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utsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh310 [2024/03/27 06:40] – minor edits, but need to restart Firefox and don't want to lose this balleyneutsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh310 [2024/04/11 21:42] (current) – hive switch with audience choir balleyne
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 For a guide through the field of moral psychology, I'm going to turn to Jonathan Haidt - whose name you'll see all over the Wikipedia article on [[wp>Moral Psychology]] - and his landmark 2012 book //The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion,// which draws on 25 years of groundbreaking research and which, I think, is full of wisdom for pro-life activists as a sort of textbook for a 300-level course in heart apologetics. For a guide through the field of moral psychology, I'm going to turn to Jonathan Haidt - whose name you'll see all over the Wikipedia article on [[wp>Moral Psychology]] - and his landmark 2012 book //The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion,// which draws on 25 years of groundbreaking research and which, I think, is full of wisdom for pro-life activists as a sort of textbook for a 300-level course in heart apologetics.
  
-(I first encountered Jonathan Haidt's concepts from the book in late 2020, in the midst of pandemic and 2020 presidential election debates and conspiracy thinking, and then my friend Katie bought me the book a year later at the end of 2021, and I read it slowly in 2022, 2023, and early 2024. I knew there were deep insights into heart apologetics from my first encounter, but as I worked my way through the book, I became more and more convinced that it would be helpful to run a seminar on this.)+(Share some of my 2020-2024 journey in thinking about this.)
  
-I'm going to pull out the core insights from Haidt's work that apply to pro-life activism, and leave aside philosophical bones to pick and worldview differences. In the first half, we'll look at the Elephant and the Rider; in the second half, the six taste receptors and the hive switch.+I'm going to pull out the core insights from Haidt's work that apply to pro-life activism, and leave aside philosophical bones to pick and worldview differences. We'll go through Jonathan Haidt's three principles of moral psychology, and apply them to pro-life activism: The Elephant and the Rider, the Six Taste Receptors, and the Hive Switch.
  
 ===== Part 1: The Elephant and the Rider ===== ===== Part 1: The Elephant and the Rider =====
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   * More on the particular moral feelings in part 2, but for now, let's think about the method here: intuitions first, reasoning second   * 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 ====
 Through much of his research, Haidt found that: **Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.** He sums this up with his analogy of the elephant and the rider. Through much of his research, Haidt found that: **Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.** He sums this up with his analogy of the elephant and the rider.
  
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 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's elephants. 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's elephants.
  
-===== Empathy for Elephants =====+===== Part 2: Six Taste Receptors =====
 The first principle in moral psychology is that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" - the elephant and the rider. Now, we'll take a look at the second principle to better understand other people, and the third principle for guidance on how to be effective at reaching them. The first principle in moral psychology is that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" - the elephant and the rider. Now, we'll take a look at the second principle to better understand other people, and the third principle for guidance on how to be effective at reaching them.
  
 <del>(Jonathon Haidt is writing as a secular liberal who went on a journey from breaking out of the matrix, becoming more aware of his own biases, and broadening his understanding of moral psychology to better understand and appreciate people with different ideological perspectives. The journey for most of us is a bit of the reverse, so I won't be following exactly his journey in the book, but the lessons he learned applied in reverse.(</del> <del>(Jonathon Haidt is writing as a secular liberal who went on a journey from breaking out of the matrix, becoming more aware of his own biases, and broadening his understanding of moral psychology to better understand and appreciate people with different ideological perspectives. The journey for most of us is a bit of the reverse, so I won't be following exactly his journey in the book, but the lessons he learned applied in reverse.(</del>
  
-FIXME I need some key images and graphs: the moral matrices from Part III, maybe the graphs from Part II as a warm up to that... +==== Beyond WEIRD Morality ====
- +
-FIXME combine parts II and III into a second half, where Part II is descriptive and Part III is prescriptive (in parts of the pro-life application) +
- +
-==== The Six Taste Receptors ==== +
-=== 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. 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.
  
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 He opens Part II like this((p. 111-112)): He opens Part II like this((p. 111-112)):
-> I got my Ph.D. at McDonald's. Part of it, anyway, given the hours I spent standing outside of a McDonald's restaurant in West Philadelphia trying to recruit working-class adults to talk with me for my dissertation research. When someone agreed, we'd sit down together at the restaurant's outdoor seating area, and I"d ask them what they thought about the family that ate its dog, the women who used her flag as a rag, and all the rest. I got some odd looks as the interview progressed, and also plenty of laughter — particularly whe I told people about the guy and the chicken. I was expecting that, because I had written the stories to surprise and even shock people.+> I got my Ph.D. at McDonald's. Part of it, anyway, given the hours I spent standing outside of a McDonald's restaurant in West Philadelphia trying to recruit working-class adults to talk with me for my dissertation research. When someone agreed, we'd sit down together at the restaurant's outdoor seating area, and I"d ask them what they thought about the family that ate its dog, the women who used her flag as a rag, and all the rest. I got some odd looks as the interview progressed, and also plenty of laughter — particularly when I told people about the guy and the chicken. I was expecting that, because I had written the stories to surprise and even shock people.
 >  > 
 > 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?" When I interviewed college students on the Penn campus a month earlier, this question brought forth their moral justifications quite smoothly. But a few blocks west, this same question often led to long pauses and disbelieving stares. Those pauses and stares seemed to say, //You mean you don't know why it's wrong to do that to a chicken? I have to explain this to you? What planet are you from?// > 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?" When I interviewed college students on the Penn campus a month earlier, this question brought forth their moral justifications quite smoothly. But a few blocks west, this same question often led to long pauses and disbelieving stares. Those pauses and stares seemed to say, //You mean you don't know why it's wrong to do that to a chicken? I have to explain this to you? What planet are you from?//
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 **The second principle in moral psychology is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness.** This is more of a lesson for WEIRD people, but it's also critical to understand the differences in how the left and the right think about morality. **The second principle in moral psychology is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness.** This is more of a lesson for WEIRD people, but it's also critical to understand the differences in how the left and the right think about morality.
  
-=== Moral Foundations Theory ===+==== 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>Moral Foundations Theory]], especially through their project YourMorals.org. Haidt says **the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors** - and what values by culture and especially by political ideology is how many taste receptors people are using as foundations of their moral intuitions. 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>Moral Foundations Theory]], especially through their project YourMorals.org. Haidt says **the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors** - and what values by culture and especially by political ideology is how many taste receptors people are using as foundations of their moral intuitions.
  
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     * e.g. Chastity as a virtue of purity, vs "your body may be a temple, but mine's an amusement park" bumper sticker      * 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 ====
-FIXME need better definitions and understanding, and... can this just be combined with the second section? The lessons are in Part III, the discovery is in Part II +
-=== Three vs Six ===+
  
 Conclusion((p. 212-214)) - maybe just read the bolded part, but use the matrices image to visualize while explaining: Conclusion((p. 212-214)) - maybe just read the bolded part, but use the matrices image to visualize while explaining:
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 > **Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.** > **Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.**
  
 +This is the second principle in moral psychology: **there's more to morality than harm and fairness.**
  
-===== The Hive Switch ===== +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/oppression? And not on sanctity or loyalty?), and we need to **speak in a language that will be received by //their// elephant, not that will simply satisfy //ours.//** 
-Morality binds and blinds. We are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee.+ 
 +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>This section needs a lot more work to smooth out the narrative. This isn't a script, but is very chunky and may need to be refactored/reorganized.</note> 
 + 
 +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, psychological perspective, that **human beings are selfish, and groupish.** He sums it up with this adage: **we are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.** 
 + 
 +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, it cannot explain our groupishness. In particular, one thing that sets human beings apart in terms of behaviour and psychology is that "it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together." Human beings have shared intentionality, we can //collaborate// and work together as a community in a way that chimpanzees cannot. Haidt refers to this ability to switch into "group" mode as "the Hive Switch." 
 + 
 +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." I hadn't known the alarm box was there, but when those four planes broke the glass and pushed the button I had an overwhelming sense of being an American. I wanted to do something, anything, to support my team. Like so many others, I gave blood and  donated money to Red Cross. I was more open and helpful to strangers. And I wanted to display my team membership by showing the flag in some way. 
 +> 
 +> But I was a professor, and professors don't do such things. Flag waving and nationalism are for conservatives. Professors are liberal globetrotting universalists, reflexively wary of saying that their nation is better than other nations. When you see an American flag on a car in a UVA staff parking lot, you can bet that the car belongs to a secretary or a blue-collar worker. 
 +> 
 +> 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." (Note: these are psychological descriptions, not ultimate explanations - we're leaving theology and philosophy aside here!) The Hives Switch is what puts us into group mode, it's that transcendent, communal/communion experience. Think about any number of examples, of what are typically some of the most important experiences of our lives: 
 +  * religious experience/encounter 
 +  * 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: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3x_fI_s4SV/ 
 + 
 +Collective ritual - Haidt says that human beings are //conditional hive creatures.// We exist on an individual level, but also as part of the larger society, as part of a community. 
 + 
 +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 ==== 
 +<note>This is a side note, could skip</note> 
 +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's "hive switch" sliders a bit: (p. 277) 
 +    * **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; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group's shared values and common identity. 
 +    * **Exploit synchrony:** People who move together are saying, "We are one, we are a team; just look how perfectly we are able to do that Tomasello shared-intention thing." Japanese corporations such as Toyota begin their days with synchronous companywide exercises. Groups prepare for battle - in war and sports - with group chants and ritualized movements. ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiKFYTFJ_kw|Example given of rugby haka]]) If you ask people to sing a song together, or to march in step, or just to tap out some beats together on a table, it makes them trust each other more and be more willing to help each other out, in part because it makes people feel more similar to each other. If it's too creepy to ask your employees or fellow group members to do synchronized calisthenics, perhaps you can just try to have more parties with dancing or karaoke. **Synchrony builds trust.** 
 +    * **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, such as friendly rivalries between corporate divisions, or intramural sports competitions, should have a net positive effect on hivishness and social capital. But pitting individuals against each other in a competition for scarce resources (such as bonuses) will destroy hivishness, trust, and morale. 
 + 
 +But also, critical, on how we form our political ideologies and identities, Haidt breaks this down: 
 +> Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that's only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the originals of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process 
 +> 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: traits that emerge as we grow, developed in response to specific environments and challenges that people happen to face 
 +> 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, and irrational traditionalism... BUt the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightly against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishin modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantable the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individual sare requal and free to pursue their self-deinfed happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one's life to achieving 
 + 
 +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 "understand" them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals... Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fedielity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle... and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles... Instead fo projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soliders in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism... Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it
  
 FIXME idea bundling... binds and blinds is idea bundling... right? FIXME idea bundling... binds and blinds is idea bundling... right?
-FIXME there's a lot about **team building** here in terms of pro-life relevance, intentionally activating the hive switch... 
  
-FIXME points to bring out: +==== Blinding ==== 
-  * How political teams form, how people gravitate to the left or right +FIXME :!: BLINDING to the other side, e.g. 
-  * For pro-life activism + 
-    * First, there's a lot of wisdom here in internal community-building - active the hive switch +p. 334 A study to try to saw ahot a "typical liberal" or "typical conservative" would respond to something: 
-    * Second, there's a lot of wisdom here in being effective communicators +> Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretnding to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described thsemselves as "very liberal." The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as "one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" or "justice is the most important requirement for a society," liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral martix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He's more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives. 
-      * We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, and we need to have empathy and be able to speak their language +> 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. 
-      * We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see //us// if they misunderstand our moral foundations, and be prepared to speak to the elephant in order to build connection and help lower their defences, etc+ 
 +e.g. Michael Feingold, a threater critic for a liberal newspaper the *Village Voice:* 
 +> Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recpie for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. WHich is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm. 
 + 
 +==== 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. 
 + 
 +But for being effective communicators to the broader culture, to people currently outside the pro-life community... 
 +  * We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, and we need to have empathy and be able to speak their language 
 +    * (ie. people don't hold different beliefs and worldviews because they're evil terrible people, let's take the time to understand their elephants and their taste receptors, and speak to them effectively) 
 +  * We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see //us// if they misunderstand our moral foundations, and be prepared to speak to the elephant in order to build connection and help lower their defences, etc - all the more reason to speak effective to their elephants and be sensitive and adapt our communication so that it's effective 
 + 
 +Dale Carnegie uses a quotation from Henry Ford: 
 +>> If there is one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own. 
 +> 
 +> 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 to fend off attacks and lob rhetorical grenades of our own. The performance may impress our friends and show our allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it's not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too. 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. And if you do truly see it from the other person's way - deeply and intuitively - you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide. 
 + 
 +===== Conclusion ===== 
 + 
 +The three principles of moral psychology: 
 +  - Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second - the elephant and the rider 
 +  - There's more to morality than harm and fairness - the six taste receptors 
 +  - Morality binds and blinds - the Hive Switch (90 percent chimp, 10 percent bee) 
 + 
 +These are the foundations of heart apologetics. In being effective communicators and apologists, we can not solely speak to the rider - we need to speak to the elephant, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, and be sensitive to human moral psychology if we want to be persuasive, especially across vast ideological and political worldview divides.