Jon Haidt: Moral Psychology and Politics

Social psychologist Jon Haidt studies the moral judgments and intuitions of people in a variety of cultural contexts. He's identified 5 domains of moral judgment that each of us are sensitive to, albeit in varying degrees.

He's observed some interesting patterns regarding how well members of different groups (i.e., religious, cultural, political) emphasize each of these domains. This video is a talk by Haidt (about 20 min. long) presenting some of his observations and interpretations regarding moral judgment and political discourse.






I'm fascinated by this sort of research, and I believe Haidt's research suggests a lot about human nature, and the universality of so called 'moral values'. His 5 domains, and some of his other interpretations may have a bit of a western bias (i.e., would the domains have been labelled differently if one came from China or India? Would there have been more or less domains if one came from Nigeria?), but his ideas are very innovative and useful for further understanding our moral instincts.

Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis is a great and fascinating and relatively quick read that examines how a number of psychological studies align well with the ideas of many of the great philosophers (who, it turns out, were great because they were great intuitive psychologists) tell us about what makes humans happy and how what we conceptualize as 'morality' works for us psychologically. Other books I would highly recommend that deal with similar issues of moral psychology include Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, Michael Gazzaniga's The Ethical Brain, Michael McCullough's Beyond Revenge, Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, and Matt Ridley's The Origins if Virtue.