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utsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh310 [2024/03/27 04:00] – sketched out an intro balleyne | utsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh310 [2025/02/12 16:12] (current) – [Part 2: Six Taste Receptors] fixed a typo balleyne | ||
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====== PBH310: Moral Psychology & Abortion ====== | ====== PBH310: Moral Psychology & Abortion ====== | ||
+ | ===== Introduction ===== | ||
+ | ==== Heart Apologetics & Moral Psychology ==== | ||
Apologetics is about effective communication and persuasion, fundamentally about rhetoric (in the classical, non-pejorative sense): How can we change what people think about an issue, and offer a defence, in this case, of the pro-life stance that is persuasive? | Apologetics is about effective communication and persuasion, fundamentally about rhetoric (in the classical, non-pejorative sense): How can we change what people think about an issue, and offer a defence, in this case, of the pro-life stance that is persuasive? | ||
- | But effective apologetics is not purely cerebral. | + | But effective apologetics is not purely cerebral. |
- | That's where heart apologetics comes in. Heart apologetics is about the emotional layer of apologetics, | + | That's where heart apologetics comes in: Heart apologetics is about the emotional layer of apologetics, |
- | Note that moral psychology is about how the mind // | + | Note that moral psychology is about how the mind // |
- | FIXME introduce Jonathan Haidt and the Righteous Mind / if you go to the Wikipedia article on moral psychology, you'll see Haidt' | + | ==== The Righteous Mind ==== |
+ | For a guide through | ||
+ | (Share some of my 2020-2024 journey in thinking about this.) | ||
- | ===== FIXMEs===== | + | I'm going to pull out the core insights from Haidt' |
- | FIXME what is Haidt' | + | |
- | FIXME I need some good stories | + | ===== Part 1: The Elephant |
- | * p 26 poop in urinal convo and moral dumbfounding | + | ==== Activate moral intuitions ==== |
+ | (Show, don't tell, that moral intuitions come first.) | ||
- | FIXME I need some key images and graphs: | + | Haidt opens the first chapter by asking the reader to consider this story, and whether or not the people in it did anything morally wrong: |
+ | > A family' | ||
+ | :?: Did the people in the story do anything morally wrong? | ||
- | FIXME more concise intro | + | Or take this story: |
+ | > A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn' | ||
+ | :?: Did the woman do anything wrong? | ||
- | * "In psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind //actually// works, not how it //ought// to work" | + | Haidt constructed many stories((p. 22, typically focused on disgust and disrespect)) in his studies |
+ | * The well-educated people in Haidt' | ||
+ | * But if you're not a liberal Westerner, like most people on the planet, you believe: "Some actions are morally wrong even if they don't hurt anyone" | ||
+ | * People would invent victims, like "what if someone saw her do it?" One kid said, "well the flag might clog up the toilet and cause it to overflow," | ||
+ | * **Moral reasoning is often the servant of moral emotions. Gut feelings can sometimes drive moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.** | ||
+ | * More on the particular moral feelings in part 2, but for now, let's think about the method here: intuitions first, reasoning second | ||
- | ===== The Elephant and the Rider ===== | + | ==== Elephants Rule ==== |
- | Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. | + | Through much of his research, Haidt found that: **Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.** |
- | + | ||
- | | + | |
- | | + | |
- | * Can I use moral dumbfounding examples for religious conservatives? | + | |
Stop at 2:02 | Stop at 2:02 | ||
{{youtube> | {{youtube> | ||
- | FIXME the social intuitionist model (image/diagram) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_intuitionism# | + | Jonathan Haidt illustrates this with a personal example: |
+ | > On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar. I was at home, writing a review article on moral psychology, when my wife, Jayne, walked by my desk. In passing, she asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby's food. Her request was polite but its tone added a postscript: "As I have asked you a hundred times before." | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > My mouth started moving before hears had stopped. Words came out. Those words linked themselves up to say something about the baby having woken up at the same time that our elderly dog barked to ask for a walk and I'm sorry but I just put my breakfast dishes down where I could. In my family, caring for a hungry baby and an incontinent dog is a surefire excuse, so I was acquitted. | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > Jayne left the room and I continued working. I was writing about the three basic principles of moral psychology. The first principle is **intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.** ... So there I was at my desk, writing about how people automatically fabricate justifications of their gut feelings, when suddenly I realized that I had just done the same thing with my wife. I disliked being criticized, and I had felt a flash of negativity by the time Jayne had gotten her third word ("Can you not..." | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's the **moral flash** I want you to recognize, your moral intuitions. This is your elephant. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think about your own experience, talking to other people, but more importantly, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In study after study, Haidt finds that moral judgment is far from a purely cerebral affair in which we're consciously reasoning (the rider), but actually "moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant." | ||
+ | |||
+ | **Does this not match our experience talking to people about abortion?** This is why we have heart apologetics - it's not always a purely rational conversation. Does this not match your experience in discussions on a wide variety of issues? There are so many proxy battles being fought in typical moral and political discussions... | ||
+ | |||
+ | Haidt puts the elephant and rider into more academic terms with the social intuitionist model. | ||
+ | ==== The Social Intuitionist Model ==== | ||
+ | This is an academic, evidence-based explanation of heart apologetics, | ||
+ | {{: | ||
+ | (Walk through each of the arrows, one by one.) | ||
+ | |||
+ | :!: Haidt talks about the application of the social intuitionist model for moral persuasion: | ||
+ | > The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: | ||
+ | |||
+ | **Therefore, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Haidt offers a lot of insight into the dynamic of moral debates with this model, and the elephant and the rider analogy, and how to be persuasive and avoid fuelling motivated reasoning: | ||
+ | |||
+ | > When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favour, just as we are quite good at finding error' | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans *toward* that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person' | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > These are even times when we change our minds on our own, with no help from other people. Sometimes we have conflicting intuitions about something, as many people do about abortion or other controversial issues. Depending on which victim, which argument, or which friend you are thinking about at a given moment, your judgment may flip back and forth as if you were looking at a Necker cube. (FIXME) | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > And finally, it is possible for people simply to reason their way to a moral conclusion that contradicts their initial intuitive judgment, although I believe this process is rare. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In studies on IQ and moral psychology, they found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted //only the number of " | ||
+ | |||
+ | On motivated reasoning: | ||
+ | > The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we //want// to believe something, we ask ourselves, "// | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > In contrast, when we // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now, Haidt says that elephants are sometimes open to reason, not like a slave serving a master but a lawyer serving a client. The elephant is far more powerful, but is not an absolute dictator. | ||
+ | * In a lawyer/ | ||
+ | * In a healthy relationship, | ||
+ | |||
+ | For pro-life activism: | ||
+ | * Reflecting on our own elephant is hugely helpful for developing //empathy// for other people' | ||
+ | * When we are speaking to other people, we need to be conscious of //speaking to the elephant and not the rider// if we want to be persuasive and reach the whole person | ||
+ | |||
+ | And this leads into the second half, on how we can apply further lessons from moral psychology on how to be persuasive to other people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | ===== Part 2: Six Taste Receptors ===== | ||
+ | The first principle in moral psychology is that " | ||
+ | |||
+ | < | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Beyond WEIRD Morality ==== | ||
+ | Jonathan Haidt rights as a secular liberal, breaking out of his liberal university bubbles and broadening his understanding of moral psychology by developing a better understanding of the broad range of human moral reasoning, rather than only the narrow range he was accustomed to and familiar with before. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In particular, he cites a lot of research on identifying WEIRD morality: that is, Western, educated, industrialized, | ||
+ | |||
+ | He posed scenarios like the dog meat and flag rag, but also this one: | ||
+ | > A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | He opens Part II like this((p. 111-112)): | ||
+ | > I got my Ph.D. at McDonald' | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > But what I didn't expect was that these working-class subjects would sometimes find my request for justifications so perplexing. Each time someone said that the people in a story had done something wrong, I asked, "Can you tell me why that was wrong?" | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > These subjects were right to wonder about me because I really was weird. I came from a strange and different moral world - the University of Pennsylvania. Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the "harm principle," | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > The Penn students were just as likely as people in the other elevn groups to say that it would bother them to witness the taboo violations, but they were the //only// group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story. As one Penn student said, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is WEIRD morality, the term taken from a 2010 cultural psychology paper: The Weirdest People in the World? **Basically, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Jonathan Haidt goes on a journey to India and outside of WEIRD cultures to discover and study the descriptive reality of moral plurialism, that this WEIRD way of viewing morality really is weird and doesn' | ||
+ | > I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, "If you don't want to see it, don't go to the museum"? | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > If you can't see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. Imagine that a conservative artist had created these works using images of Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela instead of Jesus and Mary. Imagine that his intent was to mock the quasi-deification by the left of so many black leaders. Could such works be displayed in museums in New York or Paris without triggering angry demonstrations? | ||
+ | |||
+ | **The second principle in moral psychology is that there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Moral Foundations Theory ==== | ||
+ | After breaking out of the WEIRD matrix, Haidt and his team starting doing a ton of research on what came to be known as [[wp> | ||
+ | |||
+ | - Care/Harm: sensitivity to signs of suffering and need, despising cruelty, feeling compassion and desire to protect individuals from harm | ||
+ | * Liberal: e.g. vegan activists, "stop the genocide", | ||
+ | * Conservative: | ||
+ | - Liberty/ | ||
+ | * liberals are most concerned about the rights of vulnerable groups, and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong. Conservatives, | ||
+ | - Fairness/ | ||
+ | * Conservatives care more, and they rely on the fairness foundation more heavily (in terms of proportionality) | ||
+ | * Liberals are often uncomfortable with the negative side of [proportionality] - retribution ("an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" | ||
+ | - Loyalty/ | ||
+ | - Authority/ | ||
+ | * The political right more often builds on the loyalty foundation | ||
+ | * The political left more often values disobedience, | ||
+ | - Sanctity/ | ||
+ | * biologically linked to avoidance of disease and pathogens, powered by " | ||
+ | * conversely, it's what we find to be **sacred** - when we //value// and what //binds us together//; "Why do people readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield related to the birth of your nation), people (saints, heroes), and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they were of infinite value? Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness **helps bind individuals into moral communities.** When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive." | ||
+ | * e.g. Chastity as a virtue of purity, vs "your body may be a temple, but mine's an amusement park" bumper sticker | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Three vs Six ==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Conclusion((p. 212-214)) - maybe just read the bolded part, but use the matrices image to visualize while explaining: | ||
+ | > Moral Foundations Theory says that there are (at least) six psychological systems that comprise the universal foundations of the world' | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > Everyone - left, right, or centre - cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more. Across many scales, surveys, and political controversies, | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > Everyone - left, right, and center - cares about liberty/ | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > The fairness/ | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > The remaining three foundations - loyalty/ | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > **Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the care/harm, liberty/ | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is the second principle in moral psychology: **there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So what do we do then with these findings to be more effective pro-life activists? **We need to keep these taste receptors in mind as we speak to elephants** (e.g. why do we focus so much in the pro-life message on care/harm and liberty/ | ||
+ | |||
+ | Finally, we turn to the third principle in moral psychology to develop deeper empathy, and learn a few more lessons that are relevant for heart apologetics and for the pro-life movement more broadly. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ===== Part 3: The Hive Switch ===== | ||
+ | <note warning> | ||
+ | |||
+ | In Part III of the book, Haidt explores a lot of studies and a lot of evolutionary biology to make the point, from a descriptive, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The chimp part makes sense, as we share like 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. But bees? | ||
+ | |||
+ | While our similarities to chimpanzees can explain a lot of our selfishness from an evolutionary biology perspective, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Haidt tells the story of the burst of patriotism he experienced in the wake of 9/11, despite being an unpatriotic liberal((p. 219)): | ||
+ | > In the terrible days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I felt an urge so primitive I was embarrassed to admit it to my friends: I wanted to put an American flag decal on my car. | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > The urge seemed to come out of nowhere, with no connection to anything I'd ever done. It was as if there was an ancient alarm box in the back of my brain with a sign on it that said, "In case of foreign attack, break glass and push button." | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > But I was a professor, and professors don't do such things. Flag waving and nationalism are for conservatives. Professors are liberal globetrotting universalists, | ||
+ | > | ||
+ | > After three days and a welter of feelings I"d never felt before, I found a solution to my dilemma. I put an American flag in one corner of my rear windshield, and I put the United Nations flag in the opposite corner. That way I could announce that I loved my country, but don't worry, folks, I don't place it above other countries, and this was, after all, an attack on the whole world, sort of, right? | ||
+ | |||
+ | This switch into group mode, Jonathan Haidt calls The Hive Switch. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. He says, "we are selfish primates who long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves." | ||
+ | * religious experience/ | ||
+ | * awe in nature | ||
+ | * a sports stadium | ||
+ | * a rock concert | ||
+ | * a meaningful and challenging experience that builds community (like a summer internship or tour) | ||
+ | |||
+ | FIXME example: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Collective ritual - Haidt says that human beings are // | ||
+ | |||
+ | When this hive switch is activated, this leads to the third principle in moral psychology: **morality binds and blinds.** That is, the Hive Switch //binds// us together in community. But, it also //blinds// us beyond the in-group. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Binding ==== | ||
+ | < | ||
+ | On community-building | ||
+ | * Muscular bonding in warfare (acting as a unit in a whole), but also sports and raves, etc | ||
+ | * Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more | ||
+ | * Ways to nudge everyone' | ||
+ | * **Increase similarity, not diversity.** [connect with religious idea bundling] To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don't call attention to racial and ethnic differences; | ||
+ | * **Exploit synchrony: | ||
+ | * **Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals.** As McNeill said, soldiers don't risk their lives for their country or for the army; they do so for their buddies in the same squad or platoon. Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group. Intergroup competitions, | ||
+ | |||
+ | But also, critical, on how we form our political ideologies and identities, Haidt breaks this down: | ||
+ | > Innate does not mean unmalleable; | ||
+ | > 1. Genes Make Brains: sensation-seeking / openness to experience vs threat sensitivity | ||
+ | > 2. Traits Guide Children Along Different Paths: | ||
+ | > (a) Dispositional traits: broad dimensions of personality that show themselves in many different situations and are fairly consistent from childhood through old age | ||
+ | > (b) Characteristic adaptations: | ||
+ | > 3/c. People Construct Life Narrative: The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor, and among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves... a bridge between a developing adolescent self and an adult political identity | ||
+ | |||
+ | e.g. grand unified narratives of liberalism or conservativism from the book FIXME maybe skip | ||
+ | Liberal: | ||
+ | > Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were repehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Conservative: | ||
+ | > Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected ane enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way... Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardwokring Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to " | ||
+ | |||
+ | FIXME idea bundling... binds and blinds is idea bundling... right? | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Blinding ==== | ||
+ | FIXME :!: BLINDING to the other side, e.g. | ||
+ | |||
+ | p. 334 A study to try to saw ahot a " | ||
+ | > Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, | ||
+ | > If you don't see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sancity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. | ||
+ | |||
+ | e.g. Michael Feingold, a threater critic for a liberal newspaper the *Village Voice:* | ||
+ | > Republicans don't believe in the imagination, | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== Lessons ==== | ||
+ | So, we can learn how teams form, and how people gravitate to the left or right. And we can learn wisdom for building strong communities. | ||
- | ===== The Six Taste Receptors ===== | + | But for being effective communicators to the broader culture, to people currently outside the pro-life community... |
- | There' | + | * We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, |
+ | * (ie. people don't hold different beliefs and worldviews because they' | ||
+ | * We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see //us// if they misunderstand our moral foundations, | ||
- | From YourMorals.org: | + | Dale Carnegie uses a quotation from Henry Ford: |
- | - **Care:** Concerns regarding care and protecting individuals | + | >> If there is one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person' |
- | - **Equality**: | + | > |
- | - **Loyalty: | + | > It's such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode. The rider and elephant work together smoothly |
- | - **Authority: | + | |
- | | + | |
- | | + | |
- | FIXME need better definitions and understanding, | + | ===== Conclusion ===== |
- | ===== The Hive Switch ===== | + | The three principles of moral psychology: |
- | Morality binds and blinds. We are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee. | + | - Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second - the elephant and the rider |
+ | - There' | ||
+ | - Morality binds and blinds | ||
- | FIXME points to bring out: | + | These are the foundations |
- | * How political teams form, how people gravitate to the left or right | + | |
- | * For pro-life activism | + | |
- | * First, there' | + | |
- | * Second, there' | + | |
- | * We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, | + | |
- | * We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see //us// if they misunderstand our moral foundations, and be prepared | + |