Born This Way? Nature, nurture, narratives, and the making of our political personalities

Jonathan Haidt.

As a nation, we’ve made great strides overcoming our differences. North vs. South, Catholic vs. Protestant, black vs. white. These divisions once brought forth extraordinary animosity. Even male vs. female had its day in the sun, for those of us old enough to remember the absurd 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Those differences have not disappeared, but the urgency and rancor has faded.

There is one difference, however, that is widening into a chasm and threatening to split the nation into two dysfunctional halves: left vs. right. Voters themselves have spread out only a bit in the last 10 years: Gallup reports a decline in the number of people calling themselves centrists or moderates (from 40 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2011), a slight rise in the number of conservatives (from 38 percent to 41 percent), and a slight rise in the number of liberals (from 19 percent to 21 percent).

But the political class, the political parties, and the media have completely changed their game since the 1980s. Politics used to be hardball: very competitive, but at the end of the day, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could meet for a drink and a private conversation. Congressmen and senators had the sense that they all belonged to a grand institution. They had enough in common, and enough friends across the aisle, that they could work together on solving the nation’s biggest challenges, from facing down the Soviets to dismantling Jim Crow.

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The Righteous Mind. Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Jonathan Haidt

Via Francisco Capella.

Extract:

It takes far more than technology to farm; it also takes cooperation. Many people must work together with such high levels of trust that they can divide up the tasks and then toil for many months with no reward. When the harvest finally comes in, the farmers must be able to share it, store it, defend it, and make some of it last until it’s time for next year’s planting. It takes a village to raise crops. How did our ancestors get to the point where they could work together in villages, then city-states, then nations?

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and few people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.  Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

Read full introduction.

Why We Celebrate a Killing by Jonathan Haidt

Una explicación de Jonathan Haidt de por qué se alegró la gente de la mierte de Osama bin Laden.


Why We Celebrate a Killing by Jonathan Haidt. (En español).

A man is shot in the head, and joyous celebrations break out 7,000 miles away. Although Americans are in full agreement that the demise of Osama bin Laden is a good thing, many are disturbed by the revelry. We should seek justice, not vengeance, they urge. Doesn’t this lower us to “their” level? Didn’t the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say, “I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy”? (No, he did not, but the Twitter users who popularized that misattributed quotation last week found it inspiring nonetheless.)

Why are so many Americans reluctant to join the party? As a social psychologist I believe that one major reason is that some people are thinking about this national event using the same moral intuitions they’d use for a standard criminal case. For example, they ask us to imagine whether it would be appropriate for two parents to celebrate the execution, by lethal injection, of the man who murdered their daughter.

Of course the parents would be entitled to feel relief and perhaps even private joy. But if they threw a party at the prison gates, popping Champagne corks as the syringe went in, that would be a celebration of death and vengeance, not justice. And is that not what we saw last Sunday night when young revelers, some drinking beer, converged on Times Square and the White House?

No, it is not. You can’t just scale up your ideas about morality at the individual level and apply them to groups and nations. If you do, you’ll miss all that was good, healthy and even altruistic about last week’s celebrations.

Here’s why. For the last 50 years, many evolutionary biologists have told us that we are little different from other primates — we’re selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves. But in the last few years there’s been a growing recognition that humans, far more than other primates, were shaped by natural selection acting at two different levels simultaneously. There’s the lower level at which individuals compete relentlessly with other individuals within their own groups. This competition rewards selfishness.

But there’s also a higher level at which groups compete with other groups. This competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense.

Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees. Just think of the long lines to give blood after 9/11. Most of us wanted to do something — anything — to help.

This two-layer psychology is the key to understanding religion, warfare, team sports and last week’s celebrations. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim even went so far as to call our species Homo duplex, or “two-level man.” Durkheim was writing a century ago, as organized religion was weakening across Europe. He wanted to know how nations and civil institutions could bind people into moral communities without the aid of religion. He thought the most powerful glue came from the emotions.

He contrasted two sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level. At the lower level, sentiments like respect and affection help individuals forge relationships with other individuals. But Durkheim was most interested in the sentiments that bind people into groups — the collective emotions. These emotions dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves.

One such emotion he called “collective effervescence”: the passion and ecstasy that is found in tribal religious rituals when communities come together to sing, dance around a fire and dissolve the boundaries that separate them from each other. The spontaneous celebrations of last week were straight out of Durkheim.

So is collective effervescence a good thing, or an ugly psychological relic from tribal times?

Some of those who were disturbed by the celebrations fear that this kind of unity is dangerous because it makes America more warlike and prejudiced against outsiders. When celebrants chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and sang “God Bless America,” were they not displaying a hateful “us versus them” mindset?

Once again, no. Many social psychologists distinguish patriotism — a love of one’s own country — from nationalism, which is the view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not.

The psychologist Linda Skitka studied the psychological traits that predicted which people displayed American flags in the weeks after 9/11. She found that the urge to display the flag “reflected patriotism and a desire to show solidarity with fellow citizens, rather than a desire to express out-group hostility.”

This is why I believe that last week’s celebrations were good and healthy. America achieved its goal — bravely and decisively — after 10 painful years. People who love their country sought out one another to share collective effervescence. They stepped out of their petty and partisan selves and became, briefly, just Americans rejoicing together.

This hive-ish moment won’t last long. But in the communal joy of last week, many of us felt, for an instant, that Americans might still be capable of working together to meet threats and challenges far greater than Osama bin Laden.

Más que viga, clave de bóveda por Arcadi Espada

Espada sobre la razón y la verdad. Centrándose en Jonathan Haidt.

Arnold Kling también escribe sobre Jonathan Haidt.

Destaco:

La cuestión es que fuimos retóricamente entrenados por la selección natural para que nuestros argumentos ganaran la batalla dialéctica antes que para encontrar la verdad.

Pero la verdad tiene esperanzas: cuando nos aplicamos a la crítica de los textos de los demás y no estamos enzarzados en ningún combate tertuliano, nuestro pensamiento puede recuperar la objetividad. He aquí la explicación en un fragmento de un artículo citado por Jonathan Haidt: «...Demuestra que, contrariamente a las lóbregas valoraciones respecto a la capacidad humana de razonar, la gente es bastante capaz de razonar de forma no distorsionada cuando está evaluando argumentos en vez de produciéndolos y cuando persigue la verdad en vez de ganar un debate.»

COMENTARIO:

La cuestión es que fuimos retóricamente entrenados por la selección natural para que nuestros argumentos ganaran la batalla dialéctica antes que para encontrar la verdad. Hay unos interesantísimos apuntes sobre el sesgo de confirmación en esta magna conferencia que pronunció Jonathan Haidt en la kermesse moral de Edge.

Pero la verdad tiene esperanzas: cuando nos aplicamos a la crítica de los textos de los demás y no estamos enzarzados en ningún combate tertuliano, nuestro pensamiento puede recuperar la objetividad. He aquí la explicación en un fragmento de un artículo citado por Jonathan Haidt:

«Incluso desde un punto de vista estrictamente epistemológico, la teoría argumentativa del razonamiento no dibuja un paisaje completamente descorazonador. Afirma que existe una asimetría entre la producción de argumentos, que implica una distorsión intrínseca a favor de las opiniones o decisiones del que argumenta, sea cual sea su sensatez, y la evaluación de los argumentos, cuyo objetivo es diferenciar los buenos argumentos de los malos y por tanto la información genuina de la desinformación. Esta asimetría queda a menudo oculta en una situación de debate (o en una situación donde un debate es anticipado). La gente que tiene una opinión que defender no evalúa realmente los argumentos de sus interlocutores en búsqueda de la información genuina, sino que los considera desde el principio contraargumentos que reprochar. Además, como demuestran las pruebas vistas en la sección 2, a la gente se le da bien valorar argumentos, y es bastante capaz de hacerlo sin distorsiones, siempre y cuando no tenga una particular vendetta. Los experimentos de razonamiento en grupo, en los que los participantes comparten un interés por descubrir la respuesta correcta, se ha demostrado que la verdad gana (Laughlin & Ellis, 1986; Moshman & Geil, 1998). Aunque los participantes en experimentos de tareas colectivas producen típicamente argumentos a favor de una variedad de hipótesis que en su mayoría son falsas, coinciden en reconocer argumentos sensatos. Cuando estas tareas tienen una solución válida demostrable, la verdad gana. Si generalizamos a otros problemas que no tienen una solución probable, debemos esperar, si no necesariamente la verdad, que ganen los buenos argumentos (y hemos visto en la prueba de la sección 2 que ése es en efecto el caso). Esto puede sonar trivial, pero no lo es. Demuestra que, contrariamente a las lóbregas valoraciones respecto a la capacidad humana de razonar, la gente es bastante capaz de razonar de forma no distorsionada cuando está evaluando argumentos en vez de produciéndolos y cuando persigue la verdad en vez de ganar un debate.»

Es decir, que la viga en el ojo ajeno existe. Me produce una gran tranquilidad.

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Ocioso, el delegado Lorente va a abrir un taller en Madrid. Espero que me pague con generosidad esta primera contribución.