The Righteous Mind

The model

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who taught for many years at the University of Virginia before moving in 2011 to New York University’s Stern School of Business. The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, brings together two decades of his research on moral psychology. The book has three parts, each built around a principle.

The first principle is that intuitions come first and strategic reasoning second. Haidt’s image is an elephant and its rider. The elephant is intuition, the fast, automatic, emotional processing that does most of the work; the rider is conscious reasoning, which can see ahead and occasionally steer, but mostly serves the elephant. In moral judgement, the rider acts less like a judge weighing evidence and more like a press secretary, producing justifications for conclusions the elephant has already reached. Haidt’s early experiments asked people to judge harmless but disgusting acts, such as a family eating its dog after it had died accidentally. People condemned the acts and, when every reason they offered was shown not to apply, still condemned them, a state Haidt calls moral dumbfounding.

The second principle is that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. Haidt and his colleagues proposed that human moral intuitions draw on several foundations, each shaped by evolution to solve a social problem. Care, the intuition to protect the vulnerable. Fairness, concern for reciprocity and cheating. Loyalty, commitment to one’s group. Authority, respect for legitimate hierarchy and tradition. Sanctity, the sense that some things are sacred and others degrading. In the book Haidt added a sixth, liberty, resentment of domination. Surveys found that American liberals rely mainly on care and fairness, while conservatives draw on all six more equally. Haidt argues that this helps explain why each side finds the other’s morality incomprehensible.

The third principle is that morality binds and blinds. Human beings, in Haidt’s phrase, are ninety per cent chimp and ten per cent bee: mostly selfish, but capable under the right conditions of losing themselves in a group, through ritual, shared purpose and synchrony. That capacity, which he calls the hive switch, allowed large-scale cooperation. It also makes people blind to the arguments of rival groups, because once a view becomes part of a group’s identity, questioning it feels like betrayal.

Seeing with it

The model explains why political arguments fail. Facts and reasons address the rider, but the elephant decides. People are more likely to change their minds when they feel respected and connected to someone who holds a different view, because the elephant leans toward people it likes.

It also explains why moral appeals that work on one side fail on the other. A campaign that speaks only of care and fairness will move people who weight those foundations most, and leave others unmoved. Haidt suggests that understanding which foundations a person draws on is the first step to speaking to them.

The model reaches beyond politics. Organisations, too, are moral communities, with their own sacred values and taboos, and the same psychology that binds a political tribe can bind a company or team, for good or ill. The site’s idea page Groupthink and the Silence of Rooms explores one consequence.

Where the model stops

Moral foundations theory has been actively debated. Some psychologists, such as Kurt Gray, argue that harm is more central than the theory allows, and that other foundations can be understood as perceptions of harm. Researchers have also questioned whether the standard questionnaire measures the foundations equally well across cultures and groups. Haidt and his colleagues have revised the theory over time, and a newer version of the questionnaire separates fairness as equality from fairness as proportionality.

The social intuitionist model has also been challenged by researchers who find that reasoning plays a larger role in moral change over time, even if it rarely changes minds within a single conversation. Haidt himself allows that reasoning can influence others, and that private reflection sometimes changes one’s own intuitions.

Since it was published

The book’s account of polarisation became widely cited as political division deepened in many countries in the following decade. Haidt went on to co-found Heterodox Academy, which promotes viewpoint diversity in universities, and to write The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff) and The Anxious Generation (2024), on the effects of smartphones on adolescents. The site’s essay on social media, Everyone You Know, and Everyone You Don’t, draws on the dynamics of group identity and outrage that the book describes.

Questions it lets you ask

Is this disagreement really about facts, or about intuitions we have not named? Which foundations is the other side drawing on that we are not? Am I reasoning toward a conclusion, or justifying one I already hold? What would it take for me to feel connected enough to someone to hear their view? What does our group treat as sacred, and what can no one question? And where is the hive switch helping us cooperate, and where is it blinding us?