This guy, Jonathan Haidt, is one of the best social researchers and commentators I have seen. He provided the only real light on what makes conservatives tick in an article I read a couple of years ago.
Now he is expounding an obvious truth:
But Americans need to understand the threat before they can react to it. And then they need to react to it in positive, not negative, ways.A Bedouin proverb says, “Me against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and me against strangers.” Human beings are pretty good at uniting to fight at whatever level is most important at a given moment.
One way is to focus on common threats, rather than on common ground, just as the Bedouin proverb suggests. It’s only the threat of the stranger that brings the extended family together. A physical attack by outsiders — like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 — binds people together like nothing else. But what if there is no such attack? Can trade competition with China do it? What about a threat we created ourselves? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/op...=politics&_r=0
Come sit down beside me I said to myself
And although it doesn't make sense
I held my own hand as a small sign of trust
And together I sat on the fence
Anon. Very anon.
@ Liberals or Conservatives: Who’s Really Close-Minded?University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as close-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.
Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting....
But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here it’s not conservatives.
Haidt has a theory regarding why this is the case, based on the idea that conservatives speak a broader and more encompassing language of six moral values while liberals embrace three of the six in a narrow set of core values....
The difference is liberals' narrower embrace of moral values, they're closed-minded to those they can't comprehend, and are unaware of this.
Rubbish? Here's Haidt in his own words:@ Born This Way? Nature, nurture, narratives, and the making of our political personalitiesCrossing the Divide
The two narratives are as opposed as they could be. Can partisans even understand the story told by the other side? The obstacles to empathy are not symmetrical. There is no foundation used by the left that is not also used by the right. Even though conservatives score slightly lower on measures of empathy and may therefore be less moved by a story about suffering and oppression, they can still recognize that it is awful to be kept in chains. And even though many conservatives opposed some of the great liberations of the 20th century—of women, sweatshop workers, African Americans, and gay people—they have applauded others, such as the liberation of Eastern Europe from communist oppression.
But when liberals try to understand the Reagan narrative, they have a harder time. When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations—loyalty, authority, and sanctity—I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.
In a study I conducted with colleagues Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and con*servatives could understand each other. We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?
The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He is more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.
Haidt's 6 "moral values" are, of course, the constructs of someone with a conservative bent. Though that does not lessen my admiration for his work in explaining how conservatives think.
A liberal proponent would no doubt construct a different set of values. Which conservatives would no doubt not understand either.
The American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) endorsement of Haidt's leanings acknowledges the partisanship Haidt pretends to avoid.
Last edited by Awryly; 11-07-2012 at 08:29 PM.
Come sit down beside me I said to myself
And although it doesn't make sense
I held my own hand as a small sign of trust
And together I sat on the fence
Anon. Very anon.
That is simply not what Haidt has found, namely that of six moral values, the three moral values liberals hold to overlap the six conservatives hold to, iow, they share three, but liberals lack three more, and that is why they fail to comprehend what conservatives say and are intolerant.
You defended Haidt: "This guy, Jonathan Haidt, is one of the best social researchers and commentators I have seen." I'm just showing you what he actually says.