The Righteous Mind is a book by Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a professor from the University of Virginia known for his research on morality and his TED talks. This post has some notes from the book featuring the results of studies cited in the book.
• Research in Philadelphia and Brazil found that lower-class groups moralized more than upper-class groups.
• Patients who suffer brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex have difficulty expressing emotions and making decisions.
• Research found that people made the same moral judgments whether they were dealing with a heavy or light cognitive load.
• A study found that people generated more reasons when explaining their judgments against harmless taboos.
• A study showed that people judged stories to be more disgusting and morally wrong when they contained a code word that they had previously been hypnotized to feel disgust towards.
• A study where subjects viewed photos of political candidates with no other information found that the candidate who looked more competent went on to win the election two-thirds of the time.
• An experiment showed that people made harsher moral judgments when they were next to a smelly trash can.
• An experiment showed that people become more moralistic after washing their hands with soap.
• An experiment showed that people expressed more conservative political attitudes when filling out surveys near a hand sanitizer dispenser.
• fMRI studies show that high activity in emotional processing areas of the brain correlate with the moral judgments people eventually make.
• A study that asked people to reflect on an argument in favor of a moral taboo for several minutes made them more receptive to the taboo idea.
• A study showed that self-esteem fell in response to criticism from an anonymous critic, even in people who claimed they didn’t care what other people thought.
• A study showed that IQ predicted how well people argued for their own side, but not how well they contemplated other arguments.
• A study showed that people were three times more likely to be honest when directly asked about overpayment in a task.
• An experiment that had subjects read a fictitious study linking caffeine and breast cancer, women who were heavy coffee drinkers argued there were more flaws in the study than women who didn’t drink coffee.
• A neuroimaging study found that showing political partisans information about their own candidate’s hypocrisy activated a network of emotion-related brain areas, but no increased activity in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (the main area associated with reasoning). After seeing an example of hypocrisy from a disliked candidate, the ventral striatum had increased activity, which is associated with feelings of pleasure.
• A study found that students at an American public university (Penn State) were the only group out of twelve groups where a majority overrode their first objections to a harmless taboo.
• Six hundred interview transcripts from a study of morality in India showed that there were three major clusters of moral themes: autonomy, community, and divinity.
• Data from more than 130,000 subjects on a survey of morality found that people on the political left endorse Care and Fairness, while people on the political right endorse all five moral foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) fairly equally.
• An EEG study showed that the brains of people on the political left showed more surprise in response to sentences that rejected Care and Fairness concerns, as well as more surprise in response to sentences that endorsed Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity concerns.
• A study involving an economic game showed that 84 percent of players chose to punish another player at least once, which led to increased cooperation.
• A study showed that professors on the political left give out a narrower range of grades than professors on the political right.
• A study involving an economic game showed that players’ brains responded in the same way to seeing an altruistic player being shocked as if they were shocked themselves, while they showed neural evidence of pleasure when seeing a selfish player getting shocked.
• People cheat on tests less when first asked to unscramble sentences that include words related to God.
• An analysis showed that 39 percent of religious communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to just 6 percent of secular communes.
• Moralistic high gods emerged along with agriculture in the last 10,000 years.
• Research shows that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity, while the most religious fifth of the population gives 7 percent of their income to charity.
• A study found that the factor most associated with the moral benefits of religion was the amount of friendship and group activities shared with co-religionists.
• Genetics explains somewhere between a third and a half of the variability in political attitudes.
• An analysis of DNA from 13,000 Australians found genes that differed between people on the political left and the political right.
• A review paper showed that personality factors relating to threat sensitivity or openness to experience explain the difference between people on the political right and political left.
• A study showed that people on the political left were less accurate in describing the motivations of people on the political right than vice versa.
• Several studies indicate that the switch from leaded to unleaded gasoline may have been responsible for up to half of the drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s.
• An analysis of surveys completed by 12,000 libertarians showed that they had very low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Care foundations and very high scores on questions about economic liberty.
