The talk is here, but I'll summarise:
Basically the idea is trying to understand what divides liberal and conservative mindsets by breaking down our central moral values. The speaker, Jonathan Haidt, first posits that the idea of the human mind as a blank slate is completely false, and science tends to agree. He then says that his work looked to establish the things humans care about from birth. The things we are hard-coded from the moment of birth to believe in as important enough to load with a sense of right or wrong. They worked out a big five:
- Avoiding harm and caring for the weak
- That things should be fair and equitable (aka the duckfeeding rule, because every kid knows that that duck at the back hasn't had any yet)
- tribalism and groups in general are awesome things, giving us rejuvenation and strength in lots of ways
- authority is important and needs to be inherently respected
- there are things which are pure and things which are dirty (in various senses), and being pure is better.
Obviously, there are lots of good evolutionary reasons to have these thoughts. Then they did lots of tests in various ways to see which of the five people cared about more. Generally, everyone mostly cares about the same about Harm and Fairness, but liberals put little value on group membership, authority and purity, whereas conservatives, since they tend to like the familiar, value those things quite highly.
His overall point is that to bridge the divide between the two mindsets and work towards understanding (because we're stuck with conservatives, dammit, and hey, maybe they were born that way) is to understand that the five things may be equally valuable. That certainly we need purity, authority and groups to achieve great things. We know that total anarchy never works, that people need an encoded system of belonging, justice and right ways to do things to feel safe and act purposefully and hopefully. Lots of studies have confirmed this.
The fun bit is you can join this research and go to www.yourmorals.com and find out which ones you care about. Unsurprisingly, I am big on harm and don't give a damn about purity or authority...but that's partly because their examples of purity tend to be very culturally fixed. As a liberal (and a person who likes the new and the open) I would no doubt say this but I think in general the idea is flawed that these five things ARE worth caring about equally, or without great care, simply because we start with them encoded in us. Because the last three are the ideas that become dangerous incredibly quickly, and completely ruin the first two. (For examples, see Zimbardo himself talking about his Stanford Prison Experiment and Mr Milgram in another awesome TED talk here)
Good for understanding though, and lots of other good tests on that website (you must refister though, so they get good data). The OCEAN test is interesting, basically another Myers Briggs with slightly different categories - Openness (to new experiences, ie liberal vs conservative), Conscientious (planning, self control, ie a kind of purity), Extroversion, Agreeableness (going with the group) and Neuroses (do you worry). I'm a OceAN, of course.
Which prompts the question: do I just dislike purity and authority because I suck at them, or vice versa?
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