Jonathan Haidt on Morality, Politics, and Intellectual Diversity on Campus

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan is one of the world's leading thinkers on the political views of individuals and where those views come from. Most recently, he's been involved in a crusade to make the campus environment more intellectually diverse. He's one of the world's leading psychologists, has a strong background in cultural anthropology and economics, and basically is known to us all. If you're familiar with how the Conversations with Tyler series works, I'll just point it out again. This is the conversation I wanted to have with Jonathan, not the conversation you want to have. Now here's a disclaimer. Unfortunately, the audio quality of our conversation suffered due to some misbehaving equipment. We've cleaned up the audio as best we could, but if you prefer, there is, as always, a full transcript available at conversationswithtyler.com. So just to start off with a question. So Jonathan, you think of people's political views as stemming from these social intuitions, which are fairly strongly hardwired into them. If I look at politics this year, what I see is we had almost all the pundits thinking about Republican values, the Republican past, and seeing Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and thinking some mix of those people would be the leaders. Because they matched Republican values. And they all have failed, basically. How do we think about this using your construct?

So you have to see politics as occurring at multiple levels simultaneously. And just as in, you know, at a university we've got psychologists studying individual experiences, we've got neurologists studying neurons, we've got political scientists and sociologists studying emergent phenomena, so that's what you have to do to study politics. And if you look at the history, if you look at the sort of higher-level constructs, yeah, it's bizarre what's happening. It's unprecedented. People expected the past to predict the future. But what if the emerging social constructs of the Republican Party have been getting progressively out of tune with the moral intuitions and the psychology of the voters? I think that's what we have seen. Happening.

But here's what I worry about with that explanation. If I look at local government, state legislators, governors, the Congress for that matter, the Republicans seem pretty much in tune with people's intuitions because they control all those branches, sometimes pretty solidly, especially at the state and local level. And then at the national level, there's this huge disconnect. So if all the Republicans were losing, it would be easier to see.

National politics is different from local. National politics, I believe, is, is much more like religion than local politics is. So if you take it all the way down to the very local level, who the dog catcher is, who the treasurer is of the town, that's all very practical stuff. People are very worried about their property values and things like that. It's not very ideological. National politics is much more like a religion. Is the, is the high priest of the American civil religion. I think that's what Robert Vella called it. And so at the national level, it's just, it's often unrelated to what happens at the local level.. And so I think this is something that Ronald Reagan really understood much better than his challengers. He was able to appeal to the moral intuitions of people about America, making America great. So I think it's very different from what happens at the state level.

So your core categories for understanding how values map into politics— and in a second I'll ask you to explain those— but do you see room for any new categories? So a lot of people are saying this year Well, there's a new category of populism, like my Thomas Friedman-like taxi driver experiences. I've spoken to taxi drivers, they say, "Well, I'd like to support either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders." Maybe that's populism, a kind of new category. But tell us briefly what your categories are and how fixed you think they are.

So my early research, uh, done with a lot of other social psychologists, is what we call moral foundations theory. And this grows out of my frustration as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, trying to make sense of two things that seemed so obviously true to me. One was that wherever you look, people are the same in many ways. We're obviously products of evolution. Obviously there's a human nature, and so evolutionary psychology has to be right to some extent. The other is that people are so variable, our cultures are so variable, and anthropology, cultural psychology is deeply right, and the basic meanings of moral terms varies a lot around the world. So cultural psychology has to be right. And how do you put these together? But the people who love cultural psychology often are critical, they don't dare, they feel threatened by evolution, and the people who do evolution often will dismiss cultural variation. So what I tried to do, I was working with Richard Shweder, an anthropologist at the time, what I tried to do is look around the world and say what are the things that everyone seems to care about, is there something innate about, say, reciprocity? And the answer has to be yes. Everywhere you go, in every society, people have something that involves reciprocity, a sense of I've done something for you, you need to do something for me. And that might be that I've killed somebody in your clan, well, you have to kill somebody in my clan. Or we might disagree with that, but we see the logic of reciprocity. And at the same time, there's all these evolutionary theorists, like Robert Trivers, writing about the evolution of reciprocity. So at a time when there were a lot of people people in the academy who believed in sort of blank slate notions, everything is social construction, everything could be taught by your society, fairness as reciprocity just stands out. It's gotta be innate. But then it gets built on in very culturally variable ways. So that's one foundation. Much more briefly then, care versus harm is another. We're mammals, we evolved an attachment system. Another is loyalty versus betrayal. We are really good at coalitions, we're tribal creatures. Another is authority versus subversion. We're primates. Primates are mostly hierarchical. We've got a lot of innate programming that makes us deferential to authority. Another one is sanctity versus degradation. This is the sort of the weirdest one for secular progressives, but it's one that you see in kosher laws, Hinduism, and Islam. You see it in a lot of religions. You see it if you go to like a yoga store, someplace where they talk about chakras and toxins. You see it there too. The idea that the body's a temple and you want to guard against impurities.

And the left wing or right wing has more worry about lack of purity?

In general, the right. If you look at who moralizes sex, the body, who would be more opposed to using the body as a way to just express your own individual values, it tends to pop up more on the right, but elements of the left have it. Again, if you go look at yoga, I have a—

It seems to be migrating toward the left, so GMOs when it comes to food or buying a t-shirt from the wrong country is disgusting. If these can migrate, I have this picture of these relatively fixed modules, and left-wing people have more of some, and right-wing people have more of others, but we also see them migrating. So how flexible is this?

So this is the key idea of these being these sort of modules, that they're not modules that are going off in your head at the moment of judgment so much as they are modules in us from birth. And they are, they are what cultures can build upon as you develop. So think about it as like taste buds. We have these innate taste buds because this is the way our ancestors lived. They ate fruit and meat, and so we have sweet and sour receptors and we have MSG detectors, which guide us to meat. But we don't just have a cuisine— here I am talking to the expert on culture variations here in cuisine, in a sense— we don't just have a cuisine that's based on sweet, sour, salt. It's, um, each cuisine is a cultural creation that has to ultimately please the same taste buds, universal taste buds. So think about it for morality. We all have the same, let's call them 6 moral taste buds. The 6th one that he'd mentioned before is liberty versus oppression. People resent being forced or told what to do if they don't perceive it as legitimate. So we have these 6 moral taste buds, and if you're raised on a desert island with nobody, maybe you'd have them, but they wouldn't be developed.. But whenever you have a culture emerging, it's gonna build on certain aspects of it and not others. So if you have a warrior culture, if you're constantly being attacked, boy is it gonna build on the loyalty, the authority, the sanctity ones to create these true tribal consciousness. And you can see that in a kind of a joke form in fraternities. Fraternities, even on secular campuses, fraternities will build on that, those sort of tribal foundations. Whereas if you go to say Amsterdam or New York or places that are port cities with a lot of variety, diversity, commerce, those tend to thin down the moral domain. They don't tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, "I'll tell you what, you don't hurt me, I won't hurt you. You honor your contracts, I'll honor mine." And this is a more appropriate morality for diversity and for commerce.

So if we get to a very fundamental question, left-wing individuals and right-wing individuals, and let's take for now only America, as people in other ways, how different do you think they are? Or is it just there are these semi-accidental triggers which have set off certain modules in the left-wingers in different modules than the right-wingers, but otherwise they're gonna dress the same, they're gonna treat their spouses the same way, or not? Are they fundamentally different?

Not fundamentally different, but different in predispositions. So the most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60% of the variance under some assumptions. Can be explained by the genes. It's the largest, uh, the largest piece of variance we can explain. So if you and I were twins separated at birth and raised in different families, our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue. But once we're out on our own, we're gonna sort of both converge on our brain's natural level of religiosity. Same with politics. Whether you're on the right or left is not determined by your genes, but you're predisposed. You find You find variety and diversity and challenging authority really exciting. Well, if that's the way you were as a kid, even if you're raised in a conservative household, once you go to college, you can be attracted to more radical left-wing politics.

That's it. Hippies aside, do left-wing people dress differently than right-wing people?

Yes.

Adjusting for some core variables.

Yes.

How do right-wing people dress?

Well, so the core psychology here is called openness to experience. People on the left are higher on a variable called openness to experience. People on the right are lower on it, but they're also higher on conscientiousness. They're more neat, orderly, they make deadlines. So really interesting research done by Sam Gosling at the University of Texas at Austin, back when he was a grad student or professor at Berkeley. They went into people's dorm rooms. They agreed, "OK, you just leave your dorm room, don't clean up, just leave. We're gonna take photographs." They come in, they photograph everything. Another group of students now has to just look at the photographs and guess. What do you think? Liberal or conservative.

So if you're in a swing state, you're in, say, proverbial southern Ohio, and in a natural setting you meet a person, with what probability do you think you can guess or forecast if they're left-wing or right-wing?

Oh, the— I mean—

So even up would be 0.5, right?

Yeah. Oh, probably 0.58, 0.5— I mean, something— I mean, look, people are incredibly variable. I'm a social scientist. Our goal is not to predict with perfect accuracy. We're just trying to extract what are the regularities under the surface that can explain some things of what we see on the surface. But look, put it this way. Suppose you're going to an academic conference. Well, I don't know about economists, but if it was psychologists or people in the humanities, you go into the conference and everybody is wearing a suit and tie, they're all very neat. You look around, you'd think, "I'm in the wrong room," and you probably are. People who are conservative are— what Gosling found People are conservative, they, their rooms are more orderly and neat. They have more calendars, more postage stamps. They're just better prepared to sort of be orderly and neat and get things done. People on the left had more stylistic elements, more high design elements. They had more varied books. So in a variety of ways, our preferences grow out of our innate temperaments.

So this is true in all or mostly all cultures?

Well, that I couldn't say. That I couldn't say.

You've studied in Orissa, India. You've studied in Recife, Brazil. You must have thought about the questions there and other places you've been.

Yeah. So you do find— and look, you see this if you look at ancient societies too. Whenever there was an empire, the empire always ran into trouble. And at that point, there are those who say, "Our misfortunes are because we have lost the ways of the elders. The gods are punishing us for departing from the wisdom. We need to return." So those are the people I would bet who, if you could transplant them, they would grow up to be more conservative. They feel the moral decay. They feel the loss of the tradition. Other people say, no, no, we need to march forward. We need to radically change things. So there are certain psychological dimensions that are universal. Politics grows up around that, but the way politics grows up in an open commercial secular society is just so different from, say, what I saw in Poland last year, where you've got this gigantic neutron bomb of communism communism. So what it means to be on the left and the right in Poland is really different from what it means here, because if you're on the left, you're associated with the hated communists. So the dimensions of psychology are universal, but the politics that grows up on it is very influenced by local circumstance.

Would it be a partial test of your theory if we looked at a lot of different cultures and asked, who are the people who dress neatly and who have a lot of calendars and stamps? Mm-hmm. And to measure whether those were typically the conservatives?

Yes, that would be a test. That would be a test. That would be the claim. If it is true, and here I'm drawing on research by my NYU colleague John Joost and Sam Gosling and others, if it is true that the underlying psychological dimension of openness to experience and also conscientiousness, if those are what underlie political choices, then the answer is yes to your thought experiment. And that would be great to test.

I'm interested in occupational choices. You've probably thought about this also.

Oh yeah.

If you look at dentists, they're pretty Republican. Doctors lean heavily Democratic. Superficially, they're doing similar things. They're taking care of bodies. Motel owners lean Republican or conservative, but innkeepers, quote unquote, lean Democratic or liberal. Why do we see these regularities? What are they showing?

Well, if you were to go to, say, India, where there's a caste system, you probably wouldn't see it very much. But to the extent that the modern economies open up more and more choice for people to make career choices, to express their values, rather than acting on economic necessity, you're gonna see it. So this is what we have in what's called post-materialist societies. You know, my father made the choice to be a chemical engineer. He was born in the Depression, he was poor. It turns out he didn't like that, and he did make the choice to then switch to patent law, but he and his generation were very guided by economic pressures and necessities, and you do a job because your uncle has an opening for you. But ever since, you know, you and I went into universities, we're teaching all these undergrads, They're thinking, well, you know, what's right for me? What's the right fit for me? And it's the same thing as we were talking about with the clothing. If you are interested in, if you're interested in learning new things and trying to change the world and things like that, you'll be more likely drawn to occupations that have a predominance of left-wing people. Hollywood is overwhelmingly left, and that ends up Perhaps there's discrimination after the fact, but it does— creative areas are almost always heavily left. Police, military, engineering— there are certain things that are more conducive to minds predisposed to conservatism.

Now, as you know, when one thinks about this problem, there's a question of what gets put in the realm of morality. What's a moral choice? Like in Britain in the '50s, are you a mod or are you a rocker? Correct?

Okay.

But today that just looks to us like silly convention. Like, who could get upset over that?

Yeah, we understand it's, you know, PC versus Mac. That's really what matters.

Correct. So what are the forces which determine what gets put into morality and what gets put into convention?

Oh boy, that's a good question. Things that involve— things that clearly involve harm violations of rights. There are certain things that are predisposed to be moralized. But the genius of human beings is because we're so tribal, we can moralize anything that gets tagged as being predictive of what group you belong to or being part of them. So, you know, it's funny, we see this in our politics. Ideas— there was something in Obamacare. The core idea of Obamacare was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation, I think it was. There was a— I can't remember what it was, but the exchanges. Whatever it is.

The mandate.

The mandate, that's it, the mandate, exactly. So an idea, so a mandate, a mandate, well that's interesting. That would seem to be more of a left-wing idea because the right in America tends to be wary of mandates, but the economists there concluded there's some benefit to doing this, so it came up as more of a, from the right, but as soon as it was then promoted by Obama in such a tribal and hostile time, then it was tagged as bad. Almost anything that can be associated with an ongoing hot conflict can be moralized.

Let me ask you a very concrete question. So I've had dialogue with people on the left, and I've made a harm argument to them. I've said, based on work by Mark Pawley, if you look at the people who are covered by the mandate, they have to pay more for health insurance than it's worth, actually most of them. So Obamacare is imposing a harm on them. Now generally, I agree with your characterization as the left is more worried about harm. But when I make this harm argument, there's a remarkable lack of interest in it. Now it could be the data are wrong, it could be Mark Pauly's paper's wrong, you know, I would grant all that. But the striking thing is they're not interested in hearing about the harm. So isn't it the case that people just slot in the harms they want? So conservatives are very sensitive to some kinds of harms, like a deserving white student who didn't get into Yale because of affirmative action. And that to them is a focal harm. And for the left, people not getting adequate healthcare because there's no Medicaid expansion, that's a focal harm. So isn't it more the split of what gets put into harm as opposed to—

Yeah, so first of all, the idea of the harm foundation isn't just something has happened that is against my interests. It's that we have a visceral sense of seeing somebody physically suffering, crying. We feel compassion for this real suffering. This emotional suffering. So simply saying this policy is going to work against your interests, that doesn't really activate the harm foundation. But the more important one is the one that you suggest, which is once people have taken a position on something, especially if it relates to sacred values, something that's become sacred to them, they're pretty much impervious to arguments at that point. And so let's go back to, uh, to the basics of moral psychology. In my book The Righteous Mind, I boil it all down to 3 principles. We've already touched on the middle, the second one, The first principle is intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. So the basic fact about moral argument is that we're not really listening to each other. We're not actually open to reasoning. We start with our gut feeling or our partisan loyalty, and at that point we become lawyers. We're really good at being lawyers and knocking down the other guy's arguments. The second principle is there's more to morality than harm and fairness. That's the moral foundations that we just talked about in Left and Right. While they all have all the foundations, the left tends to focus more on the care, harm, fairness, reciprocity, not so much on the more tribal ones. The third principle is morality binds and blinds, and that's also relevant here. That's the idea that people are incredibly good at forming groups. The key idea to keep in mind is the Arab proverb, "Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, me, my brother, and cousin." against the stranger. That's basic social psychology, coalitional psychology. So once it's become left versus right over Obamacare, it doesn't matter really what— however good your arguments are, I'm not listening. I've got my team and we are on a mission to defeat your team.

Let's turn to some of your work on campus and with this idea of political correctness. I would say you're the person who's done the most, in a good way, to improve the quality of that debate and make campus life more tolerant or more open. And I'm very appreciative of that. But let me ask you a question about how far this can go. So let's take your vision of morality based on what you've called social intuitionism and this modularity where things just get triggered. If I look at America today, it does seem a more tolerant place than the America I grew up with.

Oh, yeah.

For gay individuals, not all, maybe not all minorities, but many minorities, this is very much a positive thing. So if morality is fundamentally so non-rational or irrational in some key ways, is it not the case we're always either undershooting or overshooting the target? That we can never hit it just right. So maybe for America to be more tolerant, you need the norms to be quite crude and blunt and overstated, and we get this political correctness, and yes, it's bad, but maybe it's less bad than when we used to undershoot the target.

So I think you need to break it down in terms of what domain you're looking at. It's unquestionably true that life in America is getting better rapidly— rapidly for gay people in particular, and over a long period of time for African Americans, for every minority. So the objective facts are getting better and better and better. But campus is not America. Campus is a— college campus is a very, very particular community, unusual community in a lot of ways. So I've learned a lot about what's going on since. So thank you for your praise of what I've done. It's due largely to the fact that Greg Lukianoff came to me with this brilliant idea about what's going on on campus, how the current campus climate is teaching students to think in distorted ways. And so that Atlantic article happened to come out just before Missouri and Yale and other campuses melted down. But you have to see college campuses as being institutions that were designed or intended to be places where people come up with, again, diverse ideas, they're challenged, and as in a marketplace, you know, monopoly destroys a lot of the value of the marketplace. If you have a monopoly on ideas in an intellectual marketplace, you kill the marketplace. Place. So campuses are supposed to be places where nobody has monopoly on ideas, but they've become that in the last few years. So even if things are getting better and better, and especially on college campuses, we'll never— there's a paradoxical sense in which the better they get, the worse the protests will be. And it's not coincidental that most of the protests have been at the most egalitarian, left-leaning schools.

Sure.

So Yale, Amherst, Brown, these are among the most progressive places. And here we need to bring in this really wonderful article on victimhood culture by what, Manning and Campbell are the last names. If listeners just Google, where do, where microaggressions really come from, they'll find, I did a summary of this article, it's this incredibly brilliant article, which points out that despite things are getting better and better, despite that fact, that actually makes these charges of microaggression proliferate. Because it's only when you have a very egalitarian group and you have bureaucrats or institutions that will punish any sort of conflict, then everybody's incentivized to plead, "I've been harmed, I've been a victim," or, "He's been a victim, I'm standing up for him." So microaggression culture and a lot of the current campus protests only emerges when you actually get really close to an incredibly egalitarian open society.

Let's say we take the military, a very different environment. The military is not-for-profit. It intersects with corporate America, but it's not itself a corporation. It can at times be highly inefficient. And we at least try to overcome this by building up an ethos which is in some ways fairly homogeneous. And it tells people to behave a certain way, and there are strong group norms and a lot of sanctions. And one may not like all of that, but typically one sees something like that is needed in the military. Now if we take colleges and universities, they're big, they're bureaucratic, they're not-for-profit, the incentives are not traditional commercial incentives. Could it be the case that for higher education to function well, it needs these tight, strict norms? Tight, strict norms will ex post always look in some ways silly, as they can in the military, and maybe this is a semi-second, third-best efficient way of running academia. Yes or no? No.

So again, you're looking at it like, like you look at these giant systems and then let's take that analogy to another giant system. But you have to think about what is each system designed to produce. So diversity is divisive. There's a lot of social science research on this. The more you make something diverse, the less trust there will be, the harder it is for people to work. Sure. So if your goal, if you're the US military or any military, Yes, in the '70s the Army in particular embraced ethnic diversity and they did a brilliant job of it. It's actually quite striking that the military has done— that things have gotten better and better and better in terms of the racial climate in the military and worse and worse and worse in the academy. We can come back to that. But if you're the military, you need cohesion. And that's what they say above all, unit cohesion. That's our— we must have that. So you want to basically bury racial and other kinds of diversity in a sea of uniformity. We want to give people a sense of common mission, they have common uniforms. We're not trying to turn out classes of, you know, our graduating class will go forth and they will all work together as a unit to accomplish greatness. That's not what it's about. We want clashing ideas. We don't want uniformity and homogeneity. We want the benefits of diversity, but the irony is we have so focused on racial and other kinds of diversity, demographic diversity, because of the political slant of the university, because of the sacred values of the campus left. We have so focused on that kind of diversity. And there's this wonderful line from George Will in some essay he wrote: there's a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything except thought. And that's where we are. We now have almost the kind of uniformity the military has, where everybody's on the left, which gives us cohesion, but that kills the very function of the university, which is to have diversity of thought so that we change our minds, we challenge each other, a marketplace of ideas.

In the sciences, the This is not that big a problem, right?

That's correct, except for environmental science.

But is it at least possibly the case that we're seeing the greatest threat to intellectual diversity in some of the areas which matter least, and when the stakes are high, we overcome it? Physics looks pretty good. Computer science looks pretty good.

No, it's not— there are two universities now, but it's not which ones matter more and which ones matter less. It's which one— what is the sacred value? So the sacred value The sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was truth. Now it was not perfect, but we all talked that way as though, you know, I mean look at the mottos of Harvard and Yale. Veritas. Lux et Veritas. It's right there on the motto. Veritas. Truth. So we made a big show, and it was largely true, of saying this is what we're here for. We're here to find truth. But in the 1970s and '80s as we had a big influx of baby boomers who were involved in social protest, who were fighting for very good causes, civil rights, women's rights. They flood into the academy in the '70s and '80s. They get tenure in the '80s and '90s. Also in the 1990s, the greatest generation begins to retire. And there were a lot of Republicans who became professors after World War II. But the '90s is the decade where everything flips. At the start of the 1990s, the overall left-right ratio of the academy, taking all departments, was 2 to 1. Just twice as many people on the left as right. That's fine. That's not a problem. But by 2005, it had gone to 5 to 1. 5 people on the left for every 1 on the right. And that's— and those people on the right are mostly engineering, nursing, things like that. If you look at the core, the humanities and social sciences, other than economics, it's closer to 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. In other words, liberal voice— I'm sorry, right-wing or libertarian or social conservative voices have basically vanished between '95, 1995 and 2005. So this has made us unfunctional, but it's in the social sciences and humanities where the sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims. That's the division. One university in the sciences still pursues truth. The other university in the social sciences and humanities pursues social justice.

Let's say I'm a libertarian and I notice, I suspect you would agree, that libertarians are somewhat overrepresented on the internet intellectual discourse because of their personality traits, which you've written about yourself. On the other hand, the universities, especially top universities, are more left-wing. On that, should I be happy with this trade-off or upset about it.

No, you should be very upset that your fellow libertarians are wasting their time in flame wars commenting on people on the internet while in the academy, where even though libertarians actually have the highest IQ, they are the best systemizing, the best at systemic thinking, they should be overrepresented. There's interesting research, I think it's by Shields and Dunn, somewhere I read this recently, Tyler Cowen, that as people with libertarian leanings go through undergraduate, those who are inclined towards the academy end up concentrating in economics for a variety of reasons. So there are a lot of libertarians in economics. I wish we had more in psychology. I wish there were more in sociology, political science. So no, you should be upset that— because libertarians would be the easiest source of political diversity to spread throughout the academy.— it's very hard to find social conservatives in the academy.

Here's a question from a reader at Marginal Revolution: As you, Jonathan, have delved into morality more deeply, are there any examples of something you considered harmless before that now you think may actually be harmful once second, third, etc. social effects are taken into account?

Oh, yes. When I was younger, I remember thinking, oh, you know, marriage isn't so important. All that matters is of course you need to take care of the kids, but people should be free to do what they want. And I've come to see— so I started off on the left. In fact, I got into political psychology in 2004 precisely to help the Democrats because I thought they were getting their rear ends kicked by the Republicans who knew how to talk about morality, whereas Gore and Kerry just didn't have a clue. So since I started researching conservatism and libertarianism, I've just found that they make a lot of points that as a social scientist I have to agree, oh, that's a good point. And so the overriding importance of family stability, if you raise kids with families, incredible family stability, they just come out better. In fact, they're much more likely to rise economically than if they're raised with any sort of family instability. So I think I'm more conservative about family arrangements. Precisely because of these second and third level effects. Let's see, what else? I haven't really changed my views on drugs. I still am fairly, still am pretty pro-legalization and decriminalization. I guess in a way I've become more libertarian but with a real sense of respect for what social conservatives say about family stability.

Let's say people say harmful things, or take a classic case. There's a football team called the Washington Redskins.

Ah, yeah.

And I'm pretty sure most of its fans, the intent is not offense, but there is an offense there for many people. Yeah. And it's called a harm, and there are some demands that name be changed. And there is a public or social dimension to the name. That if certain groups are insulted enough times, maybe there's a demoralization, or other kinds of prejudice become seen as more effective. How do you think through whether the Washington Redskins should be called the Washington Redskins? And does this not mean that on campus there should be some political correctness?

This is a great question, because these really are tough questions. And, you know, So just two principles here. One is we should all try thought experiments to reverse the group and see if it matters. And so, you know, I'm Jewish, I think you're Jewish. Are you?

No, mostly Irish.

Okay. So, you know, suppose it was the Washington Rabbis, or though it's not very fierce sort of name, but, you know, and so, or the Washington Jews, or anything. Now, if you imagine a football game in which the fans of the Washington Rabbis bring little scissors as though they're going to circumcise their opponents. And that's their big chant, "We're going to circumcise you!" And it just sort of makes the whole thing look ridiculous. So I am sympathetic to some of these, even though, you know, the main thing I'm concerned about these days is political correctness, the whole culture of microaggressions, hypersensitivity. I'm very concerned about that. But there is really something legitimate here to having your group be mocked. And that I think might be the principle. So the worst idea— there are so many bad ideas in tennis. One of the worst and most ridiculous ideas is the idea of cultural appropriation. The idea that if you wear, you know, if you go to West Africa and you buy a necklace or you buy a shirt and you come back and you wear it, some say, "You can't do that. You're appropriating their culture." That is absurd. Cultural evolution requires us to exchange ideas.

So— But what about the actual mocks or semi-mocks? Should private colleges prohibit them?

The private—

Let's say you're Brown or Yale and students set up like a lacrosse team and they call it, you know, the Brown Redskins and they do some rituals which offend some people. No matter what the intent would be, should Brown or Yale step in and say you can't do that?

So there's a big, big line between saying Brown or Yale should step in and tell people what they can— so in general, I think No, in general, the idea of—

No, they shouldn't step in, or no?

They should not step in.

Okay.

We should be extremely limited when we say that authorities can step in and change things. The very fact of doing that encourages microaggression culture, encourages students to orient themselves towards appealing to these authorities. The point of the microaggression article is that young people today have become moral dependents. If somebody insults them, they can't straighten it out themselves, they have to go right to the authorities. And this embroils everybody in eternal battles. College used to be a lot of fun when I went. Now it's constant conflicts.

So let me try another analogy on you. I've mentioned the army, but take private corporations. And Brown and Yale, they are in a sense private corporations. Harvard was originally. I wouldn't call them restrictions on free speech. I think that's the wrong phrase. But if one's going to use the phrase that way, there are numerous restrictions on free speech within companies at the workplace. If you went to the water cooler and said a number of offensive things, you would be asked to stop and eventually fired. And I don't see anything wrong with that. So if we think of Brown, Yale, or Harvard as like a normal company, isn't there still, even with all the nonsense, a lot more free speech on campus than in actual companies?

Yes, and there should be. Again, a company is organized to be effective in the world. You, you, just like the Army, where their priority is unit cohesion, In a company, your goal isn't to encourage everyone to express their values and criticize each other. Your goal is to get them to work together.

But you need a lot of that in a university though, right?

No, you need basic civility. You need people to be able to live with each other, to critique each other's ideas, and to not then file charges because they were critiqued. Companies live in fear of lawsuits, and labor law is encouraging this. More than ever before. Universities are very, very different. Where to draw a line? I think, you know, we're seeing now, should the Woodrow Wilson School be renamed? Should Calhoun College be renamed? And so I have some— I don't know, maybe these are funny thoughts on this, but here are a couple of principles. One is that the name of your school— or I went to Yale as an undergrad— your residential college is kind of part of your identity. And so students at Calhoun College if they want to change that name because it's offensive to African Americans and to many people, if they want to change that name, I think that they should have that right. I think that's a good thing. We just should have a process so that it's not just the loudest group in the space of one year that gets to do it. So there should be a process that says if, you know, three-quarters of the people vote to do it and you take that vote two years apart, then it should be done. Now if it's a question of there's a statue on campus, there's a painting on campus, you know, Cecil Rhodes, you know, I think it's Oxford, you know Rhodes was a big donor, Rhodes was a racist according to his writings, a colonialist. If it's that there's a statue on campus, that's a very, very different matter. Because once we start saying we're going to put to a vote everything, Everybody gets to opine on whether we take down this, take down this. Before you know it, you're taking down everything because presumably religious students are offended by certain things, conservative students are offended by certain things, everyone's offended by something. So you have to have limits, you have to have a process, and at present we don't have a process. We just have outrage stoked by social media, and then we have craven university presidents who can't stand up to the protesters to say, "Okay, we'll do it." Let's say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale and you could more or less do what you thought was best without constraint.

What would you change?

Oh gosh, I'd change a lot of things. One thing that I would do is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment.. And that means that I would look for people who— so Yale in particular, but all of the top schools have a huge problem that they have basically social justice warriors who are so empowered and so angry that they dominate discourse. And you basically have the illiberal— the small illiberal left has completely terrorized the larger liberal left. So Yale right now is quite dysfunctional. Students there say they can't speak up. They can't speak up in class. They feel pressure to— on Facebook if somebody sends around a petition for some left-wing cause they feel they have to endorse it even if they don't want to. So Yale's a mess right now, as a lot of schools are. That should be the top diversity issue is intellectual diversity. I would stop admitting for social justice cred. In other words, if you say, oh, I joined this, I started this protest group and we got this overturned, basically, you know, I think a lot of students know the way to get into a top school is show you're a social justice activist. Well, top schools are now full of social justice activists. And they're no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activists. So, you know, what's that old joke? Doctor, hurts my do this. Well, stop doing this. They should stop admitting social justice warriors. They should start admitting people who show they've got the guts to disagree.

We now move to a segment of the conversation called Underrated vs. Overrated. I threw out a bunch of names or concepts. You tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated and why. Number 1: Sigmund Freud.

Um, well, he certainly was overrated for a long time. In academic psychology, his value was essentially zero, so that might be underrated, in that Freud's ideas about development were completely worthless, but he was a really interesting and provocative writer and you should probably read a little bit of him. A little bit more in psychology, overrated in humanities. They still rely on him as a psychologist in humanities. So it depends where you are. In the humanities, overrated. In social psychology, underrated.

LSD, overrated or underrated?

I would say underrated in that there are— I did a lot of reading about LSD about drugs in my late 20s, and I was interested to find that there are only a few drugs that people make religions around. I forget the name of the chemical class, but it's whatever the, the common compound is in LSD, psilocybin, yagé, those things. Those drugs all have religions built around them, whereas, you know, heroin, morphine, alcohol— I mean, alcohol plays a role in religion. So there are some drugs that ruin people's lives, and there are other drugs that enrich people's enrich people's lives. I think psychedelics have an incredibly positive track record in terms of enriching people's lives versus damaging them. And so to the extent that they are rarely used and widely feared, I would say that they are underrated. And I'm basing this on the research that was done in the '60s and it's just starting now, that when you do— when you give people people psychedelic drugs in controlled settings, be they cancer patients or criminals in jail, the therapeutic effects tend to be quite positive. So I think the moral panic against drugs in the '60s through the '80s was too much, and therefore psychedelic drugs in particular are now underrated.

I've done one of these dialogues with Peter Thiel, and he's a big fan of René Girard and his theory of sacrificial artificial violence. Do you have an opinion?

No. Many people have emailed me about him, and I know I need to read him. I think he's vaguely Durkheimian. That is—

Yes.

So if he's Durkheimian, then I'm in favor of it. By that I just mean— I don't want to sound too academic and obscure here— just that if you look at what humans are doing, so much of what we do is weird and is inexplicable. But after you read Durkheim, you see, oh, we're trying to form communities. We're trying to form from moral communities that will give order, punish deviance, allow us to work together. So if that's sort of what Girard is about, then I would agree with you.

Leo Strauss.

I don't know enough about him. Also on my to-read list.

Reading through a lot of your past work, which I did to prepare for this conversation, this struck me, and I didn't expect it to be the case, but at times I was thinking more of Claude Levi Strauss, the anthropologist than I thought I was going to. Underrated or overrated?

Again, I can't say, because again, it depends where you are. So in symbolic anthropology, I think he is still quite highly rated. Outside of that, I think very few people know about him. I read a little bit of his work when I was a postdoc at Chicago with Richard Schwader. And so what I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as people are making symbols. We live in a rich symbolic world, a world of narrative. We need to interpret those. That I think is quite right, and that's again what I love about cultural anthropology, is it gives you a way of interpreting cultures. Where it then leads you to deny that there's also a human nature that is based in our evolution, then it becomes a problem. But I just can't remember what, you know, which part of those is attributed to Lévi-Strauss.

So you're a trained psychologist. In addition to your most famous work. You have a lot of other papers which are very well-cited but less famous for other public intellectuals doing what you'd call traditional psychological research. And here we have these economists. They do what they call behavioral economics, and they tread into the field of psychology. Do they know what they're doing? Behavioral economics—overrated or underrated?

Oh, um, properly rated right now, with one caveat. So You know, we psychologists have long felt, oh, you know, those economists, they're the only ones that are ever consulted in Congress, and they get, you know, they have all these high-prestige jobs, they have a Nobel Prize, nobody listens to us. Well, you know, some economists, beginning with Robert Frank and, well, Dan Kahneman, Dick Thaler, the fact that economists have been listening to psychologists and making our work more well-known, of course Kahneman did a lot of that work, and He's a psychologist. So that's all good. I'm thrilled with the way that's going. The only caveat that I would put, which I would say if they don't do this soon then they would be overrated, is the behavioral economics work is an example of this wonderful dictum from Robert Zajonc, a famous social psychologist, which is that cognitive psychology is social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero. So to the extent that behavioral economists are saying, look at a person shopping, what influences their decision? Oh, you know, if the apple is at eye level— so they're looking at like lone consumers who are trying to make choices to optimize their outcomes. That's great work, but that's setting all the interesting variables to zero. The interesting stuff is all social. It's what does this say about me? What, uh, will I be ostracized from my group? So if behavioral economics becomes more social, which I think will be the next phase, then I would say it would deserve ever-rising market value.

And Thorstein Veblen, that was his initial vision for it actually, was that it be quite social and that the idea of a social reference class was central to people's behavioral biases. Interesting.

So I think, you know, I think the con— I mean, again, this is a critique from outside, but what a lot of people say, which sounds right to me, is that The early economists were great social theorists. I mean, my God, you read Adam Smith, what a brilliant moral philosopher. I mean, they thought so broadly. And you tell me, but it seems there was a weird turn in the mid-20th century towards mathematics. And that, I think, basically it made economists set all the interesting variables to zero. Anti-parsimonialism, underrated or overrated? Anti-parsimonialism, well, have you ever heard anyone else say that other than me? No, that's why I asked. Oh, good. Oh, well then of course I think it's underrated, because I think— so parsimony is overrated. Rather, here's what I should say: the pursuit of parsimony is a bad idea. It becomes almost a religious quest. People think, "Oh, if I can explain this phenomenon with one principle, I have won. I produced a better explanation." And that's a disaster for the social sciences. Maybe it works in physics, but again, people are really complicated, much more so than matter. So people who pursue parsimony, scientists who pursue it and think that the simplest explanation is better than one that's a little more complicated, that's a problem. So I'm trying to advocate for what I'm calling anti-parsimony or anti-parsimony.

Normatively, you're a pluralist then and not like a utilitarian or—

Ah, no, normatively I'm a pluralist, yes, and that means that there are many human values and this is really straight from Isaiah Berlin. There are many human values, and if you take one, let's take liberty. Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Wrong. Extremism in defense of any virtue becomes a vice. It becomes sick. It becomes something that leads to horrible inhumanity and brutality. So many people try to say, well, all that really matters is care and compassion. But if you take that to its absurd extreme,, you get kind of close to what we have on campus, which is we will destroy anybody's rights in order to protect these 7 victim classes.

Some of your core ideas in psychology, and also I would say anthropology, if you had to pick a famous movie or famous novel or play that illustrated those, that you would use to teach some of your ideas, what would you point to?

Oh boy, oh my God, I should have a great answer to this question. I am so poorly read, my wife makes fun of me that I haven't I haven't read a novel since I met her in the year 2000. I've just been so busy reading nonfiction. Let's see, you know, gosh, almost any of these BBC epics, anything that illustrates, I think sort of English country life, English aristocratic life in the 19th century illustrates sort of a kind of a rich, morally rich society with hierarchy and all those things that have sort of disappeared. From modern morality. So I should have a much better answer for you, but I think just reading novels from non-Western cultures— and I would consider, you know, 19th century British aristocracy to be sort of a foreign culture now— just can give you an idea of cultures other than our own.

Final segment. Let me ask you some questions about your earlier psychological research, because a lot of people aren't familiar about that. But let me just start with a very direct personal question. What is it that you find disgusting?

What do I find disgusting? These days I find illiberalism disgusting. The idea that one person takes it upon himself to shout down or shut down someone else, to decide I or my group, we get to tell you whether you can speak or not. I find this really disgusting. And so this is, I think, one of the reasons I'm so upset by what's going on on campus. Around this is that the certain group of activists decides, you know, if somebody's going to come speak on campus, fine. If you want to stand up and protest outside and hold up signs, that's fine. But how dare you go in and shout them down so that people who've come to listen can't hear. I find that really revolting. So that's the number one response.

But if I cooked some insects and served them to you, you know, with jelly and lime on top, you'd be fine with that?

About that.

It may not be your favorite, but you wouldn't say, "Oh, this is disgusting." It might just be, "Oh, I don't like turkey sandwiches," which is, "I don't like turkey sandwiches." Yeah. Oh, if you mean—

so I mean, one of my just little small moments of insight when I was studying disgust was when Paul Rozin and I were working with a Japanese colleague, Sumio Imada, and he brought a can of honey-covered grasshoppers from Japan into Paul's office in about the year 1990. And I was a disgust researcher and I thought, "Okay, good. I've never eaten an insect." before. I'm going to try it. And so I took one, I brought it up to my mouth intending to eat it, and my throat just gagged. I've never had such a clear gag response. My throat said, "No way. You're not putting that in." And I just forced my hand into my mouth, and once it's beyond the lips, interestingly, once it's beyond the lips, then disgust asserts too late. So then I was able to eat it. But no, I still find eating insects disgusting.

Are all kinds of morality compromised in psychopathy? Uh, all kinds.

We actually have some data on this. So the answer is generally yes, because they have no moral emotions. I think there are certain kinds that they can understand a little better. But you know, it hasn't really been studied well enough because everybody's been focused on care and fairness as morality. Psychopaths have no sense of care or compassion or sympathy. They're happy to cheat. They don't care about fairness. But I think people haven't really studied group loyalty, tribalism, hierarchy. My prediction is that all forms are compromised. I know there's a paper, I think I know I'm on a paper that basically has that as the title, but I'm trying to remember how clear the data was on all of those, whether it goes beyond just the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. So yes, as far as I can tell, psychopaths have no real morality. They do get angry if they feel disrespected sometimes, but that's about it.

You have some very interesting papers on moral elevation, the idea that you can elevate people, and this is an important sympathetic relation. Actually, Adam Smith wrote about this, and you can induce them to be more caring, caring in the good way. You can induce nursing behavior, you can induce all kinds of positive responses. So if a student at, say, Yale comes up to you and says, Jonathan, I would like to engage in some moral elevation on campus, what would you tell them to do?

So moral elevation happens when you display virtues in a way that's really powerful. Virtues of caring and compassion and loyalty tend to be the ones that get written about. Courage also can be quite moving. So gosh, in a really politicized climate, what would be elevating? Standing up for for principle, standing up for people's rights to speak. You'd probably get your head cut off if you tried it. Let's see, what would be morally elevating on a campus? I mean, usually people would go for social justice kinds of elevation, showing their devotion to oppressed groups, but that's a kind of a moral signaling. So I don't know what I would advise that person. I guess I would advise them The research on the effects of elevation is complicated. I had originally hoped that if I simply showed someone an elevating video, they'd be more likely to help others right afterwards, and I didn't find that. A few other researchers found it, but it's a small effect. 'Cause when you're touched, moved, and inspired, it doesn't make you go out and take action. It's kind of calming, you, I think you have parasympathetic activation, you're not prepared for vigorous action, but I think you learn more. I think you take in more, and I think it can change your values.

There's a big debate lately about a replication crisis, or supposed replication crisis, in many fields, but a lot of it's been social psychology. What's your view on that debate?

So I have good friends on both sides, and they all make incredibly good points. I think Brian Nosek, who's been leading the charge on the problems in psychology, is largely right, that our methods have been sloppy, which has allowed us to engage in practices where we're just more likely than we should be to get a significant result, and then of course that's more likely to get published. So given that we find the same problem in cancer research, biomedical research, in almost every field that's been looked at, I think that the replication crisis is very real. I think it should be a top priority for science. A lot of my work is on how we are not fully rational creatures. We are deeply emotional and tribal creatures. And so if you have this idealized view of researchers and our null hypothesis significance testing is based on an idealized view of researchers who are basically testing samples honestly and well, you know, this could only happen 1 in 20 times by chance. But we're not those creatures. We want certain outcomes to happen, we make certain choices unconsciously, so I think we all have to up our game. I don't think there's anything special about social psychology, it's no worse than other fields, but we have been the leaders at actually addressing it and saying why is this, why are we not able to replicate each other's work so much? So I actually am impressed that the young generation has really embraced this and simply committing to making your data available. If you know that other people are going to get access to your SPSS file or whatever, your data file, and they're going to be looking it over, boy, you're going to be a lot more careful. So I think just by raising the crisis, raising the alarm last year, the quality of our work is going to go substantially up. I'm really excited by this.

What's the best replacement for religion in modern secular society? Oh boy, the best replacement.

Big question. Durkheimian question. Yeah, yeah. You know, a few years ago I would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it, but given what's happened in the last year on campuses, I'm really afraid of it because you might think, well, humanitarianism should be replaced. We should all have a religion of, you know, helping the poor, helping each other. Now of course it's really important to help the poor. It's really important to help people oppressed, but once you make it a religion, religion. That means you are impervious to evidence. You are committed to certain religious rituals even if those rituals make things worse. So for example, I've been studying the research on affirmative action and diversity training, and as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that they make things better, and there is some evidence that it makes things worse. Now it's messy, I can't say for sure that they do, but the point is we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse. And the activists are largely asking for things that will make things worse. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African Americans at the bottom, which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it. So I think once you make something a religion, you then can't— you're not open to evidence, you do really crazy stupid things. So I think what I would say is is let's not have a replacement for religion. Let's set things up so that there isn't a big religion that unites us all to take on our enemies. Let's try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations, but we don't have a big sense of national purpose.

Last question to finish up. Who is your best and most important critic in any of these areas and why?

Boy, it's hard to think because, you know, when you engage in debates with people, you tend to see what's wrong with them. So my colleague at NYU, John Joost, has— we've had a lot of good discussions together. And he critiqued me early on in ways that, in fact, led me to formulate the liberty and oppression hypothesis foundation. Ronnie Janoff-Bullman at the University of Massachusetts has pointed out that there's some gaps in moral foundations theory that we haven't taken into account, sort of the motivations behind social justice and social change movements. So I think there have been some people who have critiqued moral foundations theory as it is.

What's the best— tell us again what you think the best criticism is, even if you don't agree with it?

Well, the best criticism is just that we've left some things out, which is surely true. So what's been exciting is to see that there haven't— there's one critic, Curt Gray, who has said that basically morality is just one thing, harm. And I— That has to be wrong. Yeah, I just can't see the— I mean, he hasn't really put forth an argument as to why we would even try to fit everything into procrastinating that. I don't really see the advantage of that, other than parsimony. He's a parsimonist. So other critics have simply said, well, okay, sure, there must be something innate, and okay, there are probably multiple things. And if you agree with those two things, then that's most of moral foundations theory. And then of course that morality develops on top of those. So it's mo— you know, it's mostly critics who've said you left out this, or these two things should be combined. And that's the kind of really constructive criticism criticism that we need because when we started the theory we put forth these 5 foundations and we didn't say, well, this is it. We know these are the 5. We said this is our first pass from doing a lot of reading. This is our first guess, but let's see. Let's see how it evolves.

And campus life, your best critic?

They haven't, that's the funny thing, so they really haven't been it. So when Greg and I, when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote this Atlantic article, it was talked about all over the place. A lot of people told us privately that they loved it. They were often afraid to say so publicly. Almost nothing was written against it. It's the weirdest thing. My wife was actually kind of concerned that there'd be this avalanche of criticism and there'd be a lot of anger directed towards us, but really the only things that were written said, "Oh well, you guys are white males. You're just defending your privilege." And that's like most of the argument. Other people said, "Well, you know, trigger warnings actually are kind of useful even if they can also be harmful." That's about it. It's been the most amazing There's been really no coherent criticism of what Viviana Haya said.

At any rate, Jonathan, thank you for your time. It's been an honor and a pleasure.

It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

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