The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is a 2012 social psychology book by Jonathan Haidt, in which the author describes human morality as it relates to politics and religion. In the first section, Haidt demonstrates that people's beliefs are driven primarily by intuition, with reason operating mostly to justify beliefs that are intuitively obvious. In the second section, he lays out his theory that the human brain is organized to respond to several distinct types of moral violations, much like a tongue is organized to respond to different sorts of foods. In the last section, Haidt proposes that humans have an innate capacity to sometimes be "groupish" rather than "selfish". Summary In the first part of the book, Jonathan Haidt uses cross-sectional research to demonstrate social intuitionism, how people's beliefs come primarily from their intuitions, and rational thought often comes after to justify initial beliefs. He cites David Hume and E. O. Wilson as thinkers who gave reason a relatively low estimation, as opposed to more popular thinkers who give reason a central place in moral cognition, such as Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral reasoning. In the second portion of the book,