How Science Explains America’s Great Moral Divide

How Science Explains America’s Great Moral Divide

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Jonathan Haidt is concerned, like many Americans, with the way our country has become divided and increasingly unable to work together to solve looming threats. Yet, unlike most Americans, he is a psychologist and specialist on the origins of morality. A few years ago, he began to wonder what he might do, and the result is a book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” In it, Haidt examines the roots of our morality, and how they play out on the stage of history. What he offers, in a Q&A with SciAm‘s Mind Matters, is not a solution to the red-state-blue-state problem but a different way to think about it — and a modicum of hope.