Jonathan Haidt's Home Page

“Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.” — Jonathan Haidt, from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Morality model - systems

(not much on empathy)

• harm - care

  • Attachment system is pan-mammalian (Bowlby)

  • Psychopaths lack a “Violence Inhibition Mechanism” (Blair)

  • Mirror neurons and empathy (Rizzolatti; Decety)

  • Infants detect helping and hurting...

• fairness -  reciprocity

  • Reciprocity is a human universal (Brown)

  • Reciprocal altruism (Trivers)

  • People want punishment to fit crime, not to prevent future harm

  • Concepts of fairness not clear until age 7, but emotional sensitivity to unfairness

  •  emerges much earlier...

• ingroup - loyalty

  • Minimal Groups Paradigm (Tajfel)

  • Early preference for local accent (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007)

  • Tribalism and initiation rites emerge even when not culturally supported (e.g., street gangs and fraternities)

• authority - respect

  • Hierarchy is culturally widespread; egalitarianism is not the default, it is maintained effortfully (Boehm)

  • Displays of appeasement (Keltner; Fessler)

  • Brown, Pronouns of Power: tu/vous distinction is recreated even when language doesn’t mark it: Bob/Mr.-Smith

• purity - sanctity

  • Disgust is universally present, extended into social world (Rozin, Haidt)

  • Purity & pollution practices are widespread in traditional societies, many similarities (Douglas)

  • Purity and pollution practices emerge even in modern societies......
     

wikipedia - Social psychologists such as Martin Hoffman and Jonathan Haidt emphasize social and emotional development based on biology, such as empathy.

Meng-Wu Lecture Series:
When compassion leads to sacrilege: Why conservatives and liberals have such different beliefs about helping those in need
Jonathan Haidt April 28, 2011 - Time and location TBD