The Righteous Mind
  • About The Author
    • Bio
    • Interviews & Lectures
    • Essays I’ve Written
    • Upcoming Talks
  • About the Book
    • Reviews
    • Endorsements
    • Introductory Chapter
    • Discussions of the Book
    • Figures/Notes/Refs
  • Buy The Book
  • Applying Moral Psych
    • Capitalism and Morality
    • Business Ethics
    • Viewpoint Diversity in the Academy
    • Coddling of the American Mind
    • For Teachers & Book Clubs
    • To Politics and Civility
    • In Business
    • In Religious Communities
    • In Therapy and Coaching
    • How You Can Help
  • Videos
  • Blog
Home » Evolution
Mar31 4

On Bloggingheads with Robert Wright

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in Evolution, Moral Foundations in Action, Politics, Religion, Videos

Robert Wright (author of Nonzero, and The Evolution of God), interviews me about the book. We largely agree about the evolution of religion, and about the New Atheists being fundamentalists. Bob is dubious about group selection. He acknowledges it could exist, but tries to come up with individual-level explanations for human groupishness. Bob and I co-taught a class at Princeton. We are on very friendly terms, and this allows our disagreements to be vocal without any risk of it descending into anger. Relationships help open-minded thinking and civil disagreement.

Read More
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]

Read More

Recent Posts

  • Why The Righteous Mind may be the best common reading for incoming college students
  • How not to improve the moral ecology of campus
  • How the Democrats Can Use Moral Foundations Theory Against Trump
  • The politics of disgust animated for the age of Trump
  • Where political identities come from, in one cartoon

Archives

  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • July 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012

Subscribe

  • Entries RSS

© 2018 The Righteous Mind

© 2011 The Righteous Mind | Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress