Looking at Jonathan Haidt's theory on morality and political alignment

In his tedTalk Haidt explores the different personality factors that might make someone more aligned with liberal or conservative viewpoints. This is of particular interest to my research as I posit polarisation is extremely detrimental to education and society's ability to affect meaningful change.

One of the most interesting points he raises is that when surrounded by people whose political identities we share, we fall pray to the dangers of seeing ourselves as a team. This effects how we critique different propositions and in fact Haidt suggests that most people get stuck in either a right wing or left wing moral matrix-- which makes it difficult to identify with people from other "teams".

 

One of the most interesting similarities between both left wing and right wing tendancies is the tendancy toward moralising and behaviour control. The examples he gives are Christian right control of sexuality and the lefts control of behaviours such as diet. Both are appealing to a percieved purity that people become hyper-protective over. 

He also brings up an interesting model for assessing how these morals are valued in different political groups, which tracks endorsement of Harm, Fairness, Ingroup Authority and Purity against political position. (You can see an example of the West European graph below).

Listening to Haidt's talk and looking at his research has been extremely interesting and inspiring to me. It has made me think about ways of categorising similarities and differences. It also reinforced to me the importance of psychological and neurobiological factors that must be acknowledged.