The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt and Liberal vs Conservative ethics

[Navigator]

Haidt has a recent new book: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Read this interview, which summarizes some of his points, here is some excerpts from it:

It all begins with a mystery: Why is it that mental health statistics for American teenagers were pretty flat, with no sign of any problem, from the late ’90s through 2010 to 2011? That is true whether we look at depression, anxiety or self-harm. And then, all of a sudden, in 2012, it’s as though someone flipped a switch, and the girls began getting much more anxious, depressed and self-harming. It was true of boys too, but it’s not been so sudden. It was more gradual in the early 2010s.

So, the first chapter of “The Anxious Generation” discusses what actually happened to teen mental health. And then the rest of the book seeks to unravel the mystery. It’s not just about “social media is destroying everybody.” It’s a more subtle and interesting story about the transformation of childhood — a tragedy that occurred in three acts.

Act I, which I only hinted at in the book, was the loss of community. So, if you look at America, especially in the years just after World War II, social capital was very high. The best way to make people trust each other is to have someone attack them from the outside — come together, fight a war and win. Social capital was very high in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, and then it begins to drop over succeeding decades for many reasons.

Then, after losing strong communities and play-based childhoods, we’re ready for the third act in the tragedy: the massive, sudden transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015 into a phone-based childhood.

In 2010, the vast majority of teens across the developed world had cell phones. But they were flip phones or basic phones, with no internet browser. All you could do with them is text and call. That was pretty much it aside from some games. It wasn’t for constant communication. And that’s good. Kids could text their friends and say, “Let’s meet up at 3 p.m.” It was a simple tool. There was very little high-speed internet then and no front-facing camera. There was Facebook, but no Instagram. That’s the way things were in 2010.

On the validity of his hypothesis:

Gardels: The main criticism of your thesis is that you are mistaking correlation for cause and being too technologically determinist. How do you respond to that?

[...]

Haidt: To those who argue these changes could have been caused by any number of factors, I say a couple of things. First, whatever other factor you might think was more determinative, did that happen in New Zealand and Iceland and Australia all at the same time? No one can identify such a factor. Nobody has proposed an alternative theory that works internationally.

 

[PopHistorian]

PBS interview with Haidt (in April 2024) in which he outlines what's in the previous post and more.

 

[whitecoast]

Today I read an interesting article about how the care instinct can become weaponized and twisted to cause cruel or unjust acts. The article was inspired by the recent internet phenomenon of people, mostly women, pushing to have the Menendez brothers, guilty of murdering their parents in 1989, freed from their life prison sentences. I thought this belonged in Haidt's thread because of how it tracks with how having fewer moral tastebuds does allow people to be subverted for evil.

How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Irrational

The strange movement to free the Menendez brothers

www.gurwinder.blog

One piece of information from the article I found myself questioning was the following:

Some poignant quotes I enjoyed.

Despite deluding so many people, empathy rarely gets any pushback in the West today, because there’s an assumption that it is the key to compassion, and opposing compassion is a good way to get ostracized from polite society. However, not only is empathy not required to be compassionate, it can actually be an obstacle to it. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom compares empathy to a spotlight; we only shine it on a few handpicked people at a time, and whenever we do, we lose sight of, and concern for, everyone else.

A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are. We take the bare bones of what we know about them, and flesh the rest out with assumptions. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for them, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealize them.

Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them. Instead of judging their innocence by their actions, we judge their actions by their assumed innocence, looking for the most sympathetic explanation for everything they do.

For instance, Lyle and Erik supporters sometimes argue the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their freshly murdered parents’ money was not a sign of greed but just more evidence they were traumatized, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.

But empathy doesn’t just make us unconcerned for others, it can also make us actively spiteful toward them if we feel they’ve troubled the object of our empathy. In one study, participants were told of a contest between two students for a small cash prize. Half the participants read an essay in which a contestant expressed distress at being low on money, and the other half read an essay where she mentioned she was low on money but didn’t express distress. The participants were then told that, as part of a study into pain and performance, they must choose how much hot sauce the contestant’s rival would have to consume. The participants who read of the contestant’s distress demanded the contestant’s rival consume more hot sauce. Empathy for the contestant’s distress drove cruelty toward the contestant’s rival. Furthermore, this empathy-driven spite was strongest for participants who had specific genes that made them more sensitive to vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones that play a key role in empathy.

We see this same empathic spite in the online Menendez discourse, most notably in the fact that many people who believe Lyle and Erik are victims also claim they did the right thing by shooting their parents dead, even though the brothers weren’t in imminent danger. Some TikTok clips even celebrate the shooting. Predictably, TikTok is now also filled with clips attacking Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the Menendez brothers’ first trial. One clip, which so far has more than 125,000 likes, shows photographs of Bozanich as a young woman and then as an older one, and states: “This is how you age when you’re a c***.”

But empathy doesn’t just make people spiteful, it also makes them unjust. In one study, participants watched an interview with a fictitious terminally ill girl called Sheri, and were then asked whether they would move Sheri up the waiting list to receive end-of-life care. The participants were reminded this would disadvantage other terminally ill kids who needed the care more. Of those who’d watched Sheri’s interview but been told to decide objectively, one-third opted to move her up. But of those who’d specifically been asked to empathize with Sheri, three-quarters opted to move her up. Crucially, the participants admitted their decision to favor Sheri was unfair. Their empathy overruled their principles.

In some ways it reminds me of the late Charlie Kirk's distinction between empathy and sympathy, summarized by Grok here:

Some even tied [the empathy-sympathy distinction] to broader conservative critiques (like books calling "toxic empathy" a sin or weakness when it leads to affirming behaviors they see as immoral). But the full statement shows he wasn't advocating zero compassion—he explicitly favored sympathy over empathy.

Kirk's apparent reasoning (based on how he and similar voices elaborate in related discussions):

• Empathy = emotionally identifying with / feeling someone else's pain or experience as if it's your own. He saw this as impossible in full (you can't truly feel exactly what another person feels) and dangerous because it can blur judgment, cloud truth, lead to emotional manipulation (e.g., in politics, like Bill Clinton-style "I feel your pain" tactics), or push people to prioritize feelings over facts/logic/morality.
• Sympathy = recognizing someone's suffering, feeling concern or pity for it, and showing compassion—without needing to internalize or "become" their emotional state. This keeps clarity, boundaries, and the ability to act rationally (e.g., help without losing your own perspective or principles).

In short, Kirk argued sympathy allows you to care and act helpfully while staying grounded, whereas empathy risks emotional over-identification that can distort reality or be exploited. This fits his broader worldview skeptical of progressive "feelings-first" approaches in politics, culture, or policy.