Moral foundations are basically innate psychological mechanisms for evaluating particular problems or situations.

Wait, what the hell are moral foundations? In his acclaimed book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt summarizes his 25 years of research in moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and anthropology, and outlines an incredible theory that he helped to develop: Moral Foundations Theory.īased on exhaustive research, Moral Foundations Theory holds that human morality is fundamentally based on six different moral foundations within the human mind. HighExistence’s Executive Editor Jordan Bates wrote a fantastic introduction to Haidt’s work a couple months ago, and in this post I’d like to further expand on precisely what Haidt has discovered about human psychology and why it’s so damn important.Īs I get into things, you might find yourself asking, “Wait, what does this have to do with healing division among people?” I ask that you trust me and bear with me I swear to you that this man’s work is worth understanding. Haidt is a moral psychologist who has spent the last two and half decades trying to understand why people are so divided by politics, religion, and questions of morality. If this is indeed a promising course of action, there’s one man in particular who I think can be of tremendous assistance. Perhaps the answer to this riddle has something to do with admitting our own fallibility and probing deeper into the reasons why others see the world differently. Perhaps-if I may be so audacious as to suggest-the way out of this mess has something to do with understanding and humility. Given this situation, I find myself asking: Tribalism is alive and well, and in many places, it’s leading to disaster. It’s mirrored throughout the world in different ways. Them.”Īnd the situation in the US is not isolated. “We the people” are now thoroughly caught up in a seemingly unending, toxic game of “Us vs. Close friends, family members, and neighbors are at each other’s throats. People have become hyper-polarized, combative, distrustful, and violent toward one another. The 2016 US election and its aftermath is a recent example of extreme tribalism resulting in nasty consequences. This tendency to split up into groups-sometimes called “tribalism”-is often harmless, but it can also become catastrophic if it gets out of hand. Our groups used to be nothing more than the tribes into which we were born, but nowadays, our groups are based on many things: politics, religion, class, race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, etc. It’s no secret that we live in a divided world.įor millennia, we humans have been splitting up into groups, distrusting groups we’re not part of, and fighting amongst ourselves.

J haidt the righteous mind