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.

Truth Out has the article JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall .

This time it’s the deceptively named “JOBS Act,” introduced by the far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members of both parties. The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a deregulating frenzy. Some of those protections were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which sociopathically unscrupulous business people conducted a hoax that ruined thousands of families and deprived many of their life’s savings.
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Worse, the bill is designed so that even billion-dollar corporations can be considered “startups,” leaving the door open for a dozen Enrons of tomorrow to shaft the unwary. The common-sense protections proposed by Sen. Jeff Merkley were rejected, while the equally rational protections of Sens. Scott Brown and Jack Reed, which were passed, will be fairly easy for clever sharks to swim around. We’ve seen this play before, and it never has a happy ending. That will no longer be required of them, thanks to the “JOBS” Act.

I have been so busy working on my volunteer projects that I have not been following the news as closely as usual.  I never got around to reading Scott Brown’s email that mentioned “crowd funding” also mentioned in this article.

This article does give faint praise to Brown’s contribution to the bill.

I wonder what Elizabeth Warren has to say about this bill.  Maybe I’ll do a little research and find out.  You can always beat me to it.

Here is the relevant section from Scott Brown’s Enewsletter that I had not had a chance to read.

Have you ever wished you were a part-owner of Facebook or Google when they first started? Or, are you an entrepreneur with a great business idea, but you can’t move forward because of the credit crunch?

To make it easier for people to invest in great ideas or start a small business, I’ve introduced a bill (S. 1791) to legalize something called “crowdfunding.” Here’s the background story: Believe it or not, we still live under investment laws that pre-date the first computer, and those laws prevent most people from investing small amounts – say a hundred dollars – in a new startup company or small business. Because of these rules, only the very wealthy are permitted – and can afford – to get through the red tape necessary to fund a new company.

That’s right – it’s nearly impossible for most people to invest one dollar of seed money into someone else’s new business. This makes no sense, especially in the Internet era, where every day we see new ideas, programs and social networks take off. The same technology and culture that has helped assure people that it is safe to buy a product on Ebay or donate to a charity over the internet can be used to help investors make smart decisions about what companies to support. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve hit the road to discuss this and other issues facing our small businesses.

Like so much of Scott Brown’s overblown and naive rhetoric, it is pure hogwash that “it’s nearly impossible for most people to invest one dollar of seed money into someone else’s new business.”  From time immemorial, entrepreneurs have been raising money from family and friends to start new businesses. A Vietnamese friend of mine once explained how his extended family started businesses in this country.  Every one contributed money to an investment fund.  Participants with ideas for businesses would ask to borrow from the fund.  They would be given money to start their business.  They would of course have a plan to pay it back.  They would also get the help of more experienced participants who may have already used this fund to start their own businesses.  I don’t think there were any laws that made it nearly impossible for this collaborative to operate.  I am willing to bet that large numbers of immigrant families have used this technique to bootstrap their way into the middle and upper classes in America, and they have been doing it for centuries. When I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell us bedtime stories about how our family got started in this country.

Since crowd funding has been going on long before Brown introduced his bill, (See Crowd funding on WikiPedia or do a Google search), one has to wonder what is in this bill that suddenly makes possible something that has already been going on for quite a while.

Politico has the story Senate passes JOBS Act, with tweak.

The change comes with an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), which would place additional restrictions on so-called crowdfunding, in which small amounts of money are collected from large groups of people.

Merkley said the crowdfunding portion of the House bill is “simply a pathway to predatory scams.”

Gee, Scott Brown didn’t mention “simply a pathway to predatory scams.” in his newsletter.

The Financial Times has the story Bernanke muted on health of US economy.

The story is interesting for what it included:

Mr Bernanke said most unemployment is due to lack of demand rather than structural problems in the labour market, such as workers lacking the right skills, or being stuck in the wrong parts of the country.

and for what it did not include.  There was no mention of high taxes, too much regulation, or the infamous “uncertainty.”  I wonder if the people at Nightly Business Report, which I have stopped watching, read stories like this.  Perhaps their certainty that “uncertainty” is the cause of the problem makes it impossible to realize what it is that Bernanke does not say.  A case of the proverbial “dog that didn’t bark” syndrome?