Interview: Jonathan Haidt on What Underlies Polarization in America

“In a sense, the Founding Fathers feared democracy because of the tendency of people to be carried away by their passion and easily led astray by demagogues, and I think that our modern polarization, augmented by social media, could well bring their worst fears to reality.”

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose research focuses on moral psychology. He is currently serving as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the Stern School of Business of New York University. Much of Dr. Haidt’s work had explored how different cultures viewed morality, before he began studying the different psychological features of progressives and conservatives. He has become an expert on political polarization. Although he was a progressive for much of his life, Dr. Haidt now examines all political groups with equal scrutiny and considers himself to be a centrist. He is the author of three books for general audiences: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and, with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind. Dr. Haidt is also the co-founder of the Heterodox Academy, an organization that encourages ideological diversity at universities. He joins Merion West’s Erich Prince to discuss The Righteous Mind, political tribalism, his personal journey to the center of the political spectrum, and the sources of political division today.

Dr. Haidt, thank you for speaking with us today. I’d like to begin with your book The Righteous Mind. One of the things that struck me, in particular, while I was reading was this Robber’s Cave experiment which you discuss: the researchers take a group of children from the same middle-class, Protestant background in Oklahoma and assign them to these different teams and have them compete. Not long after, they’re basically coming to blows with one another. And that’s before something like ideology or some of these big questions get into play; this is just an arbitrary division of two groups of roughly the same kids. For people who aren’t as familiar with that experiment, could you talk about why you chose to include this example in your book and how you think it might illustrate some of the divisions that we’re seeing today politically?

It’s a famous experiment in social psychology that is used to illustrate the way that human tribalism works. Human beings evolved in groups. Certainly, over the last couple hundred thousand years there was a lot of group-versus-group competition. All of us alive today are not just the descendants of the individuals who out-competed the individual next to them; rather, we are the descendants of the groups that out-competed the groups next to them, and our minds bear the signs of that evolutionary process.