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Haidt Stories
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is Jonathan Haidt’s study of how and why people along a spectrum from extreme liberal to extreme conservative viewpoints coalesce around certain value systems. To get us going, on the first page he presents these two hypothetical tales:
I’m going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn’t hurt it, right?