Summary Of The Righteous Mind By Jonathan Haidt

The book “The Righteous Mind”Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion isn’t entirely about politics and religion. The book covers all spheres of belief, even why we experience gut feelings. Jonathan Haidt explains the psychology behind why we hold certain beliefs and why we feel different emotions towards others. He also explains origins about many social taboos of groups and why certain groups of people won’t eat certain foods or partake in activities. His sphere of influence and sampling of opinions from surveys varies from upper class Virginia to lower class India, to aboriginal Papua New Guinea. The experiments he conducts are a series of questions that include scenarios and he observes how the people in each area react. Of
course, later in the book, he does delve deeper into the topic of religion and politics. He explains the psychology of why people tend to stay around people who are similar to themselves and their own beliefs. He also, sets aside his own personal political beliefs and preferences multiple times throughout the book and uses his own biases productively throughout the book so there are more relatable and realistic examples of what he is writing about. The biases we hold, although have helped our species survive and evolve since our existence, also blind us at times and force us toward staying closed minded and blind ourselves to others who are not like ourselves. The book was divided into parts which I will review, along with the chapters inside of the parts which will act as subcategories as I review how he wrote and summarize what occurs in the writing,
Part One is titled “Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Comes Second”
Throughout history, psychologists have disagreed about why people hold specific morals, mainly if people are born with morals, or rather if the morals that they have are forged into them by their surroundings.
With the rise of rationalism, people were not as obligated to give religious responses to everyday occurrences and mental processes. The idea that people aren’t inherently good or don’t have morals straight from the get-go was actually a very large step in the world of psychology because of the barriers (both legal and mental) that had been set up by people’s own religious beliefs. Jonathan came to the conslusion that people naturally have the need to have a moral compass to stand by, and that it is made by our surroundings. In this chapter, he surveys groups of people from many different cultures, upbringings, economic and social classes, and geographic location. He tells the surveyee to decide whether anyone in this story does anything that is morally wrong, he uses the scenario “A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.”. Unless you yourself has some psychological or social disorder, you most likely had an immediate
reaction.