"The Righteous Mind," by Jonathan Haidt
Jeff Glor talks to Jonathan Haidt about "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Jonathan Haidt: When I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, I set for myself the task of trying to figure out what morality really is. Where does it come from? Why is it so variable around the world, yet at the same time, you see the same basic elements (such as reciprocity, care, loyalty, and authority) repeated over and over again? I studied how morality varied between India, the USA, and Brazil. But after John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in the presidential election of 2004, the Charlottesville Democratic Association asked me to give a talk on how liberals and conservatives differ. I found that the ideas I had developed to compare different countries worked quite well to compare different sides of the political spectrum. After that talk, I decided to change my research to focus on the left-right divide, which was (and still is) tearing America apart. "The Righteous Mind" is my effort to explain that divide, while at the same time answering the question I set out to answer in grad school: what is morality, and where does it come from?
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
JH: I tried so hard to see morality from everyone's point of view that I actually came to respect conservative and libertarian ideas, as much as liberal ideas. By the time I finished writing chapter eight, in which I tried to articulate conservative notions of fairness and liberty, I realized that I could no longer call myself a liberal. I am now a passionate centrist.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
JH: I'm a social psychologist who wrote his first book "The Happiness Hypothesis" at the age of 43. I'd be perfectly happy just doing experiments and writing them up for academic journals, rather than writing books. Well, that's not quite true. Writing a book is so much more fun than the defensive writing style one must use to write an article that will get torn apart during the peer review process.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
JH: I've just moved to the NYU-Stern School of Business, so I'm trying to understand the world of business, and the various ethics of capitalism. Books such as "The Mind and the Market," by Jerry Muller, "A Capitalism for the People," by Luigi Zingales, and "The Origin of Wealth," by Eric Beinhocker.
JG: What's next for you?
JH: Business ethics. No, it's not an oxymoron, but it does seem to be the case that business and business schools promote a practical, problem-solving mindset in which moral concerns are often pushed to the background. Business ethics has traditionally been handled by philosophers. I want to see if social psychology can do a better job of it. My goal is not to teach MBA students to be ethical, but rather to apply the ideas in "The Righteous Mind" to teach future leaders how they can set up organizations that will end up producing more ethical behavior by indirect means, and will therefore be less vulnerable to the ethical meltdowns that destroyed so many companies in the last 13 years, and harmed so many millions of people around the world.
For more on "The Righteous Mind," visit the Random House website.
