1 Comment
Apr 20, 2022Liked by René Walter

I am very happy and thankful that I got to know Jonathan Haidt at your previous blog (among uncountable other insightful, thought provoking, and differentiated information and opinions).

Again I find your post and cited Haidt's text has rather simple to understand, but profound insights, so thanks for sharing! If I had started a "Zettelkasten", now I would add some more ideas to it.

tl,dr:

At that time when I first got to know Haidt via Nerdcore, the main point of a shared talk and the accompanied post in my understanding was a conclusive theory based on that most people have the same moral core values and are somewhere on a scale concerning main personality traits. However the observed big difference between e.g. liberals and conservatives is the order/priority of the moral core values respectively where on the scale of personality traits one lands - which helped me a lot to better understand what drives decisions and opinions for people with a certain political view (even if intuitively one might has a feel for this, Haidt's related TED talk and the blog post clarified that).

5 moral core values according to Haidt (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201201/jonathan-haidts-moral-political-psychology):

1. Care for Others/Do no harm;

2. Fairness/Justice/Equality;

3. In-Group Loyalty;

4. Respect for Authority;

5. Purity

If looking at conservatives compared with liberals (simplified):

Conservative -> low in openess to experience; values 5 moral core values each about the same

Liberal -> high in openess to experience; values the first 2 much more then the other 3

Expand full comment