media, in particular, has reactivated a lot of our mob-based or tribal sentiments in ways that make democracy more difficult. . . .

So I consider myself to be a centrist because I take very seriously the psychology that I reviewed in my book, The Righteous Mind—most of it not my own work but the work of others—showing that we are all designed by evolution to confirm what we want to believe. We’re very, very good at confirming hypotheses. We’re not very good at challenging them—our own hypotheses; we’re really good at challenging other people’s hypotheses. And what this means is that if you put me together with a bunch of people who think just like me, we can’t possibly find the truth about anything complicated because we’re just going to confirm each other’s share. We’re going to confirm the values, the hypotheses, the explanatory forces that are our favorite mechanisms to talk about. . . .

So I consider myself a centrist because I am committed to the idea that you have to be listening to both sides. It doesn’t mean that the answer is always in the middle. It’s not. Sometimes the left is correct, sometimes the right is correct. But if you start from an a priori position that our side is right, their side is evil and I’m not going to listen to their arguments, you’re guaranteed to get it wrong. . . .

I call myself an emergentist. That means moral truths emerge from certain kinds of interaction just like prices in a marketplace. So right now I believe platinum has a higher price than gold, which has a higher price than silver. That’s a fact, man. But it wouldn’t be a fact if extraterrestrials came here and there were not people, there was just platinum and gold and silver in the ground. It has no intrinsic value. As we trade in marketplaces, the prices emerge. Similarly, as we interact with each other over time, rights emerge. Now, they don’t emerge early in our development—only once we develop a certain degree of material prosperity, freedom from the demands of survival in daily life, then rights begin to emerge and they become facts. It is now a fact that every career, with maybe just a few exceptions, every career should be equally open to men and women. That’s a fact now. But I am hesitant to say that 100,000 years ago, proto-humans were wrong to divide hunting and gathering. That was just wrong for them to be specialized by gender. So I think moral truths exist but they exist as emergent facts about interaction, not as truths of physics. . . .

Let’s teach them ethical systems design. Let’s use the social psychology and help leaders who want to create ethical organizations, help them to change the social forces, improve the culture. Culture is incredibly powerful. If your culture values cleverness, getting around the rules to show how clever you are, well, you’re basically putting huge amounts of risk, ethical risk, which turns into legal risk, lawsuits, regulatory interventions. But if you, as many executives do, if you want your organization to have an ethical culture in which people trust each other, in which people’s word is their bond, in which you don’t have to constantly monitor people because everyone shares the same mission, well, it turns out that actually is more profitable because trust is more efficient. . . .

We are all designed by evolution to confirm what we want to believe.

Not nearly as well-written, but expressing some excellent ideas:

The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better

Diversity is how we survive as a species. This is a quantifiable fact easily observed in the biological world. From niches to natural selection, diversity is the common theme of success for both the individual and the group. . . .

Diversity is necessary in the workplace to generate creativity and innovation. It’s also necessary to get the job done. Teams with members from different backgrounds can attack problems from all angles and identify more possible solutions than teams whose members think alike. Companies also need diverse skills and knowledge to keep a company functioning. Finance superstars may not be the same people who will rock marketing. And the faster things change, the more valuable diversity becomes for allowing us to adapt and seize opportunity.

We all know that any one person doesn’t have it all figured out and cannot possibly do it all. We can all recognize that we rely on thousands of other people every day just to live. We interact with the world through the products we use, the entertainment we consume, the services we provide. So why do differences often unsettle us?

Any difference can raise this reaction: gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation. Often, we hang out with others like us because, let’s face it, communicating is easier with people who are having a similar life experience. And most of us like to feel that we belong. But a sense of belonging should not come at the cost of diversity. . . .

You can’t adapt if you have nothing to adapt. If we are all the same, if we’ve wiped out every difference because we find it less challenging, then we increase our vulnerability to complete extinction. Are we too much alike to survive unforeseen challenges? . . .

Diversity is what makes us stronger, not weaker. Biologically, without diversity we die off as a species. We can no longer adapt to changes in the environment. This is true of social diversity as well. Without diversity, we have no resources to face the inevitable challenges, no potential for beneficial mutations or breakthroughs that may save us. Yet we continue to have such a hard time with that. We’re still trying to figure out how to live with each other. We’re nowhere near ready for that meteor.

A sense of belonging should not come at the cost of diversity.

Tangential, but interesting nonetheless:

A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It’s Bad for You

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. . . . Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. . . .

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. . . .

Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. . . .

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad. . . .

Research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill).

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. . . .

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.

Meritocracy is not only wrong; it's bad.

This one shows some bias, but I like it:

The Truth About People Who Have No Personality
They actually just keep their opinions to themselves.

The study’s conclusions point to something unfortunate for the quiet and reserved among us. People with no personality are those who don’t bombard other people with their preferences and thoughts like little opinion drones. And their image suffers for it. . . .

And thus, the study comes to a timeworn, frustrating phenomenon: People seem to confuse bombastic displays of “ME!” with a rich interior life. No personality really just means quiet, and quiet is seen as unlikable. People who are just trying to go with the flow, to not say anything that might piss anyone off, to not loudly voice their lunch-place preference, haven’t been doing themselves any favors.

When you keep your personality on the inside, people think it doesn’t exist. The tyranny of extroversion persists.

No personality really just means quiet, and quiet is seen as unlikable.

A final thought on the theme that cooperation is self-interest:

The Unintended Benefits Of Vaccines

A new study shows that vaccination with a weakened strain of salmonella not only protects against typhoid fever but also seems to rev up the immune system to fight off other problems, like influenza and yeast infection. . . .

"Live vaccines have the very broad benefit of going much further than protecting just against the targeted disease." . . .

For decades, scientists have observed an extraordinarily positive side effect among children who receive the measles vaccine: Deaths from measles plummet among vaccinated children, and so do deaths from unrelated diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea.

The same result has been found as a consequence of live polio vaccine and bacille Calmette-Guerin, or BCG, vaccine for tuberculosis. When those vaccines are introduced to poor areas of the world, studies have shown, deaths from many other causes, not just the vaccine-targeted disease, go down. . . . 

Everything is related.