Bill Moyers discusses America’s cultural divide with Jonathan Haidt

From Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers discusses our contentious culture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Here is my summary of the excellent conversation, in which Haidt offers a roadmap for those of us weary from years of unproductive cultural clashes: Groupish tribalism is generally good because it ramps up cooperation among those in the ingroup while animosity toward outsiders is usually minimal. But tribalism evolved for purposes of "war," so that when a certain intensity is reached, "a switch is flipped, the other side is evil. They are not just our opponents. They are evil. And once you think they are evil, the ends justify the means and you can break laws and you can do anything because it is in service of fighting evil." (min 4:30). Haidt argues that though "morality" often makes us do things we think of as good, it also makes us do things we think of as bad. In the end, we are all born to be hypocrites. Our minds didn't evolve simply to allow to know the truth. In social settings, our minds are not designed to really let us know who did what to whom. "They are finely tuned navigational machines to work through a complicated social network in which you've got to maintain your alliances and reputation. And as Machiavelli told us long ago, it matters far more what people think of you than what the reality is. And we are experts at manipulating our self-presentation; we are so good at it that we believe the nonsense we say to other people."

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What really motivates us

A lot of businesses (and government organizations) are faced with the problem of how to motivate employees in general, and in difficult economic times in particular. I read Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us last night and had one of those face-palm "wow" moments. I can't call it an epiphany because it came from the book, but I can say that something "clicked." Dan Pink summarizes his observations:

When it comes to motivation, there's a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators doesn't work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery: the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Pink spoke on this at TEDGlobal in 2009. I recommend the book to anyone in a management (I prefer "leadership") position. As his subtitle suggests, you may be surprised.

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More options = more difficult choosing

Psycho-economist Sheena Lyengar tells us that the average grocery store today offers 45,000 types of products. The average Walmart offers 100,000. The ninth biggest retailer in the world, however, is Aldi, which offers only 1,400 products. Aldi's successful business model circumvents "choice overload." Less is more when it comes to choosing because more choices result in choice overload. In employee financial investment plans, more offerings means less participation. She recommends that we take a bit of time to think about the consequences of our choices in a vivid way to stay on target. Another technique is to order the complexity of our choices so that we start with simpler easier choices to ease into complex projects.   These strategies are worth considering, since the average person makes 70 choices every day.  Most people could use help "managing their choices." There is quite a bit of overlap in this topic with the work of Barry Schwartz, who presented on the "paradox of choice."

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Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains. Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative. I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing. I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait. That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.   Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.) [More . . . ]

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The science of how liberals differ from conservatives

Chris Mooney has presented "seven recent scientific studies showing that liberals and conservatives differ in ways that go far beyond their philosophies or views on politics. We're talking about things like physiological responses when shown different kinds of words or images, and performance in neuroscience tests." I applaud these efforts. I hope we will see many more studies to come, and that they will shed substantial additional light on why liberals and conservatives see the world so differently. Mooney aptly sums up the promise of this scientific effort:

[T]he next time a Republican denies global warming, liberals ought to be better able to check the impulse to say "what an idiot!" and instead say something like, "I can understand why they have that kind of a response."
Amen to that, based on the long sad track record of what happens when one group of people barks that out group members are "idiots." We've been intensely doing that for at least the past decade, and that strategy only gets us increasingly pissed off at each other. It doesn't lead to any fruitful understanding. It doesn't allow us to work with each other to achieve the many common goals we can agree on. Here is an earlier post I had written on this topic of applying science to understand differences between conservatives and liberals, concerning a study by Jay Dixit, Frank Sulloway et al.

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