Tag: The Righteous Mind

  • Rather, people care about their groups

    Another interesting item from The Righteous Mind. People don’t vote on self-interest all that much – that is, “self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.” [p 85]

    Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. [p 86]

    Or all those in sequence, which confuses things; or all those in sequence plus others plus all those not so much in sequence as in competition all the time, waxing and waning depending on which is most salient at any particular moment. That’s my gloss, not his, but I think it has to be right, since we’re all part of all the groups he named plus a bunch of others, and they’re not all equally salient at every moment.

    But anyway, the basic idea is useful and suggestive. A lot of us have experienced our atheism becoming less salient while our our membership in the gender group “women” has become more so, lately. We’ve experienced this so strongly that many of us express considerable hostility to the atheist “movement” as such.

    Why is this? I don’t even need to explain it, do I. It’s because big chunks of the atheist movement have taken to using a fairly large number of women as verbal punching bags, using gender-specific words and sexual disgust as boxing gloves. That makes our gender group a lot more salient while it makes our atheism group seem hostile.

    I wonder how that’s going to work out over the long haul. I don’t know, and I wonder.

  • Only the best people turn up this road

    Speaking of righteous and unrighteous, I’m still reading the Jonathan Haidt book. (I read several books at once, so that I’ll be sure to confuse them all.) I’m quite liking Part One, which argues for the primacy of intuition over reasoning. I’ve seen a lot of it before but not all of it, and anyway it’s presented well. It’s convincing.

    Like the bit on p 55 about William Wundt and “affective primacy.”

    Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something.

    I’ve been noticing something like that recently, with amusement, about driving – about a ridiculous little sorting thing going on in my head while driving that has to do with approval of the road I take and disparagement of the road others take. That’s related to stuff like “I’m going fast enough here, so the people behind me will know I know my way and I’m not some pathetic outsider who doesn’t know the way.” I have thoughts like that constantly, and then once in awhile I notice them and laugh at how ludicrous they are.

    That’s not related to the affect, really, but to the small flashes.

    Anyway, Wundt said that

    affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is.

    Wundt said it in the 1890s. In 1980 a social psychologist, Robert Zajonc, revived the idea, to correct the then-prevalent one that humans are “cool, rational information processors.”

    Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual-process model in which affect or “feeling” is the first process. It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behavior). The second process – thinking – is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation.

    Affect is more powerful than thinking.

    I knew that, but that’s a particularly vivid way of explaining it, or reminding us of it.

  • Reading Jonathan Haidt

    I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. So far I’m finding it less annoying than other stuff of his I’ve read. I think I’m seeing a flaw, though, but maybe he gets to what I think is missing later on.

    Groups are useful, so cohesion is useful. Religions foster cohesion, and are an efficient way to discourage cheaters and free riders. People behave better when they think someone is watching.

    Groups can do things that individuals can’t do.

    Haidt thinks modern intellectual types – people like him, people like me – overvalue individuals and undervalue groups.

    I suppose that’s true of me, at least up to a point. But but but

    Well for one thing, modern intellectual types do a pretty good job of managing groups that can accomplish more than individuals can. Far from perfect, but pretty good. For another thing, anti-modern anti-intellectual types who love the group more than the individual can create hells on earth.

    There’s an interesting bit on pp 256-7 though, about a study by the anthropologist Richard Sosis, of 200 communes founded in the US in the 19th century. Some were religious, others were secular and mostly socialist. The religious ones survived longer. Why?

    He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members.

    But that worked for religious ones and not secular ones. Why?

    Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”

    Pesky secular people ask why, and refuse to do it if they don’t get a good answer. Then everything falls apart. Costly sacrifice is a good solution to the problem of cooperation without kinship, and secular people are bad at it.

    Interesting. Suggestive. But…

    Well, what if for instance the costly sacrifices are made by just one part of the group? Like, say – oh, just wildly at random here – women? Other races? People branded “untouchable”?

    Haidt can be surprisingly bad at seeing this, or at least at mentioning it. But I’ve read only a little so far (I jumped ahead to 256), so maybe in this book he does better.