[tk90]

If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view.

Some ideas in the book:

- Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second.

- The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.

[thelittlenag]

I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of different books in one. I need to read his other work.

To your point about left and right, an interesting point I heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors", with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain political systems more widely.

[scns]

> I need to read his other work.

I can recommend his Happiness Hypothesis.

[moate]

>>The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left)

Citation excruciatingly needed. This feels like recency bias imo. The Right (I'm assuming we're going US here?) is a coalition of people all walks just as much as the left. I mean, right now large chunks Trump voters are rioting over the Epstein non-release and all the people who were in it for the tax breaks are trying to convince them to stop.