The Righteous Mind

What Hacker News says

1. mbilOct 2026
   The full quote from that para

   > We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.

   This idea is explored in depth in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

   And related David Hume quote:

   > Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions

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2. AnimatsAug 2026
   On the moral front, see The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt (2013). This has a nice analysis of why different people think about ethics quite differently. Haidt looks at axes of morality - Harm, Tradition, Obedience to Authority, and two others. He points out that how people weight those axes differs widely. People in developed countries with some education tend to weigh Harm much higher than the other axes. Agricultural societies weigh Tradition and Obedience to Authority more.

   This is a key difference between Left and Right in the US. (He's writing before Trump, notice.) Once you see this, it's obvious. Strongly recommend the book.

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3. mustaphahJul 2026
   Haidt, in his great book "The Righteous Mind," has been arguing that reasoning evolved not to discover truth but to win arguments. There's a lot of scientific research backing his idea.

   Haidt's metaphor is the rider and the elephant: the elephant (intuition) leans, and the rider (reasoning) invents the justification afterward and then defends it like a lawyer, not a truth-seeker.

   Intelligence doesn't fix this - it just makes people better at coming up with hard-to-defeat arguments; that explains why smart people disagree all the time.

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4. lightbulbishJun 2026
   I'm Swedish, but never heard of Örebropartiet before. I tried looking into their website and it doesn't say a lot.

   Translated from Swedish wikipedia: --- Örebropartiet was founded by Markus Allard in the spring of 2014, when he was recently expelled from the Left Party and the Young Left. [...] Among the party's main issues are reduced politicians' salaries, reduced bureaucracy, civil servant responsibility, assimilation policy and the repatriation of people who do not adapt. ---

   I think it is very reasonable to demand that people try to integrate when coming to a new country - learn the language, get into the culture. As a Swedish person I think this is missing from our integration politics, which is an often talked about topic in the last years.

   In the end this is a political question and sadly instead of engaging in dialogue the reaction to these questions feels like it most often leads to polarization and division. Inclusion means also including people with different beliefs and respecting their opinions, even if we don't share them. Through understanding comes empathy.

   Can recommend "The Righteous Mind" by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt who discusses this in a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

   Fun fact: we get a dopamine release when taking an opposing stance and then seeing (subjective) proof of our stance. It requires self-discipline and fighting your impulses to avoid polarization.

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5. tk90Jul 2025
   If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view.

   Some ideas in the book:

   - Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second.

   - The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.

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6. jvanderbotJun 2025
   This is a well-understood and popular problem. I've tried the five-whys on this, and always end up at unnecessary escalation and righteous idealism (not by any particular party or person, just kind of by everyone). But the book Righteous Mind does a better job on this issue than I ever will.
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