Yale professor Joshua Knobe has gathered various findings suggesting that the personality trait of openness correlates with moral relativism. These findings suggest "we can start out with facts about people’s usual ways of thinking or talking and use these facts to get some insight into questions about the true nature of morality."
I have written several posts holding that we are all blinded by our sacred cows. Not simply those of us who are religions. This blindness occurs to almost of us, at least some of the time. Two of my more recent posts making this argument are titled "Mending Fences" and "Religion: It's almost like falling in love." In arriving at these conclusions, I've relied heavily upon the writings of other thinkers, including the writings of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Several years ago, Haidt posited four principals summing up the state-of-the-art in moral psychology:
1. Intuitive primacy (but not dictatorship)
2. Moral thinking is for social doing.
3. Morality is about more than harm and fairness.
4. Morality binds and blinds.
In a recent article at Edge.org, Haidt argued that this fourth principle has proven to be particularly helpful, and it can "reveal a rut we've gotten ourselves into and it will show us a way out." You can read Haidt's talk at the annual convention for the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, or listen to his reconstruction of that talk (including slides) here. This talk has been making waves lately, exemplified by John Tierney's New York Times article.
Haidt begins his talk by recognizing that human animals are not simply social, but ultrasocial. How social are we? Imagine if someone offered you a brand-new laptop computer with the fastest commercially available processor, but assume that this computer was broken in such a way that it could never be connected to the Internet. In this day and age of connectivity, that computer will get very little use, if any. According to Haidt, human ultrasociality means that we "live together in very large
[caption id="attachment_16630" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Jeremy Richards at Dreamstime.com (with permission)"]
[/caption]
groups of hundreds or thousands, with a massive division of labor and a willingness to sacrifice for the group." Very few species are ultrasocial, and most of them do it through a breeding trick by which all members of the group are first-degree relatives and they all concentrate their efforts at breeding with regard to a common queen. Humans beings are the only animals that doesn't use this breeding trick to maintain their ultrasociality.
[More . . . ]
According to Truthout, Bill Moyers recently gave a talk at History Makers, and had this disturbing information: well documented facts often backfire:
As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger." You can read the entire article online. I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."
Assume that you came to Earth last year (you were a visitor from another planet). Assume that on the first morning you spent on Earth, I showed you how to make toast. I showed you how to put the bread in the toaster and how to turn the toaster on. I taught you how to wait for the toast to pop up, and then I showed you how to spread some butter on the toast after the toast popped up. Assume that a week later, I took you downstairs and told you I was going to show you how to make toast. Once again, I instructed you to put bread in the toaster, to turn the toaster on, to wait for the toaster and then to put butter on the toast. Assume that I tried to give you the same lesson one more week later. You would likely stop me at this point and tell me that I had already told you how to make toast. You might say, "You told me twice, in fact. The steps were simple and I truly listened. There's no need for you to tell me yet again how to make toast." [More . . . ]
In the Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst writes about the importance of friendship and the fact that modern distractions are seducing Americans into failing to appreciate or maintain valuable friendships. He defines friendship as "a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn't primary." What are the important things that friends do?
It's available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should).Here are the disturbing statistics. Half of American adults are unmarried and more than a quarter live alone. A recent survey shows that Americans had one third fewer friends than we did two decades earlier. "A quarter of us had no such confidants at all." None of this is surprising given that so many of us find ourselves rushing around working so that we can afford things we don't really need. Akst also cites to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, who suggest that we fail to develop friendships like we used to because it takes too much of an investment. She blames the "cult of conspicuous busyness" which we pursue to attain "status and perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another." Stir in children, spouses and our all too willingness to move in search of jobs that pay more, and we have a social environment that is downright hostile to friendships. None of this is mitigated by the 130 "friends" that the average Facebook user has. What are we doing in search of this mutual affection in the absence of friends? We have lots of talk therapists, of course. As Akst notes, Americans also own immense numbers of non-human pets, and these seem to be serving as substitutes for friends. Akst has written a thoughtful piece on friendship in which he stirs in psychology, sociology, philosophy and this conclusion:
[Friendship is] one of life's highest pleasures… It's time for us to ease up on friending, re-think our downgrade of ex-lovers to "just" friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know barely because it rains less elsewhere.