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...

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.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

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

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....

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...

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.