Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Excerpt

It is not often that a prominent academic psychologist is attacked by a Nobel prize-winning economist in the New York Times. But this is what happened to Jonathan Haidt after a speech he delivered at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, in which he claimed that social psychologists discriminated against conservatives, a group significantly underrepresented in their ranks. Portrayed in unflattering terms in the research literature (fearful, close-minded, and not very bright), conservatives experienced a hostile environment in the academy, Haidt charged. Liberal commentators were caustic in their criticisms of the speech, including Paul Krugman, who accused Haidt of equating ideological differences with racial differences. Instead, Haidt was arguing that the lack of political diversity in social psychology led to the same kind of narrow-mindedness that is feared to result from a lack of racial diversity. It was not a welcome message in liberal quarters. Those interested in Haidt’s original speech and the sometimes acrimonious responses to it can find them on the website www.​JonathanHaidt.​com/​postpartisan.​html. It makes for an interesting case study of some of the central themes of Haidt’s book: that righteousness exists because emotion has primacy over reason and that reason is employed to justify entrenched political positions and moral values rather than to dispassionately weigh evidence. …