A Pew study last year confirmed that U.S. political partisanship has risen sharply. In the face of that trend, is it possible for Democrats and Republicans to get along? Wharton professor Philip Tetlock recently spoke with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, to explore this question. Haidt breaks down why it is so hard for liberals and conservatives to understand one another and what can be done to change that.

Jonathan Haidt from New York University about his book that came out last year, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

1 of the big questions your book wrestles with is why is it so hard for liberals and conservatives to understand each other?

Well, the very nature of morality, the big thing that it does that I think isn't sufficiently appreciated, is that it binds us into groups that can do things in the world.

In the animal kingdom, the only time you get cooperation is pretty much kinship.

You get pairs of individuals occasionally.

But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, it's just family.

And human beings have this incredible capacity to come together in groups and do big things.

And when you look back at the early history of cooperation, you always find temples, gods, religion, people circle around sacred objects.

That binds them together, but at the same time, it blinds them.

Liberals and conservatives in America now, each country has its own particular battles.

Liberals and conservatives are bound around different sacred values, sacred principles, and they absolutely cannot understand each other.

They are forbidden from understanding each other, lest they be kicked out of their tribe.

Has anything happened to change your mind?

Well, since publishing the book, not really.

The book has gotten a good reception, right, left, center, libertarian, except on the far left.

Some people on the far left hate it, and the new atheists hate it.

But those are groups that I criticize in the book, so that's not surprising.

I changed my mind a lot while writing the book.

When I started writing the book, I still considered myself to be a partisan liberal.

I began shifting over from just studying morality across cultures to studying morality across political cultures, as though they were different nations.

And I wanted to just grab Kerry and the Democrats by the lapels and say, don't you know how to make a moral argument?

Why do you keep appealing to self-interest and my policy will do more for you?

So I got into the political psychology business originally to help the Democrats.

And along the way, in really trying to get inside the head of people from different moralities, I came to see that each side sees certain truths and insights and threats that they're right about.

So you've been on an ideological journey of your own.

And it is possible for people to change their minds?

Yes, all you have to do is study morality for 25 years and try to write a book in which you state the other side's case sympathetically.

I asked the question about the possibility of changing your mind because you do embrace in the book a fairly strong version of a moral intuitionist theory of how people work through puzzles of this sort.

Could you say a few words about what moral intuitionism is and its implications for our capacity to change.

So a dominant thread in the history of philosophy is rationalism, the idea that we are, or at least could be, reasoning creatures.

And if we can cultivate our reason, then we will rise above the fog of emotions, see the truth, we can talk to each other, and we will find light and truth.

And my book is a sustained argument against that.

I side very much with David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher who said that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

And so what I believe the empirical evidence from psychology shows is that our reasoning tends to be post hoc, our reasoning about moral issues tends to be something we do after we already know which way we want to go.

And we send our reasoning out like a press secretary.

The president sends the press secretary out to say, justify this position.

He doesn't say, go look at the notes about how we came to this position and explain that to the people.

He says, justify this position using whatever arguments you think would be most persuasive.

And this is why we are so good at giving each other reasons, but then the other person doesn't change their mind.

And we think, well, they must not be sincere.

The trick to changing people's minds is to first get them leaning your way.

First make them see a conclusion, feel it.

Think about Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.

It is a kind of argument, but it's an argument couched in metaphors and soaring rhetoric.

It opens your heart first, and then the metaphors can get in, and then you see the logic of it.

So I actually do believe quite a lot in the importance of reason for persuasion.

Just it has to be reason that follows intuition, not excludes it.

So if you were president of the United States right now, What would you do to encourage more civil dialogue between liberals and conservatives that the current president of the United States is not doing?

The number 1 top priority for this country is political reform to get our political institutions working better.

Everyone agrees that Congress has gotten much, much more polarized since the 1980s.

The people have gotten a little more polarized.

There's plenty that we could do as citizens.

But the real problem is the dynamics of 1 institution in particular, the US Congress.

So there's a group called nolabels.org, which has a great set of solutions.

We all know that we need campaign finance reform.

They have some simple fixes, the most important of which is change the legislative calendar back the way it was before Newt Gingrich, which is Washington is in session for 5 days a week, and then it's off for 1 week a month.

When Newt Gingrich came in, he told the incoming freshmen, don't move to Washington.

Prior to then, they all lived in Washington.

They served on committees together on school boards, or their wives or spouses did.

They knew each other, they knew each other's kids, they had personal relationships.

They're warm, incredibly socially skilled people.

They're able to make deals with each other.

And you take an institution that has trouble as it is, that has all these divided powers as it is, and then you say, how about let's separate the 2 sides so they no longer know each other, no friendships, they don't ride on the same little buses under little train cars underneath the Capitol anymore.

Let's end all personal relationships and now have them work out difficult issues.

So, there are a lot of simple fixes to Congress that will go a long way towards basically getting it to work better.

And if Congress wasn't so polarized, that would dampen down the messages out through all the polarized media that we all have to hate each other and that the other side is going to destroy the country.

So John, at the end of chapter 4 of your book, you write that no 1 has ever invented a business ethics class that has demonstrably changed the behavior of the students after the classroom experience.

And now at NYU Stern you have begun teaching business ethics.

Well yes, because they asked me to and I couldn't say no, and because I made it sound hopeless in the book.

I stand by that, that a single standalone course, meeting twice a week for a semester, can't put ethics into people's heads.

That when they go out into the work world and they're faced with requirements or pressures to do something, falsify something, hide some information from a customer, they're gonna remember their ethics class and say, oh, but this is wrong.

There's no evidence that that can happen.

The evidence in social psychology about the power of simple situational pressures is so overwhelming that I don't think an ethics class can really do that much.

What I'm hoping we can do at Stern is make the class just a part of a two-year process in which we are socializing them into professionalism.

What does it mean to be a business professional?

When they first show up at Stern, like students all over the country at every school, there's a period of openness where everyone's trying to figure out, how should I be?

What's the right way to be successful here?

We teach our ethics class in the middle of the second year.

They already know how to be a Stern student.

And So what we're trying to do is get a lot more of the content into the very first week, move the intensive class into other parts of the first year, and then get some of the content in every single class, where we'll discuss norms of professionalism.

But even more important than that, Because I think that we're so limited in our ability to behave ethically in the face of situational pressures, I want to teach our students how to do ethical systems design.

How to take all the flaws and weirdnesses of human nature and work with them to design organizations, start-up companies, where people are always concerned about the reputation.

People are concerned about reputation even more than money in most cases.

How can we set things up so that people will, in a sense, guard their reputation by doing the right thing?

That's the most important single principle.

So do these liberal conservative differences that are so pronounced in the political sphere manifest themselves in the domain of business ethics?

Are there some aspects of ethics that are trans-ideological and other aspects that polarize people, just as political issues do?

The core issues of business ethics, again, I'm new at this, but from what I'm picking up, some of the core issues are things like fiduciary duty.

You have an obligation to people who are hiring you to do a job, to fulfill a contract, to put their interests first.

I don't see any partisan difference there.

Other issues, like corporate social responsibility, are clearly partisan issues.

1 of the hottest topics in business ethics is how can we get companies to honor or maximize the triple bottom line, not just the financial bottom line, but also social benefit and ecological benefit.

Obviously, this is going to appeal to students on the left and not on the right.

Let's see, I don't know of issues that would appeal more to students on the right.

Conservatives tend to focus more on personal responsibility.

Liberals tend to focus more on victims and the poor.

But the, the core of the course seems to be non-ideological.

So the, the Friedmanite libertarians for example, tend to view any deviation from fiduciary responsibility to shareholders as a form of theft, de facto theft.

Yes, I read the article where Friedman lays that out.

And I think if we truly had efficient markets in which there were no externalities, in which there was no despoiling of public goods, in which there was perfect information and people weren't allowed to deceive and cheat, then I think the Friedman argument would work.

And I believe Friedman was very aware of that and wasn't saying, oh, just max my shareholder value no matter what the situation.

If we had such good markets where companies couldn't be foisting costs onto unsuspecting victims, then I think there would be a lot to be said for it.

Government regulation is necessary to achieve much of that.

And that's what things are so polarized about.

Do you have a maximal view in which government has to restrain the corporations?

Or do you have a minimal view in which government is the problem, and the more we can shrink it down, the freer business will be to create value?

You don't see very many companies, though, overtly endorsing the Friedmanite position.

Virtually all companies I've come across seem to endorse some form of CSR, corporate social responsibility.

I mean, putting TJ Rogers and so forth aside.

But most people are in favor of motherhood and apple pie.

I would want to know how much they put in the way of resources towards backing that up.

And I'd be surprised if it was uniformly the case that, or overwhelmingly the case, that companies are sincerely committed to CSR.

So let's circle back to the press secretary metaphor that you used earlier when you were describing moral intuitionism.

Are you able to distinguish what fraction of the embrace of corporate social responsibility is purely press secretary posturing as opposed to a genuine internalization of a moral priority?

The main thought I've had so far in my 1 year in the business world at the Stern School of Business is that whatever you want to say about business, it varies a lot by sector.

So a company like Nike or Starbucks or Google, which greatly prizes its reputation with consumers and has a tremendous cachet because of that reputation.

Those companies are really susceptible to boycotts, public criticism, they care about the reputations.

And so I think they do, especially when their feet are held to the fire, they really do make a sincere commitment to corporate social responsibility.

So just from reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, the big agribusiness companies, Archer Daniels Midland and the other ones that people don't even know their names.

So I would be very surprised if they took corporate social responsibility seriously.

There's not much economic incentive for them to do it.

So again, cycling back to the press secretary metaphor, which is really an intriguing 1.

You've got the President of the United States, and you have his press secretary, and the press secretary is there to explain and defend what the President does.

So, but yet you're optimistic about attitude change within a moral intuitionist framework.

It would be as though the press secretary were telling the president what to do as opposed to the president telling the press secretary what to do.

So if you look at it just as an individual, we are all so flawed, we are all such so bad at reasoning when our interests or moral values are at stake.

So we're not going to get better reasoning and change just by helping individuals to reason better.

But when you put us together into networks and systems and companies and juries and legislative bodies, that we can correct each other's flawed thinking.

Basically, the big problem is the confirmation bias.

We're all so good at confirming what we want to believe.

But if there are other people out there to disconfirm it, if we have no relationship with them, we just hate them and disagree with them.

But if they're members of our company, if they're friends, If they're fellow scientists, this is why it's so important to have ideological diversity in the sciences.

Because if everybody shares certain assumptions and there's nobody there to question them, then yeah, you get bad reasoning.

So I'm a big fan of thinking about institutions as ways that we've developed to put people together in ways that correct for or cancel out our flaws.

If you look at, for example, civil rights, interracial marriage, these were disgusting to many people in America 50 years ago.

It's not because of arguments, it's because you get used to it.

There's a lot of research now on gay marriage.

Why is gay marriage, why are attitudes about gay marriage changing so fast?

It's not because the arguments that were made back in the 80s suddenly people understood, oh, I see.

It's because in the 80s most gay people were in the closet, but since 5% of all people are gay and now they're mostly out of the closet, suddenly everybody knows 7 gay people and a lot have 1 in their family.

When you get used to something, it loses its shock value.

And if you take an intuitionist view about how you've got to get the intuitions right first, you've got to speak to the elephant, as it were, not the rider.

And that's what's happening on gay marriage.

We might have a problem with mixing metaphors here.

And I'm fixated on president and press secretary at the moment.

But OK, so the press secretary might come back to the president and say, I can't sell this anymore.

So when Hume said reason is the slave of the passions, that's too strong a metaphor.

That's why I like press secretary or lawyer.

A lawyer does his client's bidding, but he can say, excuse me, sir, I will do this if you insist.

But this is a losing case, and you will look bad.

And it is my fiduciary duty to advise you.

So there are feedback mechanisms like that.

And again, I think we're seeing that on gay marriage and other issues, in certain social circles, people would feel ridiculous arguing for things that they could easily have argued for 10 years ago.

So obviously your book has been widely read and widely praised.

What's the best critique you've seen of your position?

Well, 1 critique is that I'm pretty critical of liberals and I'm not critical enough of conservatives, And I think that's true.

When I wrote the book, because I had been thinking so much about what liberals don't see about conservatives, that's sort of what I specialized in.

And the people that mostly read these books are liberals.

And I should have said some of the things where I think conservatives are wrong.

1 of the main ones is that while liberals, I think, are too quick to try to take apart the law of karma, Liberals kind of want to stop bad behavior from leading to bad consequences.

Society decays when you don't have swift punishment.

But conservatives act as though the law of karma is actually true.

That is, people who are suffering now are suffering because of something they did in the past.

Liberals have a complete ban on blaming the victim, which means they can't figure out a lot of social facts.

But conservatives, I think, are a little too quick to blame victims and to not see how a disadvantage can accumulate and lead to a downward spiral.

So I do wish I'd been more even-handed in my criticism, and praise of both sides.

So the concept of deservingness plays a pivotal role here in producing ideological divergence.

And you're suggesting that conservatives believe too much in the concept of deservingness, and liberals not enough?

Deservingness going forward is a great idea.

A lot of people realize this as I did when you become a parent.

And you discover that you get a bratty kid.

And what my wife and I found very quickly was when we used the 1, 2, 3 magic method, which is when he's misbehaving, you say, that's 1, that's 2, that's 3, timeout.

Rapid punishment, boy, do you get behavior change.

And a lot of our liberal friends are trying to reason with the kids.

They say, was that a wise choice or a non-wise choice?

So I think over and over again, conservatives stand up for equity.

That is, if you do something bad, you should be punished.

If you do something good, you should be rewarded.

In fact, I show some signs in the book and in my talks.

Sign from the Tea Party, stop punishing success, stop rewarding failure.

That's about as direct a plea for the law of karma as you could have.

Conservatives, I'm sorry, liberals in contrast, assign tax the wealthy, fair and square.

See, if there are people who are hungry, well then, of course the rich should pay more taxes.

If you push for equality, that often requires you to violate equity.

We see that in Title IX, which mandates almost equal outcomes in sports, so that all of our schools are desperate to try to get women into sports, And they're trying to push men out.

They don't have enough money to pay for them.

And so we don't have equal access to sports in a lot of our schools, because Title IX is an effort to get equality of outcomes.

And liberals think, oh, well, why isn't there equality of outcome?

So you're able to weave together these conflicting strands of argument in a very sophisticated, integratively complex way, but most people don't think that way, right?

If you're a partisan, you cannot think that way.

The press secretary tends not to say, well, on the 1 hand, the Republicans are right about this, but the Democrats are right about that.

So if you're partisan, you cannot think in an integrative—that's what your research shows.

The further you are out to the extremes, the lower integrative complexity tends to go on most issues.

Most Americans will put themselves on 1 side or the other, but they're not that extreme.

Our political life is dominated by more extreme elements, bolstered by the media, which has a business model that also does not cater to integrative complexity.

So we're bathed in arguments from people who are not integratively complex.

I think it takes some doing, some seeking, some effort to find ideas on the other side.

And when you do, I mean, that to me has been the great enlightenment.

When I started reading conservative ideas about social order, about the value of tradition, about how easy it is to lose social order, they really struck me as a revelation.

For example, this is such a simple formulation I heard the other day.

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'The Righteous Mind': Why Liberals and Conservatives Can't Get Along