The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

The goal of Haidt’s book is to better understand morality and ethics. While he defines morality in his text, his definition is not prescriptive, but functional. Morality is determined by what he calls moral matrices: “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible” (270). These moral matrices vary from one culture or subculture to the next, and individuals working from different moral matrices often have difficulty understanding one another’s choices. 

As an example of a radical divergence between moral matrices, Haidt narrates his time in the small Indian city of Bhubaneswar. Though his hosts in Bhubaneswar treat him with great kindness and hospitality, Haidt finds himself troubled by many aspects of their society, including the conventions that servants should never be thanked and that women should never look men in the eye. Haidt theorizes that such conventions appear morally wrong to him because he comes from a “WEIRD” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) society, in which personal autonomy and the avoidance of harming others are paramount values. Since the conventions of Bhubaneswar appear to discount the individual rights of some members, they clash with WEIRD values.