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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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...

Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the...

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and...

The most important thing to realize is we’re not blank slates at birth. We don’t start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There’s something in our heads...

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage...

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change...

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That’s what you...

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings....

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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

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...