Thoughts on: The Righteous Mind

This is the beginning of hopefully a series of write ups that document my thoughts on the books I am reading. This new year, I unsubscribed from Netflix and HBO to carve out more time for reading. Now my Kindle is my best friend and I hope I can express myself well enough to get a few people to pick up the book I am writing about. The post is not meant to be a review or a summary — just a few things that I found in the book worth writing about.

First up is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind — Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt is a moral psychologist and if you’ve read a bit of social psychology, you might find the first few chapters of the book repetitive. If you haven’t, this book might just inspire you to pick up the likes of Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me), Just Babies — The Origins of Good and Evil, and Thinking, Fast and Slow. All three are great books and everytime I read social psychology, I end up wishing for more people to read more on social psychology and make an attempt to understand how we (and others) behave. Maybe that’ll help us come closer in a world divided on too many counts than I care to admit.

And that is why I love The Righteous Mind. This one goes beyond theory and throwing nuggets of surprising facts (I believe nothing pleases a social psychologist more than surprising people about themselves). Haidt, here, has written one of the best commentaries on why people seem to hold folks on the other side of the political spectrum with such contempt. He establishes moral foundations…