Notes

1. See Lakoff 2008 and Westen 2007 for a similar argument.

2. I equate Democrat with liberal and the left; I equate Republican with conservative and the right. That equation was not true before 1970, when both parties were broad coalitions, but since the 1980s, when the South changed its party allegiance from Democratic to Republican, the two parties have become sorted almost perfectly on the left-right axis. Data from the American National Election Survey shows this realignment clearly; the correlation of liberal-conservative self-identification with Democratic-Republican party identification has increased steadily since 1972, accelerating sharply in the 1990s (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008). Of course, not everyone fits neatly on this one-dimensional spectrum, and of those who do, most are somewhere in the middle, not near the extremes. But politics and policy are driven mostly by those who have strong partisan identities, and I focus in this chapter and in chapter 12 on understanding this kind of righteous mind.

3. Subjects in this study placed themselves on a scale from “strongly liberal” to “strongly conservative,” but I have changed “strongly” to “very” to match the wording used in Figure 2.

4. The longer and more accurate expansion of the shorthand is this: everyone can use any of the five foundations in some circumstances, but liberals like Care and Fairness best, and build their moral matrices mostly on those two foundations.

5. See report in Graham et al. 2011, Table 11, for data on the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, plus the rest of the world aggregated into regions: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The basic pattern I’ve reported here holds in all of these countries and regions.

6. Four years later, in January 2011, I gave a talk at this conference urging the field to recognize the binding and blinding effects of shared ideology. The talk, and reactions to it, are collected at www.JonathanHaidt.com/​postpartisan.html.

7. Wade 2007.

8. For people who say they are “very conservative” the lines actually cross, meaning that they value Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity slightly more than Care and Fairness, at least if we go by the questions on the MFQ. The questions on this version of the MFQ are mostly different from those on the original version, shown in Figure 1, so it is difficult to compare the exact means across the two forms. What matters is that the slopes of the lines are similar across the various versions of the questionnaire, and in this one, with a much larger number of subjects, the lines become quite straight, indicating a simple linear effect of political ideology on each of the five foundations.

9. Linguistic Inquiry Word Count; Pennebaker, Francis, and Booth 2003.

10. Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009. I note that the first pass of simple word counts produced the predicted results for all foundations except for Loyalty. When we did a second pass, in which we had our research assistants read the words in context and then code whether a moral foundation was being supported or rejected, the differences between the two denominations got larger, and the predicted differences were found for all five foundations, including Loyalty.

11. We examined the N400 and the LPP components. See Graham 2010.

12. Speech of June 15, 2008, delivered at the Apostolic Church of God, Chicago, Illinois.

13. Speech of June 30, 2008, in Independence, Missouri.

14. Speech of July 14, 2008, to the NAACP, Cincinnati, Ohio.

15. Speech of July 24, 2008. He introduced himself as “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” But conservative publications in the United States latched on to the “citizen of the world” part and did not quote the “proud citizen” part.

16. You can find the article here: www.edge.org/​3rd_culture/​haidt08/​haidt08_index.html. Brockman had recently become my literary agent.

17. See, for example, Adorno et al. 1950, and Jost et al. 2003. Lakoff 1996 offers a compatible analysis, although he does not present the conservative “strict father” morality as a pathology.

18. I learned to see the Durkheimian vision not just from reading Durkheim but from working with Richard Shweder and from living in India, as I described in chapter 5. I later discovered that much of the Durkheimian vision could be credited to the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke as well.

19. I want to emphasize that this analysis applies only to social conservatives. It does not apply to libertarians or to “laissez-faire” conservatives, also known as classical liberals. See chapter 12.

20. Of course, it’s a lot easier in ethnically homogeneous nations with long histories and one language, such as the Nordic countries. This may be one reason those nations are far more liberal and secular than the United States. See further discussion in chapter 12.

21. It’s interesting to note that Democrats have done much better in the U.S. Congress. Senators and congressmen are not priests. Legislation is a grubby and corrupt business in which the ability to bring money and jobs to one’s district may count for more than one’s ability to respect sacred symbols.

22. Bellah 1967.

23. Westen 2007, chapter 15, offered similar advice, also drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between sacred and profane. I benefited from his analysis.

24. I present this and subsequent email messages verbatim, edited only for length and to protect the anonymity of the writer.

25. We had long gotten complaints from libertarians that the initial five foundations could not account for the morality of libertarians. After we completed a major study comparing libertarians to liberals and conservatives, we concluded that they were right (Iyer et al. 2011). Our decision to modify the list of moral foundations was also influenced by a “challenge” that we posted at www.MoralFoundations.org, asking people to criticize Moral Foundations Theory and propose additional foundations. Strong arguments came in for liberty. Additional candidates that we are still investigating include honesty, Property/ownership, and Waste/inefficiency. The sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, is provisional in that we are now in the process of developing multiple ways to measure concerns about liberty, and so we have not yet carried out the rigorous testing that went into our research on the original five foundations and the original MFQ. I describe the Liberty/oppression foundation here because I believe that the theoretical rationale for it is strong, and because we have already found that concerns about liberty are indeed the focal concerns of libertarians (Iyer et al. 2011), a substantial group that is largely overlooked by political psychologists. But the empirical facts may prove otherwise. See www.MoralFoundations.org for updates on our research.

26. Boehm 1999.

27. Ibid. But see also the work of archaeologist Brian Hayden (2001), who finds that evidence of hierarchy and inequality often precedes the transition to agriculture by several thousand years as other technological innovations make it possible for “aggrandizers” to dominate production and also make it possible for groups to begin undertaking agriculture.

28. De Waal, 1996.

29. As described in de Waal 1982. Boehm 2012 tries to reconstruct a portrait of the last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. He concludes that the last common ancestor was more like the aggressive and territorial chimpanzee than like the more peaceful bonobo. Wrangham 2001 (and Wrangham and Pilbeam 2001) agrees, and suggests that bonobos and humans share many features because they might have both gone through a similar process of “self-domestication,” which made both species more peaceful and playful by making both retain more childlike features into adulthood. But nobody knows for sure, and de Waal and Lanting 1997 suggests that the last common ancestor might have been more similar to the bonobo than to the chimp, although this paper too notes that bonobos are more neotonous (childlike) than chimps.

30. In chapter 9 I’ll explain why the best candidate for this shift is Homo heidelbergensis, which first appears around seven or eight hundred thousand years ago, and then begins to master important new technologies such as fire and spear making.

31. Dunbar 1996.

32. De Waal 1996 argues that chimpanzees have a rudimentary ability to learn behavioral norms and then react to norm violators. As with so much else about comparisons between humans and chimps, there are hints of many advanced human abilities, yet norms don’t seem to grow and build on one another and envelop everyone. De Waal says clearly that he does not believe chimpanzees have morality. I think we can’t really speak about true “moral communities” until after Homo heidelbergensis, as I’ll explain in the next chapter.

33. Lee 1979, quoted in Boehm 1999, p. 180.

34. The term may have first been used in an 1852 New York Times article about Marx, but Marx and Marxists soon embraced the term, and it shows up in Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

35. Brehm and Brehm 1981.

36. The question of free riders naturally arises; see Dawkins 1976. Wouldn’t the best strategy be to hang back and let others risk their lives standing up to dangerous bullies? The free rider problem is quite pressing for species that lack language, norms, and moralistic punishment. But as I’ll show in the next chapter, its importance has been greatly overstated for humans. Morality is, in large part, an evolved solution to the free rider problem. Hunter-gatherer groups and also larger tribes can compel members to work and sacrifice for the group by punishing free riders; see Mathew and Boyd 2011.

37. Leaders often emerge in the struggle against tyranny, only to become tyrants themselves. As the rock band The Who famously put it: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

38. I thank Melody Dickson for permission to reprint from her email. All other quotations longer than one sentence from emails and blog posts in this chapter are used with permission of the authors, who chose to remain anonymous.

39. This was a reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, one of the first major acts of rebellion by the American colonists against Great Britain.

40. Hammerstein 2003.

41. I’m guilty of spreading this myth, in The Happiness Hypothesis. I was referring to work by Wilkinson 1984. But it turns out that Wilkinson’s bats were probably close kin. See Hammerstein 2003.

42. See a review in S. F. Brosnan 2006. In the main experimental study documenting fairness concerns in capuchins (S. F. Brosnan and de Waal 2003), the monkeys failed the main control condition: they got upset whenever they saw a grape that they did not have, whether the grape was given to the other monkey or not. My own view is that Brosnan and de Waal are probably right; chimps and capuchins do keep track of favors and slights, and do have a primitive sense of fairness. But they don’t live in moral matrices. In the absence of clear norms and gossip, they don’t show this sense of fairness consistently in lab situations.

43. Trivers did discuss “moralistic reciprocity,” but this is a very different process from reciprocal altruism. See Richerson and Boyd 2005, chapter 6.

44. Mathew and Boyd 2011.

45. Fehr and Gächter 2002.

46. Fehr and Gächter also ran a version of this study that was identical except that punishment was available in the first six rounds and taken away in the seventh round. The results were the same: high and rising levels of cooperation in the first six rounds, which plummeted at round 7 and declined from then on.

47. A PET study by de Quervain et al. 2004 found that reward areas of the brain were more active when people had a chance to inflict altruistic punishment. I should note that Carlsmith, Wilson, and Gilbert 2008 found that the pleasure of revenge is sometimes an “affective forecasting” error; revenge is often not as sweet as we expect. But whether they feel better or not afterward, the important point is that people want to punish when they are cheated.

48. This is Boehm’s thesis, and I see confirmation of it in the fact that the left has not been able to get the rest of the country upset by the extraordinary rise in American inequality since 1980. Finally, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests have begun to move beyond simply pointing to the inequality, and have begun to make claims based on the Fairness/cheating foundation (about how the “1 percent” cheated to get to the top, and about how they “owe” us for the bailout we gave them), and also on the Liberty/oppression foundation (about how the 1 percent has seized control of the government and abuses its power to harm or enslave the 99 percent). But simply pointing to inequality, without also showing cheating or oppression, does not seem to trigger much outrage.

49. In factor and cluster analyses of our data at YourMorals.org, we repeatedly find that questions about equality go with questions about care, harm, and compassion (the Care foundation), not with questions about proportionality.

50. See the large body of research in social psychology called “equity theory,” whose central axiom is that the ratio of net gains (outcome minus inputs) to inputs must be equal for all participants (Walster, Walster, and Berscheid 1978). That’s a definition of proportionality.

51. Children generally like equality, until they near puberty, but as their social intelligence matures they stop being rigid egalitarians and start becoming proportionalists; see Almas et al. 2010.

52. Cosmides and Tooby 2005.

53. Our goal with Moral Foundations Theory and YourMorals.org has been to find the best bridges between anthropology and evolutionary psychology, not the complete set of bridges. We think the six we have identified are the most important ones, and we find that we can explain most moral and political controversies using these six. But there are surely additional innate modules that give rise to additional moral intuitions. Other candidates we are investigating include intuitions about honesty, ownership, self-control, and waste. See MoralFoundations.org to learn about our research on additional moral foundations.

54. Starmans, Sheskin & Bloom 2017.

55. If you see a child in pain, you feel compassion. It’s like a drop of lemon juice on the tongue. I am arguing that witnessing inequality is not like this. It rankles us only when we perceive that the person is suffering (Care/harm), being oppressed by a bully (Liberty/oppression), or being cheated (Fairness/cheating). For an argument against me and in favor of equality as a basic foundation, see Rai and Fiske 2011.

56. You can see this finding across multiple surveys in Iyer et al. 2011.

57. Berlin 1997/1958 referred to this kind of liberty as “negative liberty”—the right to be left alone. He pointed out that the left had developed a new concept of “positive liberty” during the twentieth century—a conception of the rights and resources that people needed in order to enjoy liberty.

58. In a poll released October 26, 2004, the Pew Research Center found that small business owners favored Bush (56 percent) over Kerry (37 percent). A slight shift leftward in 2008 ended by 2010. See summary on HuffingtonPost.com by searching for “Small business polls: Dems get pummeled.”

59. This was our empirical finding in Iyer et al. 2011, which can be printed from www.MoralFoundations.org.

60. Unpublished data, YourMorals.org. You can take this survey by going to Your Morals.org and then taking the MFQ version B. Also, see our discussions of our data on fairness on the YourMorals blog.

61. Bar and Zussman 2011.

62. Frank 2004.