August 2024 — The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

📖 Why this book? 📖

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • THE ACCLAIMED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST CHALLENGES CONVENTIONAL THINKING ABOUT MORALITY, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN A WAY THAT SPEAKS TO CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS ALIKE - A "LANDMARK CONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY'S UNDERSTANDING OF ITSELF" (THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW).

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

“This is really for anyone who wants to
understand why people are the way they are. What kinds of values conservatives tend to hold vs liberals.” — Sharon McMahon (America's Government Teacher®, Jefferson & Webby Award winner)

[In a presidential election year, this is a timely pick! —Rebecca]

Published March 13, 2012

Hard to find a copy? Use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$7 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. To cover the store's overhead, there is a $7 donation per person. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount?

Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens?

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition-the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim-that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psy-chology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, con-servatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.

In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts.

If you're ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.