Conservatives Live in a Different Moral Universe -- And Here's Why It Matters

By Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune.com. Posted April 25, 2009.

An unapologetic liberal atheist, Haidt has a remarkable ability to describe opposing viewpoints without condescension or distortion. He forcefully expresses his own political opinions but understands how they are informed by his underlying moral orientation. In an era where deadlocked debates so often end with a dismissive "you just don't get it," he gets it.

Four years ago, he recalls, "I wanted to help Democrats press the right buttons because the Republicans were out-messaging them.

"I no longer want to be a part of that effort. What I want to do now is help both sides understand the other, so that policies can be made based on something more than misguided fear of what the other side is up to."

Haidt's journey into ethical self-awareness began during his senior year of high school in Westchester County, N.Y. "I had an existential crisis straight out of Woody Allen," he recalls. "If there's no God, how can there be a meaning to life? And if there's no meaning, why should I do my homework? So I decided to become a philosophy major and find out the meaning of life."

Once he began his studies at Yale, however, he found philosophy "generally boring, dry and irrelevant." So he gradually gravitated to the field of psychology, ultimately earning his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. There he met several influential teachers, including anthropologist Alan Fiske and Paul Rozin, an expert on the psychology of food and the emotion of disgust. Fascinated by Rozin's research, Haidt wrote his dissertation on moral judgment of disgusting but harmless actions - a study that helped point the way to his later findings.

As part of that early research, Haidt and a colleague, Brazilian psychologist Silvia Koller, posed a series of provocative questions to people in both Brazil and the U.S. One of the most revealing was: How would you react if a family ate the body of its pet dog, which had been accidentally run over that morning?

"There were differences between nations, but the biggest differences were across social classes within each nation," Haidt recalls. "Students at a private school in Philadelphia thought it was just as gross, but it wasn't harming anyone; their attitude was rationalist and harm-based. But when you moved down in social class or into Brazil, morality is based not on just harm. It's also about loyalty and family and authority and respect and purity. That was an important early finding."

On the strength of that paper, Haidt went to work for Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago who arranged for his postdoc fellow to spend three months in India. Haidt refers to his time in Bhubaneshwar -- an ancient city full of Hindu temples that retains a traditional form of morality with rigid cast and gender roles -- as transformative.

"I found there is not really a way to say 'thank you' or 'you're welcome' (in the local language)," he recalls. "There are ways of acknowledging appreciation, but saying 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' didn't make any emotional sense to them. Your stomach doesn't say 'thank you' to your esophagus for passing the food to it! What I finally came to understand was to stop acting as if everybody was equal. Rather, each person had a job to do, and that made the social system run smoothly."

Gradually getting past his reflexive Western attitudes, he realized that "the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability, which is very important in the absence of good central governance. But if the goal is creativity, scientific insight and artistic achievement, these traditional societies pretty well squelch it. Modern liberalism, with its support for self-expression, is much more effective. I really saw the yin-yang."

After returning to the U.S., Haidt accepted a position at the University of Virginia, where he continued to challenge the established wisdom in moral psychology. His colleagues were using data from middle-class American college students to draw sweeping conclusions about human nature. Proffitt remembers him arguing "with some passion" that they needed to widen their scope.

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Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years experience at daily newspapers. He has served as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Ventura County Star.

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