The Righteous Mind

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

The rider evolved to serve the elephant, but it’s a dignified partnership, more like a lawyer serving a client than a slave serving a master.

When morality opposes justice: conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize.

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness.

Moral reasoning is often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.

Genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. The rate at which genes changed in response to selection pressures began rising around 40,000 years ago.

Our 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.

Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. It just somehow feels like the right thing to do.

When people choose the labels 'liberal' or 'conservative,' they are not just choosing to endorse different values on questionnaires. Within the first half second after hearing a statement, partisan brains are already reacting differently.

We don’t express gratitude in order to repay debts or balance ledgers but rather to strengthen relationships.

Liberals like Care and Fairness best, and build their moral matrices mostly on those two foundations.

Racism, genocide, and suicide bombing are all manifestations of groupishness. They are not things that people do in order to outcompete their local peers; they are things people do to help their groups outcompete other groups.