The Righteous Mind (Your Coach in a Box)

by Jonathan Haidt

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.
 
His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

• ISBN10: 0307907031
• ISBN13: 9780307907035
• Publish Date: 13 March 2012 (first published 1 January 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 299
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Does NOT Predict July 2024 Assassination Attempt of President Trump. This is a book I've had for a few years now - apparently I purchased my copy in 2020, several years after it had been out, and I just this month read it after an Acton Institute Fellow claimed on Twitter that this book "predicted in 2012" that something like the assassination attempt of President Trump would occur.  

 

To be clear, if there is any indication at all of such a prediction, I must have missed it somehow.

 

Instead, what this book *does* do is show Haidt's own work as a psychology based sociologist, studying both societies and how the brain gets to the decisions it makes. Here, Haidt actually has a lot of seemingly solid ideas... though it is clear in looking through the one star reviews that few on the left appreciate his candor, despite his own admitted background (and presumptive leanings at the time of writing this, at minimum, back in 2011 or so) being as a leftist himself.

 

Yet Haidt makes his points clearly and logically, and actively builds concepts up rather than just expecting the reader to understand complex points from the get-go. The narrative is well laid out, and the overall writing is such that nearly anyone should be able to follow along reasonably well.  

 

I can't speak to the bibliography, as I listened to the Audible form of this book and thus don't have access to that particular information.

 

Thus, all that I can see here, all that I experienced here, was a reasonably well written, clearly thought out narrative structure that made clear Haidt's own work and the work of others in his field in a way that proves particularly illuminating and worthy of conisderation.

 

Indeed, in the points Haidt actually makes within this text, we can all learn to understand each other quite a bit better... which actually leans to this book *not* predicting any assassination attempts on current or former Presidents.

 

Still, I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book, and I absolutely recommend you do too... just don't think it makes any predictions on current events. (It doesn't.)

 

Very much recommended.