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.