My early research – I’m a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning – how do...

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun...

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the ‘American civil religion.’ The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America’s heroes and history,quote its sacred texts...

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.

On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our...

Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it’s the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates...

Dividing into teams doesn’t necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring.” (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than...

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.

In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it’s rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves...

Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams… but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the...

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called ‘openness to experience.’ People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new...

There’s an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he’s a member of your ethnic group.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates – we’re mostly out for ourselves.

When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that’s fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was...

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

By temperament and disposition and emotions, I’m a liberal; but in my beliefs about what’s best for the country, I’m a centrist.

Anytime we’re interacting with someone, we’re judging them, we’re sharing expectations, we think they didn’t live up to those expectations.

When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

Those who think money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop … People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet...

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against...

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it’s one of the only growth stocks I’ve ever invested in.

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming...

Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.

Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you...

Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?

Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.

If you have high IQ, you’re really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it’s not clear to most voters what Democrats’ core moral values are.

If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you...

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even...