Jonathan Haidt of New York University and author of The Righteous Mind talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book, the nature of human nature, and how our brain affects our morality and politics. Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.
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Readings and Links related to this podcast episode
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About this week's guest:
Jonathan Haidt's Home page
About ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
Books:
The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt at Amazon.com
Articles:
David Hume. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Vernon Smith. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
James Buchanan. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Podcast Episodes, Videos, and Blog Entries:
Another Disappointing Reaction to the Great Market Monetarist Experiment, by Scott Sumner at EconLog, 1/4/2014.
Nosek on Truth, Science, and Academic Incentives. EconTalk.
Kling on the Three Languages of Politics. EconTalk.
Vernon Smith on Rationality in Economics. EconTalk.
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0:33
Intro. [Recording date: January 7, 2014.] Russ: I have to say at the beginning that The Righteous Mind is one of the most interesting books I've read in the last 10 years. I do worry that my assessment is biased. It deals with a host of issues that come up regularly here on EconTalk, in particular the limits of reason, as well as issues that I'm grappling with as I work on a book on Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. So my rave review may not apply very well for those of you listening out there. But it might. So let's get into it. Jonathan, earlier in your book you ask how children come to know right from wrong. Where does morality come from? What's your answer? Guest: My answer is that we are products of evolution, like everything else, and we have certain stuff built into us that helps us navigate the social world. That's the first part of the story. But nothing is hard-wired. Evolution in people is quite flexible. And the second part of the story is culture shapes us to develop certain capacities more than others. So, when I was first in grad school, the general answer was: 'oh, kids figure it out for themselves'--is what Lawrence Kohlberg said, or anthropologists said. Or, 'Kids internalize if from the grown-ups in their culture.' But I really went a third way, which is kind of a modified nativist view, starts with what's innate and then you look at how it develops within a cultural context. Russ: So, explain what you mean by nativist and what you mean by innate. Guest: So, in the social sciences one of the big controversial areas, really for a couple hundred years, is: Is human nature innate? Is there human nature, even? Steve Pinker wrote a book called The Blank Slate, arguing against the prevailing notion. It's most common on the political Left that there is no human nature; that people are flexible, malleable. We can raise kids to turn out however we want. That's the extreme view of what is sometimes called the 'empiricist' position, which is everything is a product of experience. At the other extreme is the extreme nativist view, which is to say that our behavior, our personality, all that is as innate as our eye color and our hair color. After all, everything is heritable. That's the big debate in the social sciences. And I've come down fairly firmly on the nativist side, as long as you grant that culture and flexibility is part of our evolutionary endowment. Russ: And you say often--you have a number of different metaphors, but I like a point you say: 'We are predisposed but not predestined', in various ways. But you have other ways of talking about it. Guest: That's right. The best definition of 'innate' that I've ever found that I think just cuts through all the confusion is from my colleague here at NYU [New York University], Gary Marcus, who says that 'innate' just means structured in advance of experience but then experience can revise it. If you look at the way kids come out all over the world they tend to kind of know that if someone hits you, you hit him back. You don't have to teach that. Now, you can try to teach them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, and maybe you'll have a little bit of success. But we are structured in advance of experience to think in terms of reciprocity. If someone is nice to me, I'll be nice to him. If someone does something mean to me, I'll do something mean to her. So that's what I mean by structured in advance of experience but still flexible afterwards.
4:30
Russ: Now, you say we are born to be righteous, and you also claim that children, not only are they prone to hit back but they are prone to be favorable toward kind people and kind even physical objects--in puppet shows and other representations--and not sympathetic, not empathetic with cruel, suggesting that harm as a moral principle, an opposition to harming others is deeply embedded in us. Talk a little bit about how that could possibly be known. And I'm a little bit skeptical about it. I'm sympathetic to the idea, but I'm skeptical about the findings. Guest: Okay. My general approach is called 'moral foundations theory', the idea that there are multiple foundations. Just as we have multiple taste buds on our tongue. We don't just have one taste receptor that guides us to delicious food. We have taste receptors that guide us to fruit and other receptors that guide us to meat--sweet and sour on the one hand, and umami or glutamate and salt on the other. And in the same way, in our social lives, we have to figure out: Who should I cooperate with? Who should I trust? Who should I marry? Who should I partner with? And so we've got all these moral taste buds, you might say. And one of the most basic is: Who is nice, and first is, who is cruel? People vary a lot on this. So I was working on this theory over the last 8 or 10 years, and while I was doing that, there was this amazing work coming out of Yale, coming out of Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn, their lab, their developmental lab at Yale where they study children. And what they found is that when you take kids as young as 3 or 4 months and you show them a puppet show with these wooden puppets they made in which one of the puppets is struggling to get up a hill and the other puppet either seems to come out behind it and help push it up to the top, or, you take the same puppet that starts from the top and he comes down and he smashes into him from above and blocks him and pushes him down. So even 3-month-olds seem to detect this is a story about helping or about hindering. And then after they see that story, you put the two puppets on a tray and you look at which one they look at, or, when they are a little older, which one they reach for. And what you find is that as young as 3 months, and very clear by 6 months, the kids like the puppet that was helping, and they don't like the puppet that was hindering. There are a lot of results like this that show that kids are picking up what's sweet. They like what's sweet; they don't like what's sour or bitter. They are picking up what's nice, sort of morally sweet, you might say. Russ: Do you remember what--again, I'm a little skeptical of that kind of finding. Part of the reason I'm skeptical is it's so cool. A 3-month-old is hard-wired to be kind. So one question I'd ask, and maybe you don't know this stuff off the top of your head; I apologize if you don't: but, how statistically different, not significant, but what's the magnitude of the difference? Is it 80% of the time the kids pick up the nice puppet? Or is it 53% of the time? Versus the mean puppet. Guest: Yeah. I don't have those numbers handy but I'm pretty sure it's in between. So, these studies tend to not use large sample sizes. Your question is very germane when you have large sample sizes. Sometimes you can have, you know, 52% of Republicans but only 48% of Democrats do something, in a sample of 10,000 people; and that's statistically significant but it's so small that we don't really care about it. These studies are a little harder to do--they tend to just use like 15 or 20 subjects per cell. And my recollection is that they are pretty robust. So, it's not like 80%, I mean, when you are dealing with little kids there is a lot of noise in the data. But it's also not just a tiny effect. Lots of labs get these effects. They are now getting them for something even about group loyalty, in-group/out-group. But I'm puzzled by your skepticism. Why would you be skeptical? Why would you think that kids are born blank slates, unable to distinguish between someone in their environment who is nice and warm and gentle between someone who is cruel and tyrannical and violent? Russ: Well, for starters--I have no problem with the idea that we may be hard-wired to be that way. Part of me, as I suspect many listeners would say, would like to believe that. When I think about that actual experiment I worry about: what did 'reach for' mean? I worry about--does a 3-month old really know what it means for a puppet to go up a hill? Does it really understand? There's a lot of things I'm just not so sure about. Guest: I was going to say: These findings build on some of the coolest findings in developmental psychology done in the 1980s by Renee Baillargeon, who showed that kids have an intuitive understanding of physics. So, she's the one who developed this method where you show people, like, a car which seems to move through a solid block, or in other cases the car is moving on a track behind the solid block. And she found that kids as young as three months, they stare longer at what looks like magic. It's like, oh my God, if the blank slate is true, this doesn't make sense, because how could they have learned that? But if knowledge of physics is innate then it makes perfect sense. Now think how crazy it is to be surprised that knowledge of physics is innate. In horses, horses are born; they stand up on the first day, and they move. They don't run into trees. A horse's brain is able to see, well, there's a tree; I can't go through it. Why can't a baby's brain be born to understand that objects are solid, and objects can't pass through other solid objects? The brain is very, very structured in advance of experience. Russ: I'm open to that idea; and as I said, I'm more than open; I like the idea of it to some extent. But I just think we should be a little bit skeptical of experimental results in general. Guest: That is true. Russ: And we'll come back to that. Guest: There are reasons to be skeptical of experimental results. We have to be more skeptical of them than we have been. I agree with that. Russ: So, we'll come back to that.
10:32
Russ: You mention--a key idea of your book in passing--I want you to talk about it some detail, which is that we have moral receptors that are varied in the same way we have taste receptors. And that's just a metaphor. So, to make that real and vigorous you have to talk about it in more detail. But to get us into that, I want you to talk about 'WEIRD.' Now, WEIRD is an acronym used for Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic folk, folk who live in, say, America. And I don't know who made the acronym, but the acronym points out that we are actually somewhat distinctive. WEIRD folk, like you and me--what's weird about us in terms of the scope of our morality? What is the range of moral sensitivities that you've discovered, in your research and that of others? Guest: Sure. So, I began my research looking into what I called harmless taboo violations. When I was a grad student, I was trying to understand morality across cultures. And I read the Old Testament, I read the Koran, I read a lot of religious texts. I read a lot of anthropology; I read a lot of accounts of non-Western societies. And what struck me is that most of them care a great deal about purity and pollution. They have all kinds of elaborate rules for how to treat women who are menstruating and what to do with corpses, and so much stuff about the body--which we think is just hygiene. This isn't morality--this is hygiene. But we, it turns out, are the exceptions. Most cultures moralize the body; they think food has all kinds of moral properties and moral essences. Of course, sex is often heavily moralized; we do that, too. But my point is that it's like morality is very thick in most parts of the world; and then for us, it's really thin. For us, we went through this historical process in the Enlightenment and both before and after of rising individualism, rising individual liberty. You can't tell me to not do something unless you can show that I'm hurting you. Or in some [?] of standing to say that I'm causing some harm to someone. But in most of the world morality is thicker: It regulates all kinds of stuff. So anyway, so I'm doing that work in the 1990s and early 2000s, and at the same time this team at the U. of British Columbia led by Joe Henrich, they were summarizing all the results they could find, including my research, on how it is that people from WEIRD cultures--Westerners like us--are different. And even in visual perception. That's what's so cool. It's even in visual perception, the general perception is, we WEIRDos see a world full of individual objects, and most people see a world of things that are more connected. One nice example is if you show people a picture of fish swimming, we WEIRDos focus on the lead fish; we think he's leading. People from East Asia, they actually see and remember more about all the fish. And they actually notice the background. Americans can't remember the background, because they didn't notice; they were just looking at the lead fish. So, our minds work differently. We're more individualistic. And that leads to us thinking in very different ways and behaving in different ways. Russ: So talk about the 6 types or morality that you feel cover the spectrum, given that you feel it's a wider spectrum outside the United States and the West. Guest: Yeah. So, starting with the 3 that we all have, that everybody has and that we Americans have--so we've already talked about issues of care vs. harm. You find that everywhere. Then there are issues of fairness vs. cheating. Now you will never find a human society that doesn't care a lot about reciprocity, trading favors, vendettas, feuds, gratitude, exchange. So this also is a basic foundation of human sociality[?] and of human morality everywhere. Now what we found is that Liberals focus more on equality--by 'liberal' I just mean Left. And Conservatives, the Right, focus more on proportionality. But they all think that they care about fairness. Third foundation is liberty vs. oppression. We are primates. We evolved in hierarchical primate groups. We can do hierarchy. But we really resent a bullying alpha male. And you see this, boy, do you see this in the Tea Party, where the bullying alpha male is the government. And it harkens back to the American Revolution and liberty, liberty, liberty. You see on the Left, too, where the bully is the corporations and the rich, and we need the government to protect us. So, there it's the same psychology, only a different villain. So those are the 3 that are easy, that are at the heart of the American cultural war now. Now we can move on to the 3 that are less common the political Left. Now, you still find them on the Right, and you find them in almost all traditional societies. But those three are: authority vs. subversion--so the idea that people in power or it's especially clear within the family: there are positions where someone is deserving of respect. Just the word 'backtalk,' where in my sort of liberal Jewish family there was no such thing as backtalk. Of course you talked back to anybody who tells you to do something and you disagree. Russ: You wouldn't have a special term for it, in other words. Guest: Yeah. That's right. But when I began teaching at the U. of Virginia, or actually when I lived in an African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and the kids would use words like 'backtalk,' and the rural kids in Virginia would say that: 'You know, you don't talk back to grown-ups.' So that's the fourth foundation, authority. The fifth is loyalty vs. betrayal. And here you find this, especially in working class families, the idea that blood is thicker than water, that you owe things to people because you are members of the group. And then the last one is sanctity vs. degradation. And this is, for example, the idea that the body is a temple. On the Left there is more--actually, I have bumper stickers in my book: 'Your body may be a temple, but mine's a playground.' The idea that things are sacred, that we shouldn't take advantage of them even if we would enjoy it and there's no harm. And you see this especially in the Evangelical Christianity; it's all over the Koran, the Old Testament. The idea of sacredness and sanctity and holiness and purity. And these issues, you always find, if you look at the older cultural war, battles like over drug use, abortion, euthanasia--any of these life-and-death issues. They are not really just about harm versus choice. They are almost always about some lingering notion of sanctity, zones where we should not transgress. Russ: Now you said--I don't want listeners to get confused. You said the first three of those are Western, and the last three are more associated with traditional cultures. Guest: Well, the first three are universal. Russ: But the last three do exist in lots of places in America. And in general you associate them with Conservative politics. Guest: Yes. That's correct. But since the people doing the scholarship are almost always secular Liberals, they tend not to see that as part of the moral domain. If you look at the moral philosophy literature, it's almost as though there's a prize for whoever can identify a single foundation of morality. So, the philosophy literature, which grows overwhelmingly out of sort of Liberal or Leftist thinking--leaving aside the Catholic tradition, that is--it's either, you've got the Utilitarians who say morality is all about harm; that's all it is; everything is reducible to harm. Or, you've got the Kanteans and Deontologists, who say, No, no, it's all about rights and fairness and justice. So, yes, you do find all of the moral foundations in the United States, but they are rather thin on the secular Left, those last three. Russ: And I should mention that you are a member--you would probably classify yourself as a member of the secular Left, correct? Guest: Um, well, not exactly. I'm certainly secular. And I was Liberal all my life. And I've really hated George W. Bush--I thought he really was just destroying the country, the [?] policies. And as long as he was President I had to consider myself a Liberal. But in writing the book I really tried to understand everybody from the inside, and I really tried to read a lot-- Russ: It's a very risky strategy. Guest: Well, I guess in terms of where it led me, yeah. I realized I couldn't call myself a Liberal any more. I'm not a Conservative. My views [?] are as a social psychologist who studies morality. I've come to believe the research, which is that everybody is an expert on certain aspects of the moral domain, and that causes them to go blind to what the other side is saying. And I realized--you know, I think Liberals are right about a lot of important issues and rising inequality and some sort of things we ought to do to get a capitalist system to function humanely. They are right on a lot of important issues. But in doing the research, I came to see that, wow, Conservatives, if your criterion is how to run a healthy society that actually leads to flourishing and well-being, actually Conservatives and libertarians are right on a lot of things, too. So now I consider myself a centrist who finds a lot of wisdom on all sides but not much in the current Republican Party.
20:00
Russ: We're going to come back to that maybe toward the end. I raised the issue about your personal views, which usually are irrelevant in our conversations, but in this one I think they are-- Guest: They are relevant. Russ: They are somewhat important. But it raised an interesting issue just as a sidenote, which is, I find as I've tried to become more tolerant, as I get older--I don't know if I've been successful--but we talk a lot on this program about how we have to be aware of our own tendencies to self-deceive; we have to be humble. It's a very Hayekian viewpoint, that we don't understand everything; there are limits to reason. One of the possible outcomes of that is that you lose faith in your principles, because you start to realize, you know, the other guy, he's well-intentioned as well as I am. And I don't have a monopoly on truth. Guest: Yes, that is true. Russ: So, reflect on that. Guest: That is true, you lose faith in your principles. That's absolutely true. I spent the 1980s being really angry at Reagan; I spent the 1990s exalting in Clinton and being angry at his enemies. I just think, be a sort of average level of anger. Maybe [?] Russ: Partisan. Guest: As you get older--as a partisan, yeah, that's right. But as you get older, as your testosterone levels drop, generally in the life course one gets less angry with age. So I can't tell what it is. But I have found myself not getting angry that much. I despair at the gridlock and the ridiculousness of our political system. But it is true that I am less confident of my principles and therefore I have less-principled anger. Russ: Less self-righteousness. Guest: That's right. Now, I think if I was an activist, if I were a legislator, well, there are a lot of reasons why you might want that passion. But I'm a scientist. My job is to figure out what's right, and so I'm willing to make that tradeoff of having fewer passionate principles driving me; and actually I feel like I can see more than I was able to 5 years ago. Russ: Does that make you a relativist? I'm sure you get that charge sometimes. Guest: Yeah. I do, especially from the Right. It's a little bit complicated [?]-- Russ: By the way, that's usually used as a pejorative term. It could be viewed as a compliment but it does have a pejorative sense to it. Guest: That's right. So, I certainly am not a moral realist in that I don't think that there is some objective truth outside humanity. 'Earth is the third planet from the sun'--that's what's called a non-anthropocentric truth. If aliens come here from another galaxy they will discover that earth is the third planet from the sun. But 'men and women should have equal political rights'--well, is that an objective truth? I think that's a truth today but I'm not willing to say that our ancestors 5 and 10 and 50,000 years ago were wrong when there was always a gender division in which men handled the politics and women would handle the home life. So I don't think that there are eternal moral truths that are true regardless of how we live. If that makes me a relativist, then I'm a relativist. Actually, here you go: I think of myself as an emergentist. I think that moral truths are actually like truths of the market? Is gold more valuable than silver? Well, you know, if aliens come from another planet, they might not think so. But given the way we live and the way we trade, the value of gold emerges, just as gender equality has emerged. And it is really true. There is a moral truth now that women should have equal political rights. So there you go. I'm an emergentist, just like you. Russ: I'll accept-- Guest: Isn't it Hayekian? Russ: It is, but I'm more absolutist than you are in the following way. Guest: Okay, how so? Russ: I think people misunderstand spontaneous order in [?] in the following way. I'm not suggesting you do, but maybe. We'll find out. I think we tend to romanticize; I do think there's something romantic and wondrous and marvelous about spontaneous order. But I also realize there are many emergent orders that are horrific and a-moral or immoral. Slavery, say, in the late 18th, early 19th century in America, even though that was an emergent phenomenon--no one designed it [?]. In fact the opposite; a lot of people tried to stop it from being part of the American fabric when we became a literal nation. So it was emergent but it was awful. And I have no problem saying that the morality that saw African Americans as inferior was evil. So, in that sense, I'm not a relativist. Guest: Okay. So let's build on that. The way I like to think about it is this. A cultural relativist would say, Hey, if that's the way they do it then it's okay. That's the first step. And I definitely would not say that [?], and for the reasons that you said. The next step would be: Let's look at the people who appear to be victims in this society and if they themselves think they are victims, that's enough of a reason for us to condemn it. So, African slaves did everything they could to flee; they hated it; there is no reason to think that this was a legitimate moral order that they approved. Same thing for Jews in Nazi Germany. But if we look at, say, Muslim societies in which the women veil, well, sometimes--I don't know enough about it--but it seems as though that is not necessarily enforced against their will. So there could be multiple emergent moral orders in which even the people that we think are victims endorse it, don't feel they are victimized, and can articulate justifications that don't seem crazy. Now of course there are issues of false consciousness and deception. But at any rate, I'm one who believes that-- Russ: You're right; I think that's a great starting place. Looking at how the alleged victims actually feels seems to be a crucial way to distinguish.
25:41
Russ: Now, you say at one point--you say it a lot actually, and I think it's a beautiful phrase. This is a good point to explain it. You say 'morality binds and blinds.' Explain that. Guest: Yes. So the thing that really has motivated me in writing the book is trying to think about this miracle of human civilization. No other species on the planet can cooperate unless they are siblings. So that bees, ants, wasps, termites, and naked mole rats can all live in giant structures that they've built together because they are all sisters, or sisters and brothers. But humans develop this ability to work together in all kinds of ways, not just people who are not kin but even with strangers. You and I have never met but we are able to cooperate and put on this podcast. We're just so good at this. How did that happen? And so, you know, we could look at language; we could look at all sorts of things that allowed us to interact. But what allowed us to actually trust each other and not take advantage of each other and to reap the benefits of cooperation? And the story I tell in the book is that morality serves a variety of functions but they are social functions, one of which is to bind groups together in ways so that they can cooperate to compete against other groups. And so what we gain in cohesion we often lose in open-mindedness. And you see this on Capitol Hill all the time--one side, the mere fact that one side proposes something means the other side will suddenly do everything it can show why that's wrong. Even if that side had actually proposed the same idea 10 or 20 years earlier. Now, some of that is strategic and is just Kabuki theater. But in general, but when you get a moralistic group, a group bound together by a certainty that it's right, they become blind, closed off to contradictory evidence. And I've kind of made a little cottage industry of showing how that happens on the Left. The academic world, where almost everybody is Liberal; I think in general we do a good job in the sciences, social sciences, but on the key issues, where there are sacred moral values at stake, it's hard for us to think straight. Russ: Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the role of reason. You say that 'intuitions come first; strategic reasoning second.' And you use the image of the rider and the elephant. Explain that image and how you apply it. Guest: So, from my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I was examining ten ancient truths, and the most basic psychological insight from around the world is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Usually one of these parts is said to be reason or conscious reasoning or something like that. And the other is emotion or intuition, something like that. Now, Plato gave us the metaphor that these two parts are--reason is the charioteer and the passions are the horses. And the charioteer, if he can control the horses, then you get a rational reasonable person. And so a man should study philosophy and learn to control the passions. But that's a very optimistic view of reason. But I think the evidence just doesn't support it. The evidence shows that people are automatically and effortlessly do motivated reasoning. We start with the conclusion and we think: How can I find evidence to support that conclusion? Research has found that if you compare people who are really smart versus those that are less smart, the really smart people aren't more open-minded. They are not better at looking at both sides. What they are better at is finding ever more and better post hoc justifications. So, basically, I concluded pretty early on that David Hume was right when he said that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Most of my career has basically been an experimental vindication of David Hume's arguments against those who are worshiping reasoning in the Platonic tradition. Russ: So, talk about the rider and the elephant. Guest: So, what I came to see in writing the first book is that the mind is divided like a rider and an elephant. If you make New Year's resolutions--this came about when I was, say, in dating relationships, and I would resolve, Oh, I should break up with her; but I found myself powerless to do so. And I just marveled at my--what's the word--my inability to make myself do what I thought I should do. There's a line from Ovid: I see the right way and approved it; alas, I follow the wrong. So, individual reasoning I think is not very powerful. Danny Kahneman talks about this as System 2, with reasoning, versus System 1, the intuition. But all is not lost for reason. While individual reasoning is so flawed, while an individual rider is pretty poor at making the elephants do what the rider wants; but if you put us together in groups in the right way so that we can correct each others' motivated reasoning, human beings and human groups can actually end up producing pretty rational behavior. So this is my main debate with the rationalists. A lot of people accuse me of being an anti-rationalist who thinks that reason doesn't exist or doesn't matter. And I say, no, it's just that individual reasoning is really, really unreliable, or rather it reliably plays the role of a lawyer or press secretary. But why science works so well is because, while we can't disprove our own ideas--we are bad at that--boy, are we good at disproving each others' ideas. So, science ends up being pretty rational, even though it is made of individually flawed scientists. Russ: Yeah. Vernon Smith says something similar on this program a few years back. He won the Nobel Prize the same year that Danny Kahneman did and they both were experimentalists. Kahneman emphasized the irrationality of the human mind, and what Vernon Smith's interested in is how markets push irrational people into rational decisions. Guest: Yeah. Perfect. I love it. Let's give that guy the Nobel Prize. Russ: I do too. But of course I would like it, given my ideology, so I have to be careful. But there is no doubt that individuals don't make great decisions and markets make pretty good ones. So there's something going on there. Guest: Yeah, you aggregate--that's right, the weaknesses cancel out. Russ: Well, I don't know if they cancel out, but something's going on. It's actually, I think, a subject for a different kind of research agenda than the experimental kind, that the experimentalists do in labs, to think about how that process works. I don't know if anyone's written successfully on that. I think it would be a good idea.
32:09
Russ: Let's talk about your metaphor of our individualism versus our social side. You just mentioned that how we work well in groups and of course sometimes we work well in groups to hurt other groups; sometimes we work well in groups to create beautiful, extraordinary things, like a symphony performance. You say humans are 90% chimp and 10% bee. First, say what you mean by that. And my question, which I don't think you talk about much in the book, is: Where do you get those numbers from? Guest: Okay, sure. The easy part is the numbers I just made up as being approximate. Russ: Yeah, I understand. It's not 90.3, 90.7. Guest: Yeah. So what does it mean? There's so much written on the evolution of morality. And this especially started in the 1960s. So, Charles Darwin was really concerned about the evolution of morality, because here he was talking about the importance of competition, and why is it that animals sometimes cooperate? And what about humans? Morality seemed to be something of a challenge for his theory. So he had a lot of really good ideas about it, one of which was that sometimes a virtue might put one at a disadvantage relative to your peers, but if it helps the whole group and your group is competing with other groups, then this virtue can spread in that way, because your group is more successful. So this is known as group selection. And Darwin thought that perhaps as one of several processes human morality was a result of group selection as tribes vied with other tribes. And lots of people loved this idea that we are born to be cooperative. But it was applied in very wooly-headed ways. In the 1960s George Wilson basically demolished the idea and showed that if you just do very simple mathematical models that any sort of genetic basis for being altruistic might help your group but if there is a selfish person in the next tent over from you, that person will on average have more children than you and the genes for it will disappear. So that became dogma. Richard Dawkins really the developed the idea further in The Selfish Gene. That idea really became dogma: No group selection; there is no group selection. And so for 30 years all anyone talked about was reciprocal altruism, which is, you can easily show--Darwin suggested this--how we can't evolve to be uniformly nice, but boy, if we can recognize who is likely to return the favor, it is adaptive to be nice to that person. So, reciprocal altruism and kin selection. For 30 years that's all anyone ever wrote about. It got so boring, I couldn't stand to read these analyses in books, in the 1980s and 1990s. And in the 1990s then this guy, David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University had been arguing all along that, No, no, the models actually work for humans because as long as we have a way of stamping out free riding and punishing cheaters, actually you can get group selection models working well. And I read his book, Darwin's Cathedral, and I found it very, very persuasive. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you are just thinking about morality as altruism, you don't need group selection. But if you expand the moral domain as I did and you are interested in group loyalty and respect for authority and the idea of making things sacred, boy, these things don't make a lot of sense from reciprocal altruism. But they make perfect sense if you think about tribes competing with other tribes. And if you think as Darwin did that group cohesion matters when you have intergroup competition. So, what I'm saying here is that almost all human nature can be explained without group selection. We are 90% chimps. Chimps are not really group-selected. So, as Frans de Waal says, all the building blocks of human morality can be found in chimps. And I think almost all can. So that's the 90% chimp. But I think that, beginning with Homo heidelbergensis, which is about 800,000 years ago, beginning with that species, which is thought first to tame fire, have campsites, hunt large game cooperatively, bring it back to the campsite, butcher it--well, this group probably also, they had spears. They probably also were engaged in intergroup conflict. And it's this species that also begins to have cumulative cultural evolutions--the first signs of culture building on previous innovations. So, that I think was our Rubicon--Homo heidelbergensis, 800-500,000 years ago. So that opens up the possibility of true group selection aided by gene culture co-evolution. Now, bees are group selected. The bee doesn't live or die based on its ability to outcompete other bees. Bees live and die based on the hive's ability to prevail over other hives. So that's what I mean by we are 10% bee. We have a short period, maybe just a couple hundred thousand years, in which I believe there was group selection, adding a kind of group-selected overlay to our older human nature. And this is crucial for not just understanding war and genecide and all the ugly stuff, but patriotism, nation-building, local pride, sports. Our ability to form companies. Corporations--a corporation is, in law and in practice, a body composed of other bodies. So I think the evidence is all around us that we are groupish. And that's what I'm trying to capture in that metaphor--we are 10% bee. We have a little bit in common with bees because we went through a group selection process.
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Russ: I'm deeply in agreement with that. It's one of the things I think libertarians sometimes miss, which is our desire to be part of something larger than ourself. I think the Left romanticizes, say, our democracy or political process and takes away some of the realities of it to make it look more appealing than it actually is. But I think libertarians have no ability, almost no ability, to even appreciate the idea of the body politic or collective decision-making. And I understand the harm of it, the dangers of it. But it seems to be an important part of our humanity in lots of ways. And for some people, their political persuasion is their religion; for other people, their sports is their religion; and for some folks, their literal religion is their religion. Let's talk about that. I like your UVA, University of Virginia, Saturday afternoon religious experience. Talk about that and talk about how sports, religion, and all these things have many things in common. Guest: Yeah. That's what I found so--so, to make the structure of the book clear, the first part of the book is about the idea that intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. And you and I already talked about that. The middle part of the book is based on the idea that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. And that's all the moral tastebuds, the moral foundations. The third part of the book is based on the idea that morality binds and blinds. And it's because I saw so much the same behavior--if you read about initiation rites in non-Western societies and what it takes to turn a boy into a man and make him feel part of the group and a warrior who will defend the tribe's honor, and you look at what gangs do in the inner cities--same stuff. You look at the rituals, the way cults work to incorporate people--same stuff. You look at what a lot of religions do, a lot of sports teams do. Now even though they are doing more, more complicated. But there are all these different ways of achieving the same end, which is changing the individual to a group member. I'm very ungroupish. I'm rational atheist; I identified more with Spock than with Kirk growing up watching Star Trek. But at least as a scholar and a social scientist I see all this stuff. And I felt it at times. So I began studying it that way. And I think your point about libertarians--that's what I've found in my research on the different psychological types--libertarians are the most individualistic, the least emotional, the least sociable. They are the most rational. They are the smartest. Sounds like if you lean libertarian and if you recognize that portrait of libertarian, it sounds like you at least can rationally recognize that most people are really groupish, even if you are not. And so that's what I'm trying to do in this part of the book, is appeal to everybody to just explain that sort of bizarreness of our species. You look at sports, look at people going to football games in sub-zero weather painting their faces and taking their shirts off. By any rational calculation [?] intuitive, it's crazy, unless you realize that we are 10% bee. Russ: Yeah, and I think libertarians have handicapped themselves tremendously by failing to realize that most people aren't like us. Guest: That's right. I agree. Russ: Most people are groupish, most people are emotional. They don't want an analytical argument. Most people don't. They want an argument that appeals to the heart; and they want to feel part of something. So the libertarian--obviously there are many different strands of libertarianism, but I think the worst strand is the one that is totally individualistic and totally analytical; and that appeals powerfully to an analytical individualist. And then they can't understand why no one wants to go with them. And the answer is because you've made it unattractive.
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Guest: Here, I think we should bring in the idea of stories and narrative. And I know you've written two books that try to get at this. So, I must first ask you: Why did you write your books? Was it because you recognized this problem? Russ: Yeah, that's part of it. I've written actually three novels. They are all designed to touch the heart, because I think that's the overwhelming way that people accept or adopt ideas. And if we only as people of freedom, people who care about liberty, only couch our ideas in blackboard graphs and charts, we lose. Guest: Yeah. That's right. And here I would also bring in Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute [AEI]-- Russ: He's trying to do the same thing. Guest: He's trying to do the same thing for Conservatives. Exactly. That's right. That the arguments for the free market system can't be about productivity and graphs. Russ: Getting rich. Guest: They have to be that markets end up solving poverty; markets end up helping people, markets end up doing things that people on the Left would approve of. Russ: You, as we've talked about, are sympathetic, at least in concept, to Conservatives, and in certain issues. But what I've noticed--and this goes back--I'm going to lump Conservatives and libertarians together. Obviously in many ways they don't belong together. But in many areas they do overlap. They overlap certainly in economic policy. Excuse me--they tend to. I think there is a problem with the pro-business wing of the Conservative movement, which libertarians totally reject. But let's put that to the side. In 2001, James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate, wrote a rather extraordinary op ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he said that classical liberalism--and by that he meant a whole bunch of things, but one of the things it includes is free market policies--has lost the moral high ground. And you suggest in the book, implicitly, that because of these different moral centers that we have in our brain, that in many ways Conservatives, and you could argue libertarians who are free-market oriented, have an advantage, because they've got all these additional arguments. But I agree with Buchanan. I think the free-market viewpoint has lost a lot of its moral fiber; has trouble making a moral case to skeptics and independents. And we see this today when Republicans are trying to stop, say, unemployment benefits from being extended for--I think they've been in place for 5 years instead of the normal 39 weeks. But Republicans cannot make a moral case. And therefore they are going to vote to extend it, which they've done so far. What's going on there? Guest: Well, I don't know that free market ideology has lost the moral high ground, in that the evidence of history, which was ambiguous during the 20th century and which looked pretty bad in the 1930s for free market policies, obviously scored a big win with the fall of Communism. But what I'm seeing--here, I am in the business school--is the incredible rise of India and China and so many other countries, which has led to the rapid fall of poverty. I mean, this is one of the biggest events in human history: poverty rates are plummeting around the world. Because whenever a nation turns toward free markets, bang!, their poverty level drops. Maybe there are exceptions here and there, but in general. So, I think that free market have in a sense, won, on the global scale. Now, I think what's happening is that there are so many different forms of capitalism, which vary in their corruption, efficient markets are wonderful things but business leaders, government officials--there is so much to be gained by warping markets and taking kickbacks, bribes, rents. So, to the extent that free market societies in practice are corrupted, then it triggers outrage. It triggers the fairness foundation, that these guys are cheating; it triggers the liberty/oppression foundation and that these guys are bullying us. So, I spent a little time at Occupy Wall Street. [more to come, 45:26]