In the final days of 2012, as Congress worked to hammer out a last-minute deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, it was difficult to turn on any American news source and not see political finger-pointing. Words like “extremist,” “angry” and “sharply divided” floated in the ether.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been interested in how political choices are made — at TED2008, he delved into “the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.” So he seemed like the perfect speaker to invite to our New York office to tackle the question: can’t we all just get along?

His answer in short: yes. But the key is to understand that all of us are facing the same looming dangers, and make some critical changes in Congress that will allow us to work together on them.

Haidt begins today’s talk with an unsettling statement: A pack of giant asteroids are headed for the United States, and they will hit within 50 years. These, of course, are metaphorical asteroids. Says Haidt, “I’m talking about threats that are headed our way that are wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us.”

“Our problem — and our tragedy — is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, ‘Hey look! There’s an asteroid,’ means that the other side says ‘Huh? What? I’m not even going to look up,’” says Haidt. In this talk, he looks at the social psychology that leads us into this mess. “One of the most important principles of morality is that it binds and blinds: It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.”

In today’s must-see talk, Haidt gives powerful suggestions for how politicians and everyday Joes can get past the rhetoric and see that the other side usually has a point. His challenge to each and every one of us: to see all four asteroids.

After digesting Haidt’s talk, we still had many questions. So we called Haidt in his office to chat more on this issue.

Your talk got me thinking — on a personal level, what should I be doing and saying and thinking every day to defuse these tensions and break through a party lens?

Great question! I think the key is for us to all think about the word “demonization,” and do what we can to tone it down. That doesn’t mean that we all have to become centrists. My ideal is that we all have more constructive disagreement. So when you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that’s fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.

Are there other key terms that you would love to see disappear from our political vocabulary?

“Extremist” is an easy one, because extremist just means somebody on the other side. Overall, we do need to watch our language — but it’s not so much specific words. It’s the claims that people on the other side are motivated by evil motives. The key to toning down demonization is to actually get to know some people on the other side and to build relationships with them. If your friend tells you something, you don’t demonize, you listen. But if your opponent does it, you jump right into lawyer mode and say, “Here are 10 reasons why you’re wrong.”

There was so much tension in Congress over the fiscal cliff. Do you think the kind of stalemate that we’ve been seeing is the natural product of a two-party system?

I don’t. A two-party system can work beautifully if there are other conditions that pull for moderation. But not if you systematically remove those conditions — like privacy to negotiate in secret. Now that we have C-SPAN and everything is televised, there is essentially no deliberation done on the floor of either chamber. So I think the two-party system as we presently have it is completely dysfunctional.

What do you think are the big differences between compromising on economic issues and compromising on social issues? Or have they both been so moralized that there’s no difference?

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues. With the economic issues, however, such unbelievably vast amounts of money are at stake that unbelievably vaster amounts of money are spent on lobbying. Research shows that whatever political preferences the wealthiest few percent of the citizens have tends to be enacted into law.

So if social issues are not about money, where does that moral might come from?

If you assume that democracy is somehow supposed to reflect the will of the majority, then you would be interested in looking at the ways that reality diverges from that. On social issues, it diverges because it’s not the will of the majority — it’s the will of the most vocal. So on issues like gun control and abortion rights, it’s a question of: Who is most angry? Who is most energized?

Speaking of gun control, what do you think will happen on that issue? Do you see the right and the left uniting around the issue of gun violence anytime soon? It feels like, following the national horror of the Newtown massacre, there could be some consensus on this.

I see no sign that there will be any left-right agreement on this. If it was clear that gun control would greatly reduce the frequency of these atrocities, then I think we might see some movement. But it’s not clear. We did in fact have an assault weapons ban in the ’90s and it apparently didn’t do very much. As long as there’s any ambiguity, people are going to find evidence for whatever they want to believe.

For me, I find gun control to be the absolute number one social issue that I have the most difficulty seeing the other side of. What is the primary moral value that plays into being against stricter gun control?

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they’re willing to take that risk.

Liberals are more prone to utopianism. For example, some liberals proposed that we should have gun-free communities, and we should put signs on them saying, “This is a gun-free community” — which of course conservatives made fun of, because you’re basically saying, “Come in and rob us! Don’t worry about getting shot!” Liberals are horrified by violence, and especially violence against children. So they demand a policy response. And while I want a policy response too, I think we have to make the response be based in the research on what will actually work.

We’ve talked about the left-right divide in politics, and I’m curious about what you’ve seen as a professor in the academic world. How similar or different is that dynamic?

In the academic world, most fields have gone from being predominantly liberal to being overwhelmingly liberal. It’s been a part of this general polarization of our society since the 1970s. There used to be liberal Republicans and there used to be conservative Democrats, but beginning in the ’60s — once Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act — we got the moral purification of the two parties. So the change first happens in Congress, and then once the two parties become purified, it’s like this giant electromagnet cranks up and starts ripping apart everything else. My own field of social psychology has always leaned to the left, but in the last 20 or 30 years the minority of conservatives has shrunk to be undetectable. And this is a problem for scholarship, I believe.

What do you think can be done about that?

Fortunately, we are the world’s experts in how to promote diversity. People are beginning to recognize that we need to be more careful about the things we say — about the things that might inadvertently create a hostile climate. But the larger picture is that polarization emanates from the elites. Congress and the media have become so amazingly polarized in the last 20 or 30 years; this then drives polarization in so many other realms of society.

In the House of Representatives, most districts are gerrymandered to some extent, and that means that there is very little payoff to a representative to be a centrist or a moderate. We can’t change the social trends that have contributed to polarization, but there are a lot of institutional changes that could be made: we can change the filibuster, we can change the way elections are run so that there are more open primaries, we can change the role of party leadership. At present, party leaders have so much power that they can enforce conformity by punishing any member who thinks for himself. The group NoLabels.org has a set of policy changes that could be adopted within the next few months.

I don’t blame the senators and representatives. Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service. They have come to Washington to try to make things better, and they are all frustrated as hell because they can’t do it. The system forces them to play this eternal game of blue team versus red team — country be damned.

What about the media? How should we deal with the partisan influence of our news sources, and what would a better source look like?

This is very hard because, in a free market, anger and conflict sells, and calm, reasoned analysis is dull. The First Amendment does many good things for us, but it means that there’s very little that we can do in terms of regulating the media. The best idea that I’ve heard comes from Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania, who is arguing that there is a legal warrant for us to hold television stations and cable stations liable for truth in advertising. When they air a political ad which is full of lies, it should be just as if they advertised for some kind of snake oil that claims to cure cancer. That’s one of the only ideas I’ve encountered. The media is one of the most difficult areas to change.

In your talk, you mentioned four asteroids. Are there any smaller asteroids that you didn’t get the chance to mention that we should be looking out for?

The idea of an asteroid is something that, if not attended to, will become even worse. Think about plastics and chemicals in our food supply. The FDA and the EPA are so limited in what they’re allowed to do, and we’re all exposed to massive amounts of chemicals. The left sees this and wants regulation — and the right says no.

Now, one that the right sees: declining national greatness. America was the greatest nation of the 20th century. It was a force for good in the world, and it is losing that. I do think that the right is concerned about declining national greatness, and I think they’re right to be.

Tell me about The Asteroids Club. What is it, and what kind of future do you see for it?

I was invited to give this TEDx talk on civility at TEDxMidAtlantic, and I developed the metaphor of asteroids coming at us. Just on a whim, I bought the website name AsteroidsClub.org. I had recently formed a working relationship with Liz Joyner and Steve Seibert, who run ToTheVillageSquare.org, and they had some ideas for how we could make this an actual club that brings people together. So we’re giving it a try.

Rather than looking for common ground, we’re just trying to get people to see multiple threats. This might be easier because you don’t have to say that you’re wrong about anything. A successful evening will be one in which the people on the other side can begin to see your asteroids and you can, perhaps for the first time, see theirs.

Something that you wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times last year really stuck with me. You said, “When your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege.” That is a really powerful statement. How, then, can we ever get people to listen to issues that they find so fundamentally threatening?

The first step is relationships. As our society gets more and more segregated by lifestyle — as the blue districts get bluer and the red districts get redder, as the Internet allows us to segregate into gated moral communities — we have to make the effort. I am hopeful that my book The Righteous Mind should give people at least some things to talk about. If you can, start off any conversation with praise, saying, “You and I may disagree on many things, but one thing I read about your side that I thought was interesting was that you folks believe X. Tell me more about that?” That is a completely different way of starting a conversation than with a challenge.

Most of us don’t get to meet people on the other side that often, and when you do, take a chance. If you’re the sort of person who comes to TED, who loves new ideas, well — the biggest single repository of new ideas that you’ve not been exposed to is probably going to be found on the other side of the political aisle.

Watch Watch Haidt talk about the Asteroids Club on MSNBC’s The Cycle >>

The term “fiscal cliff” has gained traction in the U.S. news in the past few months, at least in part because it paints a vivid metaphorical picture. Popularized by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the term refers to the ill economic consequences that could occur if Congress does not change its course on several policies by January 1, 2013 — including the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts and automatic spending cuts that were agreed to in 2011. But for Congress to act, Democrats and Republicans need to find some general agreement on how to bridge the gap between the federal government’s revenues and spending. Let’s just say that’s been slow to come.

As the deadline nears, we invited three speakers — social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, data visualizationist Jer Thorp and “Planet Money” co-host Adam Davidson — to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a new program to reimagine the headlines. The idea: to give us a deeper understanding of the issue and why it has been so darn difficult for American political parties to work together in recent times.

First to the stage was Jonathan Haidt, who explored “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives” at TED2008. Haidt began his talk with a dramatic statement: Four asteroids are headed for the United States, and they will hit within 50 years.

These, of course, are allegorical asteroids — climate change that could flood many of our major cities, the federal debt rising to the point where a welfare state may become untenable, a growing rise in inequality which is making us deeply distrustful of each other, and the breakdown of marriage which feeds into disparity in income. The problem, as Haidt explains it, is that the current American political climate makes it very difficult to see all four as true problems.

“In our hyper-politicized time, one person says, ‘Look! An asteroid is coming.’ And the other person won’t even look up,” says Haidt. “Retiring members of Congress say that it’s become like gang warfare.”

In his talk, Haidt looks at the social underpinnings that create this type of polarization, where fingers are pointed while real data is ignored. And he also presents several ideas for what could help relieve these tensions and get politicians working together to solve problems. One of his simplest ideas is to shift Congress’ schedule to three weeks on, one week off. This way, members of Congress will be forced to make homes in Washington, D.C., instead of flying home every week. With more politicians living in the Capitol, they’d socialize and meet each other’s families, allowing them to build common ground where the idea, “Hey, the other guy might have a point,” could surface.

At TEDxVancouver, Jer Thorp urged us to “Make data more human.” Today, he shared a fascinating project, “The Colour Economy,” in which he gave screen pixels a very human ability — to trade their red, green and blue values in pursuit of a profit. As the colored bits moved on a screen, stratifications emerged — a situation which feels all too familiar.

Thorp’s point is that data visualization can help us understand how and why things happen, and can inspire new realizations. Currently, says Thorp (shown above), there are a mishmash of images and metaphors that cloud our understanding of the economy. Could creative uses of data — data fiction, data poetry, data theater — gives us new ways of thinking?

Finally, Adam Davidson spoke, describing the fiscal cliff as “a self-imposed arbitrary deadline,” that both parties need to resolve, though neither wants to make the first move and be seen as weak. In other words, it’s a game of chicken, fueled by partisan anger.  “The worse the crisis gets, the more each side thinks they have the answer,” says Davidson.

But what’s so curious, he explains, is that the American population isn’t as polarized as one would think, and people even tend to agree — for the most part — on what kinds of decisions we should make about the federal budget. For example: When asked, people want Social Security and Medicare to stay strong.  “The American people tend to be moderate, pragmatic centrists,” says Davidson. “You’d think that if you add up Democrat and Republican, you get the American people, but that’s not what the data shows … Forty percent of people consider themselves independent.”

American history, says Davidson, is full of skirmishes about money. And yet the dollar has remained one of the most stable currencies. So when it comes to the fiscal cliff, he urges, “Instead of talking about it in vague terms that feed partisanship, let’s talk about it as what it really is — a really solvable math problem. Though not one where we’re all going to get what we want.“

After an election that seemed to bring partisanship to a fever pitch, there seemed to be a pulling together this weekend as the nation mourned those killed in the school shooting in Connecticut on December 14. When asked if he thought the same polarization would happen with gun control that has been happening over the economy, Haidt shared enthusiasm that this could be an issue that highlights commonality and brings across-the-divide cooperation. As we arrived back at our desks from the salon, a new headline appeared on NYTimes.com that suggested this may be the case: “Newtown Shooting May Cool Washington’s Partisan Passions.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidason

Author and UVA psychology professor Jonathan Haidt kicks off his TED2012 talk with a provocative question: “how many of you think of yourselves as religious?” Some people raise their hands, but not so many. Another question: “Do you think of yourselves as spiritual in any shape or form?” The majority of people in the room raises their hands.

Haidt is making the case that one of the main reasons people feel they have some sort of spiritual life is the search for self-transcendence. Then, in the spirit of every good storyteller grappling with a complicated concept, he helps us out with a metaphor. “Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we’re very familiar with,” he says. “But every now and then it’s like a door appears from nowhere. The door opens, we go through it; we find a secret staircase. We climb the staircase and we enter an altered state of consciousness.”

Climbing a staircase to greater meaning has been used as such a concept a lot over the years. Earlier twentieth century psychologist William James collected case studies and told the case of a young man who described the death of his petty moralistic self in just such terms. And the world’s religions have found many ways to help people “climb the staircase,” through meditation, psychedelic drugs, whirling or dancing or other means. But, Haidt adds, you don’t need religion to get up the staircase and reach self-transcendence. He refers to Jill Bolte Taylor‘s extraordinary talk at TED2008, in which she described her ecstatic experience and union with everything when a stroke shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. Haidt says he himself found awe watching that talk. (I was also there and I should add that I did, too.)

But awe can come from weird places too: for instance, War. So many books say the same thing: nothing brings people together quite like war. So the real question: what do all these very different examples of transcendence actually have in common? Answer: the elevating idea that self can become unimportant–and that can be a good thing. The idea that we move up the food chain of experience was central to the writing of French sociologist, Émile Durkheim, who described the human being as the “homo duplex”, split between the level of the profane, or ordinary, where we satisfy our own individual desires and goals, and a sacred level, where we coalesce into in a team that is far more than the sum of our own parts. Hence the collective emotions that bind people together and make them feel they’re part of a larger whole, such as the collective joy in Britain at the end of World War Two, or the anger in Tahrir Square as the Arab Spring got underway, or the collective grief in the weeks post-9/11.

So now the million-dollar question: is this so-called staircase a feature of our evolutionary design, or is it a bug? Many scientists see religion as memes that get in our minds and make us do crazy things. How could that ever be good? And, how could it ever be good for an organism to overcome self-interest? Haidt has a theory. Darwin noted that when tribes were in competition, always ready to aid and defend each other, that tribe would always succeed: “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere.” We should think of this as multi-level selection, Haidt suggests. While on a rowing boat, the slowest guy is the weakest guy, when the competition expands to other rowers, there becomes no choice but to cooperate. They’re literally all in the same boat. It might sound trite, Haidt says somewhat heatedly as people laugh, but this is fundamental.

So what of free riders, those who’ll merrily come along to exploit the work of others? Well, as it turns out, nature has solved this issue many times–and the favorite solution in nature is simple: to put everyone in the same boat. It’s happened in the bacterial world, and it’s happened when wasps began making primitive hives and forced their kin to cooperate–and spread. And it happened again when ancestors came together around hearths and unlocked the most powerful, constructive force in history: the force of human cooperation. Yet still, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as hives of wasps. We might fly around, exulting in our freedom, yet we still sometimes wonder: “is that all there is? What’s missing?”

Haidt has at least a suggestion of an answer, presented in a special 3-minute video bonanza at the end of the talk. “What’s missing is that we’re Homo duplex but modern secular society has been built to satisfy our lower, profane self,” he says. Instead, we need to try and find the staircase amid the clutter and become a part of something larger. And this itself explains the resonance of that simple metaphor from John Donne: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

DINNER PARTY DISCUSSION

Steven Pinker: I’m not persuaded by group selection. There are successful cooperative societies, but are the successful ones spontaneous, or do they work by coercion?

Jonathan Haidt: My goal is purely descriptive. There is a big part of human nature that no one is talking about. I came to the study of morality by the study of disgust and taboo, and that got things that you can’t get to by studying kin selection. For academics, anything about groupishness or tribalism is racism.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Why are you linking self-transcendence and the group?

JH: It seems there’s an “off button” for the self, and that’s what got me into it. I started wondering whether this really could be selective. It’s true that having an off button doesn’t automatically make you “groupish,” but it is a pre-condition.

Chris Anderson: How core is having a transcendent experience to having a full life?

JH: For those who have it, they would say that it is absolutely essential. A metaphor that I often use is that we can imagine what it’s like to see it in infra-red, but we can’t really. So those who don’t have it are missing something profound.

CA: Steven and Rebecca presented a world that’s gradually getting better by reason. Do you see the tendency of humans to be groupish as dangerous?

JH: No. This is what got us out of the jungles and savannas, and those were incredibly violent. This is what got us into civilization. We’ve gotten better by building institutions. his is what got us out of the jungles and savannahs. If it wasn’t for the ability to have sacredness

See also: Jonathan Haidt’s talk from TED 2008: On the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.

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:

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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

… 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:

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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“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

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!