Five Themes In Johnathon Haidt's The Righteous Mind

In chapter four of Johnathon Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, Haidt talks about five different topics. Of these five, there are three that I am going to discuss; 1.) We do care about what others think about us, even if we do not think we do. 2.) We as humans will always tend to be dishonest when we think we can get away with it, and 3.) We will reason with anything to justify our original thought. His main thesis for this chapter is that our intuitions come first, then our strategic reasoning. With this chapter comes about a lot of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is the word we use to describe something that bring the most amount of pleasure and the least amount of pain for everyone involved. It also takes the consequences into effect. I say

He proposes an experiment where he had a large group of students rate their self-esteem and how much it depended on what others thought. Then he picked a few individuals who- question after question- said they were completely unaffected by the opinion of others. He took those individuals plus the other individuals who admitted to being affected by what others had to say about them, to a lab a few weeks later and had them talk about themselves for five minutes, speaking into a microphone. At the end of each minute, they saw a number flash on the screen indicating how much the person in the other room wanted to interact with them. With ratings one to seven (seven being best), you can imagine how it would feel to see the numbers drop 4…3…2…3…2…etc. Not surprisingly, people who admitted that they cared about what others thought had huge reactions to the numbers, and their self-esteem sank. But the self-proclaimed mavericks suffered shocks almost just as big. They might not have thought that other people’s opinions mattered to them, but when it showed the numbers right in front of their face, the indeed had a negative reaction. Haidt’s quote “Our reasoning is less for our own benefit, and more to convince others of our stance” sums point number one

We definitely notice how quick people are to judge others by their statements and beliefs if they go against our own- but if it’s our own belief, we tend to defend it until the end. In this point, Haidt talks about the confirmation bias, which is the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People tend to think “there is evidence that supports my theory, therefore my theory is right.” The main point in topic number three is that people tend to be close-minded when it comes to being wrong. No one likes to be wrong, so we tend to find ways that support how we feel and what we think is right in order to justify out thoughts and feelings. Our intuitions come first, our strategic reasoning comes