Videos | The Righteous Mind

Mar14 12

TED 2012 talk on Religion, Evolution and Self-Transcendence

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in Evolution, Religion, Videos

I spoke at TED 2012, on the reason why people have so many ways of achieving self-transcendence. My goal in the talk was to illustrate visually some of the most complex ideas in my book — chapters 9 and 10 on multi-level selection and hive psychology. If you read those chapters, the video will make even more sense. If you watch this first, those chapters will make even more sense.

The basic idea is that our ability to lose ourselves and become “simply a part of a whole” (as Durkheim put it) is an adaptation, not just a fluke of crossed neural wiring, and the New Atheists would have it. It’s a mental ability that is of little use for helping individuals beat their neighbors in competition, but boy is it useful for helping teams bond together to out-compete other teams.

In other words, I’m siding with Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson, and David Sloan Wilson on this issue, and against the dominant (but fading) view in evolutionary biology that group selection never happened.

[Be sure to watch this video full-screen, for the video effects]

Mar13 5

Ideological Diversity Matters More than the Usual Kinds (with Ratigan)

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in Civility, Politics, Videos

[For those of you getting my RSS feed: I’ll soon start writing real blog posts about politics. For now I’m making videos accessible through my blog]

Dylan Ratigan and I talked about how to get people out of their righteous certainty. He used the metaphor of people being asleep (certain that they know) and awake (awakened to the true state of affairs, in which they realize how blind and arrogant they were before). He also said that good social networks are the key to waking up. I agreed enthusiastically because what he said matches so perfectly with what I wrote about the confirmation bias (in ch. 4), and how the only cure for the confirmation bias is other people, with different beliefs, who can look for evidence to disconfirm your beliefs. Our conversation then turned to the value of diversity, and how it is really intellectual and ideological diversity that matters — that can wake people up — whereas when people talk about diversity they usually just mean racial, gender, and ethnic diversity without any regard for whether these “diverse” people think differently. I was so pleased to have the opportunity to talk about the importance of ideological diversity, which I have argued would improve the quality of thinking and research in the social sciences.

Mar13 3

Moral Narratives

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in 2012 Campaign, Politics, Videos

I was a guest on BeastTV (Daily Beast), with John Avlon (author of Wingnuts). We talked about the dueling narratives of left and right that make it easy for each side to believe weird stuff.

Mar12 2

On Morning Joe

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in 2012 Campaign, Politics, Videos

I was a guest on the MSNBC show Morning Joe (March 12).

We talked about the re-emergence of religion into the culture war as the Republicans have focused on issues such as birth control and abortion.

Here’s the clip:

Feb01 26

On Moyers and Company

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in Videos

I’m the guest on Bill Moyers’ new show, Moyers and Company, airing on PBS stations Feb 5-7. Check your local PBS stations. Or, just watch the whole episode below, or, better yet, online here. There’s some good additional material on that page, below the main video, including this 3 minute clip on how my time in India, while working with Richard Shweder, helped me to step out of the “matrix.” The producers of the show also created this wonderful feature, to help foster mutual understanding: They asked a well-known blogger from each side to recommend blogs from the OTHER side that they each found helpful and insightful.

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Moyers and I talked on camera for about two and a half hours. (He is as lovely, warm, and conversational in real life as he appears on TV. The time flew by.) The producers edited our conversation down to 47 minutes, so there was a lot of material that didn’t make it into the show, including just about every place where I gave credit to my collaborators. So let me at least mention them here:

–My colleagues at YourMorals.org, of whom a picture is flashed up early in the show: Pete Ditto, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, and Sean Wojcik.

—Emily Ekins, at UCLA, who took the photos of the Tea Party rally, and who is working with me to study Occupy Wall St.

Jan23 2