The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.

The rate at which genes changed in response to selection pressures began rising around 40,000 years ago, and the curve got steeper and steeper after 20,000 years ago. Genetic change reached a crescendo during the Holocene era, in Africa as well as in Eurasia.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”).

Kids can’t talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat

Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen: Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”

we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community.42 More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community t

In people, oxytocin reaches far beyond family life. If you squirt oxytocin spray into a person’s nose, he or she will be more trusting in a game that involves transferring money temporarily to an anonymous partner.29 Conversely, people who behave trustingly cause oxytocin levels to increase in the partner they trusted. Oxytocin levels also rise whe

“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.”34 “Reasoning-why” can occur only for creatures that have language and a need to explain themselves to other creatures. “Reasoning-why” is not automatic; it’s conscious, it sometimes feels