The Righteous Mind - by Jonathan Haidt
ISBN: 0307455777Date read: 2023-05-28
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Brilliant insights into human nature. Moral reasoning, inventing victims, emotional reactions, the elephant (emotions) and its rider (explanations). Intuition reacts then logic confabulates a reason. Survival of the fittest applied to groups. Understanding religion and tradition. Great from start to finish.
my notes
My goal here is not just to build a legal case in an academic battle that you might care nothing about.
Morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.
Human nature is intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.
Moral reasoning is a skill we evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to.
Moral reasoning is mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Children’s understanding of morality is self-constructed as kids play with other kids.
Rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal.
Actions that Americans said were wrong but Indians said were acceptable:
• A young married woman went alone to see a movie without informing her husband. When she returned home her husband said, “If you do it again, I will beat you black and blue.” She did it again; he beat her black and blue. (Judge the husband.)
• A man had a married son and a married daughter. After his death his son claimed most of the property. His daughter got little. (Judge the son.)
Actions that Indians said were wrong but Americans said were acceptable:
• In a family, a 25-year-old son addresses his father by his first name.
• A woman cooked rice and wanted to eat with her husband and his elder brother. Then she ate with them. (Judge the woman.)
• A widow in your community eats fish two or three times a week.
• After defecation a woman did not change her clothes before cooking.
In the US, the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom.
When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned.
If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
Inventing victims:
I had written the stories carefully to remove all conceivable harm to other people, yet in 38 percent claimed that somebody was harmed.
Were people really condemning the actions because they foresaw these harms, or inventing these harms because they had already condemned the actions?
People usually condemned the actions very quickly, but it took them a while to come up with a victim.
“I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.”
Their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.
Not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it.
Morality binds and blinds.
The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality.
Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths?
Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?
Reasoning is the servant of the passions. When the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.
Reasoning-why, we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.
Saying “Because I don’t want to” is a perfectly acceptable justification for one’s subjective preferences.
Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong.
I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside of my own preferences. That pointing is moral reasoning.
We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.
Emotions are not dumb.
Emotions are a kind of information processing.
Patients made terrible decisions when deprived of emotional input into their decision making.
Contrasting emotion with cognition is as pointless as contrasting rain with weather, or cars with vehicles.
Ditch the emotion-cognition contrast.
Moral judgment is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgment.
We all make hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions every day.
Notice the many tiny flashes of condemnation that flit through your consciousness, the next time you read a newspaper or drive a car.
Two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning.
Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds for 500 million years.
When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning the brain did not hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer.
Reasoning can do several useful things:
It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads)
It can help make better decisions in the present.
It can learn new skills and master new technologies
The rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking.
The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next.
Friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.
Social influence: Other people influence us constantly just by revealing that they like or dislike somebody.
Other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing.
Moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog.
A dog’s tail wags to communicate.
You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail.
And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.
Few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode, to fend off attacks and lob rhetorical grenades
The performance may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team.
Truly see it the other person’s way - deeply and intuitively.
I lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.
We lie, cheat, and justify so well that we honestly believe we are honest.
Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit to the self, and then adjust behavior to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad.
Most of our reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions.
Almost everything we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect.
Small flashes of positive or negative.
We find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is.
You can make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.
The brain tags familiar things as good things. This is the “mere exposure effect”.
Thinking could work independently of feeling in theory.
But in practice affective reactions are so fast and compelling that they act like blinders on a horse.
They reduce available alternatives for later thinking.
When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling.
If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it.
Subjects who are asked to wash their hands with soap before filling out questionnaires become more moralistic about issues related to moral purity.
Once you’re clean, you want to keep dirty things far away.
Also the reverse process: immorality makes people want to get clean.
When does the elephant listen to reason?
The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people.
We are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.
Other people do us this favor.
If there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments.
Flip a coin on the day of your birth:
Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel.
Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue.
Which outcome would you prefer?
People care much more about appearance and reputation than about reality.
Reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth.
To design an ethical society, make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
Moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes.
When people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically.
They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.
Accountability is the explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others, coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.
When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.
Exploratory thought is an evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.
Confirmatory thought is a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.
Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply:
(1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience
(2) the audience’s views are unknown
(3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.
The rest of the time - which is almost all of the time - accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought.
Trying harder to look right than to be right.
Reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery.
We are also trying to persuade ourselves.
We want to believe the things we are about to say to others.
When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?”
We search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking.
We now have permission to believe.
We have a justification, in case anyone asks.
When we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?”
Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.
The WEIRDer you are - (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) - the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
You can’t study the mind while ignoring culture, as psychologists usually do, because minds function only once they’ve been filled out by a particular culture.
You can’t study culture while ignoring psychology, as anthropologists usually do, because social practices and institutions are shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind.
When you’re grateful to people, it’s easier to adopt their perspective.
Your emotions lean towards them, which make your logic search for moral arguments in their defense.
In India, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.
In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values.
Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.
I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.
We are multiple from the start.
Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood.
Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.
This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework.
Moral monism - the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle - leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.
Humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods.
Original triggers are the set of objects for which the module was designed.
(Example: the set of all snakes is the original trigger for a snake-detector module)
The current triggers are all the things in the world that happen to trigger it.
(including real snakes, as well as toy snakes, curved sticks)
Modules make mistakes.
Cultures can shrink or expand the current triggers of any module.
Many moral controversies turn out to involve competing ways to link a behavior to a moral module.
In psychology, theories are cheap. Anyone can invent one.
Progress happens when theories are tested, supported, and corrected by empirical evidence.
Especially when a theory proves to be useful.
Babies’ brains are prewired - flexible and subject to change - rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.
The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development.
No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood.
But not a single chapter - be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality - consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.
Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
“Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
We care about violence toward many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did in their time.
Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules.
To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.
Conservative caring is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group.
It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.
“Selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity.
On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality - people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
Loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.
Far worse than lust, gluttony, violence, or even heresy is the betrayal of one’s family, team, or nation.
Neophilia (an attraction to new things)
Neophobia (a fear of new things)
People vary in terms of which motive is stronger.
Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”).
Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.
Plagues, epidemics, and new diseases are usually brought in by foreigners - as are many new ideas, goods, and technologies - so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia.
Every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations.
Humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.
Aggressive, controlling behavior can trigger righteous anger: the feeling you get when an authority tells you you can’t do something and you feel yourself wanting to do it even more strongly.
The rise of a would-be dominator triggers a motivation to unite as equals with other oppressed individuals to resist, restrain, and in extreme cases kill the oppressor.
We are wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust.
Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We’re one-of-a-kind freaks of nature who can be as selfless and team-spirited as bees.
Our ability to work together, divide labor, help each other, and function as a team.
It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.
When early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased exponentially.
Everyone on the team now had a mental representation of the task, knew that his or her partners shared the same representation, knew when a partner had acted in a way that impeded success or that hogged the spoils, and reacted negatively to such violations.
When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born.
Cultural innovations (such as keeping cattle) can lead to genetic responses (such as adult lactose tolerance).
We love using symbolic markers to show our group memberships.
From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships.
A way to forge a sense of “we” that extends beyond kinship.
We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us.
We expect them to share our values and norms.
Shame and guilt increase the chance that norms are followed.
Individuals who found it harder to play along, to restrain their antisocial impulses, and to conform to the most important collective norms would not have been anyone’s top choice when it came time to choose partners for hunting, foraging, or mating.
We self-domesticate.
Our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness.
Domestication generally takes traits that disappear at the end of childhood and keeps them turned on for life.
Genes are constantly turning on and off in response to conditions such as stress, starvation, or sickness.
Genetic evolution kicked into overdrive in the Holocene era, pulling along mutations such as the lactose tolerance gene, or a gene that changed the blood of Tibetans so that they could live at high altitudes.
Every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks, 74,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.
People have two distinct sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level.
Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.
Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life.
Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more.
Mirror neurons: people feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates.
Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile.
The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn passes the smile into someone else’s brain.
We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.
Corporations turned out to be a winning formula. They let people place themselves into a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential for gigantic rewards.
It’s no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.
People are happy to follow when they see that their group needs to get something done, and when the person who emerges as the leader doesn’t activate their hypersensitive oppression detectors.
A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation.
Increase similarity, not diversity, to make everyone feel like a family.
Drown race differences in a sea of similarities.
Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights.
A nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people.
A nation of individuals, in contrast, is likely to be hungry for meaning.
Showing support for their football team may help fans motivate the players, but is that the function of these behaviors? No. The creation of a community.
Religion cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees.
Trying to understand religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand football by studying the ball.
Look at the ways that religious beliefs create a religious community.
Believing, doing, and belonging.
Either you have to grant that religiosity is beneficial, or you have to construct a complicated, multistep explanation of how humans in all known cultures came to swim against the tide of adaptation and do so much self-destructive religious stuff.
The New Atheists choose the latter course.
Religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative.
Groups with less effective religions didn’t necessarily get wiped out; often they just adopted the more effective variations.
So it’s really the religions that evolved, not the people.
The gods of larger societies are usually quite concerned about actions that make conflict and division within the group, such as murder, adultery, false witness, and the breaking of oaths.
People cheat more on a test when the lights are dimmed.
They cheat less when there is an image of an eye nearby.
Gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turn out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.
Religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper.
Rice farming takes a cast of hundreds.
Over several centuries the Balinese carved hundreds of terraced pools into the mountainside and irrigated them with an elaborate series of aqueducts and tunnels, some running underground for more than a kilometer. How did they maintain it and share its waters fairly and sustainably?
Place a small temple at every fork in the irrigation system. The god in each such temple united all the subaks that were downstream from it into a community that worshipped that god, thereby helping the subaks to resolve their disputes more amicably. This arrangement minimized the cheating and deception that would otherwise flourish in a zero-sum division of water. The system made it possible for thousands of farmers, spread over hundreds of square kilometers, to cooperate without the need for central government, inspectors, and courts.
Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon.
In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts.
Supernatural punishment for abrogation.
What matters for neighborliness? Religious belongingness, not religious believing.
The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.
Religions are moral exoskeletons.
If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior.
But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That is also a recipe for anomie - (“normlessness.”)
Atheistic societies are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.
Philosophers are rarely interested in what people happen to think.
Identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together rarely turn out similar to each other.
Genes contribute to just about every aspect of our personalities: the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation.
Genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences.
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story.
The most important stories we know are stories about ourselves.
Had his teachers treated him differently - or had he simply interpreted events differently when creating early drafts of his narrative - he could have ended up in a more conventional job.
But Keith Richards came to understand himself as a crusader against abusive authority.
His own life narrative just fit too well with the stories that all parties on the left tell.
The book “Moral, Believing Animals”, by sociologist Christian Smith, is a master at extracting these grand narratives and condensing them into single paragraphs. Each identifies a beginning (“once upon a time”), a middle (in which a threat or challenge arises), and an end (in which a resolution is achieved).
Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion.
True conservatives see radical change as dangerous.
Modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances.
Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience
Markets that require very high trust to function efficiently (such as a diamond market) are often dominated by religiously bound ethnic groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews), who have lower transaction and monitoring costs than their secular competitors.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants create the most efficient market because their transaction and monitoring costs are so low - because they trust each other.
If a rival market were to open up across town composed of ethnically and religiously diverse merchants, they’d have to spend a lot more money on lawyers and security guards, given how easy it is to commit fraud or theft when sending diamonds out for inspection by other merchants.
They’d have a much harder time getting individuals to follow the moral norms of the community.
people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive.
Laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.
Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community.
Diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that’s the trade-off.
You’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity.
Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.
A commune that valued self-expression over conformity and that prized the virtue of tolerance over the virtue of loyalty might be more attractive to outsiders, and this could indeed be an advantage in recruiting new members, but it would have lower moral capital than a commune that valued conformity and loyalty. The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.
Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.
Yin and yang refer to any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent.
Summer and winter, male and female. We need both, often in a shifting or alternating balance.
Two opposite dangers:
ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition
individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible
Corporations will grow ever more powerful as they evolve, and as they change the legal and political systems of their host countries to become ever more hospitable.
The only force left on Earth that can stand up to the largest corporations are national governments, some of which still maintain the power to tax, regulate, and divide corporations into smaller pieces when they get too powerful.
“Externalities” - the costs (or benefits) incurred by third parties who did not agree to the transaction causing the cost (or benefit).
For example, if a farmer begins using a new kind of fertilizer that increases his yield but causes more damaging runoff into nearby rivers, he keeps the profit but the costs of his decision are borne by others.
If a factory farm finds a faster way to fatten up cattle but thereby causes the animals to suffer more digestive problems and broken bones, it keeps the profit and the animals pay the cost.
Corporations are obligated to maximize profit for shareholders, and that means looking for any and all opportunities to lower costs, including passing on costs on to others in the form of externalities.
Some problems really can be solved by regulation:
Phaseout of leaded gasoline: This one regulation saved vast quantities of lives, IQ points, money, and moral capital.
When people say that markets offer better solutions than do regulations, let them step forward and explain their plan to eliminate the dangerous externalities generated by many markets.
Libertarians are liberals who love markets and lack bleeding hearts.
Patriotism and parochialism lead people to exert themselves to improve the things they can improve.
High levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital.
Diversity reduces both kinds of social capital:
Bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities.
Bonding capital refers to trust within groups.
Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.
People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down” - turn inward and become more selfish, less interested in contributing to their communities.
Liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive.
There is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments.
If someone pursues one of these values, and I do not, I am able to understand why they pursue it or what it would be like in their circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it.