A Subtle Introduction to Haidt, Part I

One of the most important thinkers of our time, and there's chance you've never heard of him. Also, a first attempt to define the two visions.

This is Principled Bicycling, a Substack discussing and exploring the various issues surrounding the bicycling advocacy rabbit hole with occasional tangents into semi-related topics such as energy, monetary policy, and skepticism of many cherished institutions. Tin foil helmets are optional.

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Jonathon Haidt is a social psychologist, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business; author of the books The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; and co-author of the book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure with Greg Lukianoff. If you’ve never heard of Haidt and his work, and want to understand the polarization in our society today, then you’re missing out. If you absolutely had to choose between the three for the purpose of understanding much of the future content to be covered in this publication then I’d recommend The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure. It’s an excellent, very readable book where both he and Lukianoff made great strides to not sound too academic or force their readers to sleep. Haidt also narrates the audio version and his voice is excellent too.

The reason many readers have likely never heard of Haidt is that he’s a bit of a heterodox thinker and one must swim in some unique and insightful circles to become familiar with his work. He bucks the trend typical in Fiat Academia, which is to break away from the groupthink and other nonsense that has parasitized our institutions of higher learning as of late. To see a great video of this, see Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities. And Haidt in terms of politics, which in general lean heavily left in Fiat Academia causing enough problems of its own, identifies as a center left life long Democrat voter. Part of his goal in writing The Righteous Mind was to try to provide an understanding and strategy guide to his fellow party on how to win elections. What Haidt discovered though was a rabbit hole which turned him far more apolitical and solidified him into one of the most important thinkers today whose new goal is to try to bridge the culture wars and political divide between Americans. Ironically his work is far more accepted with right-leaning folks and libertarians (there’s evidence to suggest individuals in both of these groups, counterintuitively to most, are more scientifically literate than the third group. Oops.) than with his initial audience and political tribe. While this is anecdotal, trying to explain and conceptualize Haidt’s work out here in the super Progressive West Coast has been extremely challenging.

Haidt has said in interviews the one thing he wants to be remembered for is his Elephant and Rider metaphor for describing how the human brain works in interpreting pure emotion and gut feelings from rationality. The elephant in Haidt’s metaphor represents the part of the brain responsible for gut feelings and intuitions that are automatically processed at extremely high speed. The rider on top of the elephant is supposed to represent more rational thought which are derived from slow, cautious, methodical thinking. The elephant runs the show more than the rider does and the rider has to take great effort and have patience to steer the stubborn elephant in the desired direction. The rider too is often a bit stubborn in that thinking they have more control over the elephant than they really do.

Haidt’s famous quote to sum this up is: “Intuition (elephant) comes first, strategic reasoning (rider) second.” There’s a great emphasis to be placed on “strategic reasoning second” as it must follow intuitions or the elephant. Those intuitions differ greatly thus “poisoning the well” of the strategic reasoning which means that two different individuals given the same information can process things differently based on the differences in their mind’s elephants. Quick tangent: If you want to see a great example of this, take a peak at the essay “The Myth of the Rule of Law” by John Hasnas. While Hasnas does not explicitly mention Haidt’s concepts, the gist of his essay is that two different participants in a court of law can be presented with identical facts and come up with different rulings. There’s also a great 7 minute explanation (trigger warning: discussion of anarchism and other fringe scary ideas) by author Michael Malice on this essay. In the context of bicycling, this also is a decent explanation as to why judges and juries rule against cyclists in what appear to be unfair and unjust ways in our eyes.

But back to Haidt.

Something Haidt strives extensively to point out is that every human brain for the most part has an active elephant and rider. Even the Spocks of the world do but there is variation among the human population and it’s largely influenced by one’s moral intuitions. These moral intuitions, which Haidt and several others developed over the years (this is detailed in The Righteous Mind) exist on six axes and they are:

• Care/Harm

• Fairness/Cheating

• Loyalty/Betrayal

• Authority/Subversion

• Sanctity/Segregation

• Liberty/Oppression

Another way to think of these moral intuitions is to consider the central metaphor in the third chapter of The Righteous Mind, “The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.” If I recall correctly, Haidt actually borrowed this idea from David Hume. But nevertheless Haidt and his team did something rare these day in the world of Fiat Academia, and especially in psychology (and bikeway studies, ahem) - they actually empirically tested their hypotheses of the six axes and were largely unable to falsify it.

Across the human population there is a variance in the sensitivity of these taste buds which explains the spectrum of political views and in this context I do not mean which of the two rival parasitic gangs known as the major political parties here in the US you belong to, although the moral intuitions often map roughly to individuals in these parties.

So, what exactly does this all have to do with bicycling?

It helps to explain the difference between my half-assed still-a-work-in-progress concept of the two primary visions of cycling advocacy: the platitude-driven vision and the principled-driven vision.

The taste buds map on well to the two visions which I intend to actually try to define a bit here:

Platitude-Vision

• Outcome based

• A greater emphasis on positive liberty (rights, justice, etc, must be derived by humanity mostly via the State)

• Different rules for different people, largely based on group identity.

• Heavy focus on oppressor/victim dichotomy.

• Heavy focus on “ought” and “should.”

• A desire for quick change, in the name of progress, or to solve what is seen as a dire and urgent problem.

• Solutions

• High Time Preference

Principled-Vision

• Process-based

• Greater emphasis on negative liberty, less reliance on the State for derivation of rights.

• Equal rules with constraints.

• Heavy emphasis on “is” and acceptance of reality and the constants to change.

• A desire for slower change, but not always due to resistance, but instead as a respect for experience.

• Tradeoffs

• Low Time Preference

One’s particular set of moral tastebuds is, as I hope to argue in the next few posts, tied to which vision they subscribe to and I promise I will actually tie it to bicycling. But for now, this is a lot of content to process and I doubt I’ve really given Haidt and his fellow colleagues their proper due with this small wall of text.