27 September 2009

The healthcare debate: Jonathan Haidt on how our moral roots skew our reasoning

Only on the TED Blog: In The TED Lens, each Sunday a TED speaker offers a new look at the week's big news stories. This week, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how the moral roots of the political right and left are shaping the debate over healthcare in the United States.

In your talk at TED2008, you asked us all to "take the red pill" and step outside of our moral matrix. You said that moral psychology was the red pill, and that it could help people resolve many of the puzzles of politics. When emotions are running high in a debate such as we are seeing in the United States over healthcare, it's difficult to do this. What can moral psychology tell us about the healthcare debate?

I think there are three basic principles of moral psychology, and I find it helpful to approach any new puzzle by applying them.

The first principle is intuitive primacy: Peoples' judgments are based primarily on their intuitive reactions -- on quick gut feelings, not on reasoning. This is how we make most decisions, and Malcolm Gladwell reviewed this research in Blink. Our feelings guide our subsequent thinking, and in this case there is a vast sea of fear and anger out there caused by the financial crisis, the threat of unemployment, the rewarding of greed and arrogance on Wall Street, and the big changes the Obama administration is trying to implement on many fronts. People who didn't vote for Obama started off with negative or ambivalent feelings toward him. Independents who may have voted for him without much love are easily turned against him by talk of tax increases, whether true or not. His race may contribute some negativity, for some people. Whatever the source, negative feelings make it easy for people to believe just about any negative proposition given to them about Obama, including conspiracy theories about his birth certificate. Negative feelings make it easy to believe any negative claim about his health care plan, including the stuff about death panels.

The second principle of moral psychology is that moral thinking is for social doing: We engage in moral thinking not to find the truth, but to find arguments that support our intuitive judgments, so that we can defend ourselves if challenged. The crucial insight here comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich at Cornell, who says that when we want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Can I believe it?" -- and we look only for evidence that the proposition might be true. If we find a single piece of evidence then we're done. We stop. We have a reason we can trot out to support our belief. But if we don't want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Must I believe it?" -- and we look for an escape hatch, a single reason why maybe, just maybe, the proposition is false. So people who have a negative intuitive reaction to Obama, or who are fearful about the enormous changes going on, are already inclined to believe rumors against him and his plans. They hear about death panels and forged birth certificates and ask "can I believe it?" The answer is usually yes, particularly if Fox News raises these questions and brings on experts who claim that the propositions are true. Even if Fox News presents both sides, the fact that somebody on TV endorsed a proposition gives viewers permission to believe it, if they want to. Conversely, Democrats can give rebuttals till they're blue in the face, but if people are asking themselves "must I believe it" about the Democrats' claims then the answer they will usually reach is "no." Logic and consistency just aren't very important when it comes to morality. Reasoning is "the servant of the passions," as the philosopher David Hume said long ago.

That brings us to the third principle, which is that morality binds and builds. I said in my TEDTalk that morality and politics are team sports. People aren't just engaging in post-hoc rationalization to justify their individual feelings. Rather, moral reasoning and rationalizing are done in large part to help your team, and to show that you are a good member of your team. Moral teams tend to form around principles held to be sacred. One sacred principle for conservatives since the 1980s, and for libertarians in all eras, is that government is evil, it is a form oppression. Individual liberty, tied to individual responsibility, are good, so nanny states such as those of Europe, which seem so humane to liberals, are reviled as socialist nightmares that are then mistakenly blended with totalitarian nightmares. Hence the Obama equals Hitler comparisons. Of course, people are quite selective about the aspects of government they find oppressive, and many commentators have pointed out the irony of protesters who say, in one case literally, "keep your government hands off of my medicare." But once again, logic plays little role in our moral lives. Moral claims and arguments function like gang signs -- they show others what team you are on, and they let you share emotions with other people, which bonds you more closely together.

At the end of your talk, you say, "The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and really easy to lose." How does this notion that order tends to decay -- suffused by the conservative mentality, which highly values in-groups, authority and purity -- shape conservative thinking about President Obama's healthcare reform proposals? What are liberals missing about the perspective of the political right?

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement. Rather, my message to secular liberals is, Don't dismiss these entirely. Be wary of them, sure; they can motivate violations of civil liberties and human rights. But we need them at times, and to a limited degree. Above all recognize that matters related to ingroup (such as immigration, or the flag), authority (such as crime and punishment), and purity (such as sexuality) are the ones that take on a kind of religious importance for most Americans, because they are about binding groups together around sacred values. Liberals often trigger outrage by ignoring these concerns in their pursuit of social justice, or of efficient policy.

In terms of the "five foundations" that I presented in my TEDTalk, I think that a big area of misunderstanding in the current debate concerns the role of purity/sanctity in biomedical issues, particularly abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research. If your morality is based on the moral foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity (as liberal morality is, in my data), then you're likely to take a very practical or utilitarian approach, one that aims to minimize suffering while maximizing the rights of the individuals involved. You take a "materialist" view of life, which doesn't mean materialistic as in greedy, it means you think the only thing that exists is matter – no souls – so you think life is a physical or mechanical process that can be tinkered with to optimize the welfare of human beings. Hence abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and stem cell research are all justified.

But materialism is deeply and profoundly threatening to many people. It's the reason that the philosopher Peter Singer is so widely attacked, despite his humanitarian intentions. The current Pope and the last one both railed against this form of materialism. The materialism of the secular left opens it up to charges that it promotes a "culture of death." Liberals are said to like to kill fetuses and the elderly; they don't treat anything as sacred. This term has been bandied about on the right for many years, and while it is a gross exaggeration, it is based in a real truth, a real difference on the question of the sacredness of life. So when Palin threw out the term "death panels," the term struck a chord that had been played many times in recent years. Liberals were flabbergasted, because it's a blatant lie, but it's false only in a logical sense, not an emotional one. And once again, logic has little to do with morality. If a pro-life social conservative asks himself whether Obama is secretly plotting to create death panels, he is not asking whether this is likely to be true, he is asking only "can I believe it," and the answer is usually yes.

Of course, liberals believe that it is conservatives who like to kill people (think militarism and capital punishment). Both sides care about life, but in different ways. Both sides live inside their own moral matrices. And just like in the movie The Matrix, morality is a "consensual hallucination" that is very hard to step out of. But moral psychology can help people to understand that there are moral motivations on all sides. People may not be logical, but few of them are crazy.

How would you advise a proponent of Obama's healthcare reform bill to go about persuading its opposition -- or at least to turn the debate toward the actual validity of its proposals, rather than the sensationalist claims?

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you. You've got to create trust and liking first, and then people will be willing to listen. People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe. You have to get them to the point where they ask themselves "can I believe it?" about your claims, rather than about your opponents' claims. The time to establish that trust and liking was months ago, and perhaps some of it was burned up in the giant bailouts and coziness with Wall Street. I'm not a political scientist; I can't say why his poll numbers went down. But as a moral psychologist I can say that there's now little that can be done to win over or calm down the town-hall protesters. They've formed a new gang, a new heroic moral identity of resistance.

My main suggestion is to boil the plan down to a few easy-to-understand ideas, each of which has some intuitive moral content. The compassion and caring-for-all ideas should be easy for Obama, but they are not going to win over non-liberals, particularly those like Congressman Joe Wilson who are offended by the prospect of caring for outsiders (i.e., immigrants). But Obama might have to reach beyond his moral comfort zone to bring in some conservative ideas of fairness, such as that laziness or personal irresponsibility must not be rewarded. Obama might want to consider discussing the role of lawyers, and the role of lawsuits in driving up the costs of medical care. Even if economists say that this is not a major economic factor, it is a major moral issue for many people: whiny, irresponsible patients team up with crooked lawyers to milk the system for multi-million dollar settlements. It's outrageous, and Obama's opponents specialize in mobilizing outrage. Opposition parties always do, and neither side has a deep respect for the truth, although I do think that the kind of populist moral outrage now being cultivated by Glenn Beck and other conservative media personalities shows the three principles of moral psychology in an unusually florid fashion: intuitive primacy, moral thinking is for social doing, and morality binds and builds. It's very hard to combat such attacks with reasons and evidence. I hope the Obama team finds some more indirect ways to change feelings – perhaps by making progress on the economy, or by handling an international crisis well. When it comes to moral persuasion, the way to the head is through the heart.

Jonathan Haidt's 2008 TEDTalk:

See more TED Blog exclusives covering current events:
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+ Laurie Garrett on H1N1 swine flu and our preparedness for pandemic
+ Nathan Wolfe on H1N1 swine flu and the "perfect storm" for viruses

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23 September 2008

The physical difference between liberals and conservatives?

Conveniently timed for last week's premiere of Jonathan Haidt's TEDTalk, "The Real Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives," this report in Science suggests that libs and cons may sport a physiological difference, in their bodies' reponses to unexpected stimuli. From the abstract:

... In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War ...

Study author Douglas Oxley told the Washington Independent that the study does not imply there's an inborn or genetic difference between people on the left and right, only that there is some correllation between physiological response and ideology, in a small test group of volunteers, in Nebraska. And yet, the WI writer makes the excellent point that:

it’s still a small step toward a greater understanding of our ideological divide, even if the answer doesn’t lie in our genes.

Watch Jonathan Haidt's TEDTalk for more insight:

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17 September 2008

The real difference between liberals and conservatives: Jonathan Haidt on TED.com

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most. And he challenges all of us to step outside of our moral Matrix and pledge to work toward a more civil, productive political process. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:42.)

Watch Jonathan Haidt's 2008 talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of almost 300 TEDTalks -- including many more talks about politics.

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02 March 2008

TED2008: Days 3 and 4 in Quotes

Photos: Andrew Heavens

“Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream ... But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership

"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people." - Musician and activist Bob Geldof (above)

“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” - Ocean explorer Robert Ballard

"I think it's the dopamine." - Anthropologist Helen Fisher, explaining to Chris Anderson why she's still optimistic about love, despite understanding its chemical and biological basis

"Relative to the universe, it's just up the road." - Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as 'just up the road' from Monterey, CA

“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” - Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind’s worst disease.” - Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China

"The job of the C is to make the B sad." - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin

“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” - Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” - Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level

“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” - Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network

“It's important to leave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” - Environmental advocate John Francis (below), who went 17 years without speaking

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01 March 2008

TED2008: And The Point?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.)

The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals to inflect the political debate:

John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for the Earth -- and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I've been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars -- and that's quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you're just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon -- 500 miles -- and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I'd written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn't have the money and I didn't speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.
I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn't ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change -- and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn't know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we've gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives a 3-minutes talk about  "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far".

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past, trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of happiness and of the meaning of life -- and that they are quite coherent with modern science.
He studies morality and emotion in the context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?
Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.
What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:

• Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others
• Fairness/reciprocity
• Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate
• Authority/respect
• Purity/sanctity

If these are the five best candidates for what's written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We've put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.
What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease" (Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us".
Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can't just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.

British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he's become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people".
There can't be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we're moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn't enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate.  The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it's rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It's almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something's gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.
Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.
All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they're gone. We can't let that continue (see also Wade Davis' speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that's what I'm gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we're going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.

This is the last TED in Monterey. Final show of TED2008, live from TED@Aspen, with singer Jill Sobule and comedians Rives, Zé Frank and the Raspyni Brothers.

The next TEDs:

TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?" Information and registration here.

TED2009: Long Beach, California, 4-7 February 2009. Theme: "The Great Unveiling". It's already sold out.

TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.

TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.

What a week! Time to pack and off to SFO. Find all my posts from TED2008 here -- and of course those of the other TED bloggers. Bye!

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