The New York Times book review, Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt, is a companion piece to my previous post Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture.
In the book review, William Saletan writes:
You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.
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Haidt’s faith in moral taste receptors may not survive this scrutiny. Our taste for sanctity or authority, like our taste for sugar, could turn out to be a dangerous relic. But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.
The reviewer very astutely assesses the value of the book and its ideas while also posing some thoughtful questions about those ideas. I think I may have hinted at some of those questions in my previous post.
Haidt’s insights are not completely new to me. The book How We Decide covers some of the same ground from the psychological side of things.
The following quote from the review of Heidt’s book shows why we need to be thoughtful about the conclusions we draw.
To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.
The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.
What I take from the description of these experiments is that if you first trigger a visceral reaction to a subject, then the reasoning process will be turned to justifying this visceral reaction. If you can avoid triggering this reaction, then you might be able to reason about a subject in a balanced way.
The terms “hot button issues”, “red meat issues”, “wedge issues” came from an understanding of the human nature of thinking and reasoning. If you want to elicit a certain response, you need to trigger the visceral reaction that most suits your needs and then you won’t have to even be concerned about the reasoning that will follow. You must also avoid triggering the visceral reaction that does not suit your needs.
If the Republicans get to introduce a topic with the visceral reaction that suits their needs, then there is little the Democrats can do to use reason to convince people that the Republican position is wrong.
Perhaps, what the Democrats need to do is to bring up the visceral reaction that suits the Democrats’ needs and then start to reason.
An example might be the discussion I had on the web site of the Politico news story, Senate passes JOBS Act, with tweak. One of the comments on the article was as follows:
Hopefully this time next year America will have it’s ease from the painful lesson of voting in Obama in 2008.
We’ll see business come back stronger and quicker under a new Pro- business President like Romney.
My response was:
But Romney’s activities as a “business man” are the exact cause of much of the trouble this country finds itself in.
Outsourcing jobs
Draining company assets to pay for salaries of vulture capitalists and letting the debt holders try to get their money back in bankruptcy court.
Draining the funds put aside for employee pensions, closing the factories, and leaving workers without jobs or pensions or health care insurance.
How much more of this “pro business” behavior do you think this country can survive?
Perhaps I could have tweaked this response a bit. The point is to hit the visceral concepts of stealing assets, stealing pensions, stealing jobs, and stealing health benefits.