Jonathan Haidt is a social and cultural psychologist. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 1995 and is currently a visiting professor of business ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the co-editor of Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well Lived, and is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
I learned from my former graduate student Sara Algoe that we don’t express gratitude in order to repay debts or balance ledgers but rather to strengthen relationships. Furthermore, feelings of gratitude make us want to praise the other person publicly, to bring him or her honor. There are so many relationships I want to strengthen, so many people I want to honor for their help in creating this book.
First, I thank the five advisors who taught me how to think about morality. John Martin Fischer and Jonathan Baron drew me into the field with their enthusiasm and support. Paul Rozin led me to study disgust, food, and the psychology of purity, and he showed me how much fun it is to be a general psychologist. Alan Fiske taught me to look at culture, cognition, and evolution simultaneously, and showed me how to think like a social scientist. Richard Shweder taught me to see that every culture has expertise in some aspects of human potential and not in others; he pried my mind open and made me a pluralist but not a relativist. Moral Foundations Theory draws heavily on his “three ethics,” as well as on Fiske’s Relational Models Theory.
Next, I thank my gang, the team at YourMorals.org: Pete Ditto, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, and Sean Wojcik. Together we’ve become 90 percent bee, 10 percent chimp. It has been a joyous collaboration that has taken us far beyond our initial hopes. I also thank the extended YourMorals family: Craig Joseph, who developed Moral Foundations Theory with me; Brian Nosek, who got our research going, gave us statistical rigor, and shares ideas and expertise with us at every turn; and Gary Sherman, the “data whisperer,” who can find the most astonishing relationships in our data set, which is now so large that it has nearly attained consciousness.
I was fortunate to have found a home at the University of Virginia in one of the most collegial psychology departments in America. There I had an extraordinary network of collaborators, including Jerry Clore, Jim Coan, Ben Converse, Judy DeLoache, Jamie Morris, Brian Nosek, Shige Oishi, Bobbie Spellman, Sophie Trawalter, and Tim Wilson. I have also been fortunate to work with many excellent graduate students who helped me develop these ideas and who discussed and debated every chapter with me: Sara Algoe, Becca Frazier, Jesse Graham, Carlee Hawkins, Selin Kesebir, Jesse Kluver, Calvin Lai, Nicole Lindner, Matt Motyl, Patrick Seder, Gary Sherman, and Thomas Talhelm. I thank undergraduates Scott Murphy, Chris Oveis, and Jen Silvers for their contributions to my thinking.
I thank my new colleagues at New York University’s Stern School of Business—Dean Peter Henry, Ingo Walter, and Bruce Buchanan—for welcoming me in July 2011 as a visiting professor, and then inviting me to stay on permanently. Stern gave me time to finish the book and surrounded me with great colleagues, from whom I’m now learning about business ethics (which is where I hope to apply moral psychology next).
Many friends and colleagues gave me detailed comments on the whole manuscript. In addition to the YourMorals team, I thank Paul Bloom, Ted Cadsby, Michael Dowd, Wayne Eastman, Everett Frank, Christian Galgano, Frieda Haidt, Sterling Haidt, James Hutchinson, Craig Joseph, Suzanne King, Sarah Carlson Menon, Jayne Riew, Arthur Schwartz, Barry Schwartz, Eric Schwitzgebel, Mark Shulman, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed Sketch, Bobbie Spellman, and Andy Thomson. Stephen Clarke organized a reading group of philosophers at Oxford that offered constructive critiques of every chapter; it included Katrien Devolder, Tom Douglas, Michelle Hutchinson, Guy Kahane, Neil Levy, Francesca Minerva, Trung Nguyen, Pedro Perez, Russell Powell, Julian Savulescu, Paul Troop, Michael Webb, and Graham Wood. I want particularly to recognize three conservative readers who each wrote to me years ago with mixed reviews of my work: Bo Ledbetter, Stephen Messenger, and William Modahl. We have since developed email friendships that testify to the value of sustained civil interaction across moral divides. I benefited immensely from their generosity with advice, criticism, and suggested readings on conservatism.
Many friends and colleagues gave me advice on one or several chapters. I thank them all: Gerard Alexander, Scott Atran, Simon Baron-Cohen, Paul Bloomfield, Chris Boehm, Rob Boyd, Arthur Brooks, Teddy Downey, Dan Fessler, Mike Gazzaniga, Sarah Estes Graham, Josh Greene, Rebecca Haidt, Henry Haslam, Robert Hogan, Tony Hsieh, Darrell Icenogle, Brad Jones, Rob Kaiser, Doug Kenrick, Judd King, Rob Kurzban, Brian Lowe, Jonathan Moreno, Lesley Newson, Richard Nisbett, Ara Norenzayan, Steve Pinker, David Pizarro, Robert Posacki, N. Sriram, Don Reed, Pete Richerson, Robert Sapolsky, Azim Shariff, Mark Shepp, Richard Shweder, Richard Sosis, Phil Tetlock, Richard Thaler, Mike Tomasello, Steve Vaisey, Nicholas Wade, Will Wilkinson, David Sloan Wilson, Dave Winsborough, Keith Winsten, and Paul Zak.
Many others contributed in a variety of ways: Rolf Degen found me dozens of relevant readings; Bo Ledbetter did background research for me on public policy issues; Thomas Talhelm improved my writing in the early chapters; Surojit Sen and his father, the late Sukumar Sen of Orissa, India, were my generous hosts and teachers in Bhubaneswar.
I am particularly grateful to the team of professionals who turned my original idea into the book you are now holding. My agent, John Brockman, has done so much to create an audience for science trade books, and he opened up so many opportunities for me. My editor at Pantheon, Dan Frank, applied his great wisdom and light touch to make this book better focused and much shorter. Jill Verrillo at Pantheon made the last hectic months of manuscript preparation so much easier. Stefan Sagmeister designed the jacket for the hardcover, and Cardon Webb designed the cover for the paperback, both of which so perfectly illustrate what the book is about.
Finally, I have been blessed and supported by my family. My wife, Jayne Riew, nurtured our growing family while I worked long hours over the last three years. She also edits and improves everything I write. My parents, Harold and Elaine Haidt, inducted me and my sisters, Rebecca and Samantha, into the Jewish American moral matrix of hard work, love of learning, and pleasure in debate. My father passed away in March 2010, at the age of eighty-three, having done all he could to help his children succeed.
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? And it was their dog, so they had a right to do what they wanted with the carcass, no? If I pushed you to make a judgment, odds are you’d give me a nuanced answer, something like “Well, I think it’s disgusting, and I think they should have just buried the dog, but I wouldn’t say it was morally wrong.”
OK, here’s a more challenging story:
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Once again, no harm, nobody else knows, and, like the dog-eating family, it involves a kind of recycling that is—as some of my research subjects pointed out—an efficient use of natural resources. But now the disgust is so much stronger, and the action just seems so … degrading. Does that make it wrong? If you’re an educated and politically liberal Westerner, you’ll probably give another nuanced answer, one that acknowledges the man’s right to do what he wants, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone.
But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner, you probably think it’s wrong—morally wrong—for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don’t hurt anyone. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place.
I studied philosophy in college, hoping to figure out the meaning of life. After watching too many Woody Allen movies, I had the mistaken impression that philosophy would be of some help.1 But I had taken some psychology courses too, and I loved them, so I chose to continue. In 1987 I was admitted to the graduate program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a vague plan to conduct experiments on the psychology of humor. I thought it might be fun to do research that let me hang out in comedy clubs.
A week after arriving in Philadelphia, I sat down to talk with Jonathan Baron, a professor who studies how people think and make decisions. With my (minimal) background in philosophy, we had a good discussion about ethics. Baron asked me point-blank: “Is moral thinking any different from other kinds of thinking?” I said that thinking about moral issues (such as whether abortion is wrong) seemed different from thinking about other kinds of questions (such as where to go to dinner tonight), because of the much greater need to provide reasons justifying your moral judgments to other people. Baron responded enthusiastically, and we talked about some ways one might compare moral thinking to other kinds of thinking in the lab. The next day, on the basis of little more than a feeling of encouragement, I asked him to be my advisor and I set off to study moral psychology.
In 1987, moral psychology was a part of developmental psychology. Researchers focused on questions such as how children develop in their thinking about rules, especially rules of fairness. The big question behind this research was: How do children come to know right from wrong? Where does morality come from?
There are two obvious answers to this question: nature or nurture. If you pick nature, then you’re a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (as Darwin argued).2
But if you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist.3 You believe that children are more or less blank slates at birth (as John Locke said).4 If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate? Whatever morals we have as adults must have been learned during childhood from our own experience, which includes adults telling us what’s right and wrong. (Empirical means “from observation or experience.”)
But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves. Jean Piaget, the greatest developmental psychologist of all time, began his career as a zoologist studying mollusks and insects in his native Switzerland. He was fascinated by the stages that animals went through as they transformed themselves from, say, caterpillars to butterflies. Later, when his attention turned to children, he brought with him this interest in stages of development. Piaget wanted to know how the extraordinary sophistication of adult thinking (a cognitive butterfly) emerges from the limited abilities of young children (lowly caterpillars).
Piaget focused on the kinds of errors kids make. For example, he’d put water into two identical drinking glasses and ask kids to tell him if the glasses held the same amount of water. (Yes.) Then he’d pour the contents of one of the glasses into a tall skinny glass and ask the child to compare the new glass to the one that had not been touched. Kids younger than six or seven usually say that the tall skinny glass now holds more water, because the level is higher. They don’t understand that the total volume of water is conserved when it moves from glass to glass. He also found that it’s pointless for adults to explain the conservation of volume to kids. The kids won’t get it until they reach an age (and cognitive stage) when their minds are ready for it. And when they are ready, they’ll figure it out for themselves just by playing with cups of water.
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn’t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.
Piaget applied this cognitive-developmental approach to the study of children’s moral thinking as well.5 He got down on his hands and knees to play marbles with children, and sometimes he deliberately broke rules and played dumb. The children then responded to his mistakes, and in so doing, they revealed their growing ability to respect rules, change rules, take turns, and resolve disputes. This growing knowledge came in orderly stages, as children’s cognitive abilities matured.
Piaget argued that children’s understanding of morality is like their understanding of those water glasses: we can’t say that it is innate, and we can’t say that kids learn it directly from adults.6 It is, rather, self-constructed as kids play with other kids. Taking turns in a game is like pouring water back and forth between glasses. No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they’re just not ready to get the concept of fairness,7 any more than they can understand the conservation of volume. But once they’ve reached the age of five or six, then playing games, having arguments, and working things out together will help them learn about fairness far more effectively than any sermon from adults.
This is the essence of psychological rationalism: We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings. And if the child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.
Rationalism has a long and complex history in philosophy. In this book I’ll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.8
Piaget’s insights were extended by Lawrence Kohlberg, who revolutionized the study of morality in the 1960s with two key innovations.9 First, he developed a way to quantify Piaget’s observation that children’s moral reasoning changed over time. He created a set of moral dilemmas that he presented to children of various ages, and he recorded and coded their responses. For example, should a man named Heinz break into a drugstore to steal a drug that would save his dying wife? Should a girl named Louise reveal to her mother that her younger sister had lied to the mother? It didn’t much matter whether the child said yes or no; what mattered were the reasons children gave when they tried to explain their answers.
Kohlberg found a six-stage progression in children’s reasoning about the social world, and this progression matched up well with the stages Piaget had found in children’s reasoning about the physical world. Young children judged right and wrong by very superficial features, such as whether a person was punished for an action. (If an adult punished the act, then the act must have been wrong.) Kohlberg called the first two stages the “pre-conventional” level of moral judgment, and they correspond to the Piagetian stage at which kids judge the physical world by superficial features (if a glass is taller, then it has more water in it).
But during elementary school, most children move on to the two “conventional” stages, becoming adept at understanding and even manipulating rules and social conventions. This is the age of petty legalism that most of us who grew up with siblings remember well (“I’m not hitting you. I’m using your hand to hit you. Stop hitting yourself!”). Kids at this stage generally care a lot about conformity, and they have great respect for authority—in word, if not always in deed. They rarely question the legitimacy of authority, even as they learn to maneuver within and around the constraints that adults impose on them.
After puberty, right when Piaget said that children become capable of abstract thought, Kohlberg found that some children begin to think for themselves about the nature of authority, the meaning of justice, and the reasons behind rules and laws. In the two “post-conventional” stages, adolescents still value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify dishonesty or lawbreaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly justice. Kohlberg painted an inspiring rationalist image of children as “moral philosophers” trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves.10 In the post-conventional stages, they finally get good at it. Kohlberg’s dilemmas were a tool for measuring these dramatic advances in moral reasoning.
Mark Twain once said that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Once Kohlberg developed his moral dilemmas and his scoring techniques, the psychological community had a new hammer, and a thousand graduate students used it to pound out dissertations on moral reasoning. But there’s a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg’s second great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.
Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It’s really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.
Kohlberg’s timing was perfect. Just as the first wave of baby boomers was entering graduate school, he transformed moral psychology into a boomer-friendly ode to justice, and he gave them a tool to measure children’s progress toward the liberal ideal. For the next twenty-five years, from the 1970s through the 1990s, moral psychologists mostly just interviewed young people about moral dilemmas and analyzed their justifications.11 Most of this work was not politically motivated—it was careful and honest scientific research. But by using a framework that predefined morality as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition, it was inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secular, questioning, and egalitarian.
If you force kids to explain complex notions, such as how to balance competing concerns about rights and justice, you’re guaranteed to find age trends because kids get so much more articulate with each passing year. But if you are searching for the first appearance of a moral concept, then you’d better find a technique that doesn’t require much verbal skill. Kohlberg’s former student Elliot Turiel developed such a technique. His innovation was to tell children short stories about other kids who break rules and then give them a series of simple yes-or-no probe questions. For example, you tell a story about a child who goes to school wearing regular clothes, even though his school requires students to wear a uniform. You start by getting an overall judgment: “Is that OK, what the boy did?” Most kids say no. You ask if there’s a rule about what to wear. (“Yes.”) Then you probe to find out what kind of rule it is: “What if the teacher said it was OK for the boy to wear his regular clothes, then would it be OK?” and “What if this happened in another school, where they don’t have any rules about uniforms, then would it be OK?”
Turiel discovered that children as young as five usually say that the boy was wrong to break the rule, but that it would be OK if the teacher gave permission or if it happened in another school where there was no such rule. Children recognize that rules about clothing, food, and many other aspects of life are social conventions, which are arbitrary and changeable to some extent.12
But if you ask kids about actions that hurt other people, such as a girl who pushes a boy off a swing because she wants to use it, you get a very different set of responses. Nearly all kids say that the girl was wrong and that she’d be wrong even if the teacher said it was OK, and even if this happened in another school where there were no rules about pushing kids off swings. Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as rules related to “justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.”13
In other words, young children don’t treat all rules the same, as Piaget and Kohlberg had supposed. Kids can’t talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.14
Turiel’s account of moral development differed in many ways from Kohlberg’s, but the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition). Hierarchy and authority are generally bad things (so it’s best to let kids figure things out for themselves). Schools and families should therefore embody progressive principles of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable elders to train and constrain children).
Kohlberg and Turiel had pretty much defined the field of moral psychology by the time I sat in Jon Baron’s office and decided to study morality.15 The field I entered was vibrant and growing, yet something about it felt wrong to me. It wasn’t the politics—I was very liberal back then, twenty-four years old and full of indignation at Ronald Reagan and conservative groups such as the righteously named Moral Majority. No, the problem was that the things I was reading were so … dry. I had grown up with two sisters, close in age to me. We fought every day, using every dirty rhetorical trick we could think of. Morality was such a passionate affair in my family, yet the articles I was reading were all about reasoning and cognitive structures and domains of knowledge. It just seemed too cerebral. There was hardly any mention of emotion.
As a first-year graduate student, I didn’t have the confidence to trust my instincts, so I forced myself to continue reading. But then, in my second year, I took a course on cultural psychology and was captivated. The course was taught by a brilliant anthropologist, Alan Fiske, who had spent many years in West Africa studying the psychological foundations of social relationships.16 Fiske asked us all to read several ethnographies (book-length reports of an anthropologist’s fieldwork), each of which focused on a different topic, such as kinship, sexuality, or music. But no matter the topic, morality turned out to be a central theme.
I read a book on witchcraft among the Azande of Sudan.17 It turns out that witchcraft beliefs arise in surprisingly similar forms in many parts of the world, which suggests either that there really are witches or (more likely) that there’s something about human minds that often generates this cultural institution. The Azande believed that witches were just as likely to be men as women, and the fear of being called a witch made the Azande careful not to make their neighbors angry or envious. That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.18
I read a book about the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines whose young men gained honor by cutting off people’s heads.19 Some of these beheadings were revenge killings, which offered Western readers a motive they could understand. But many of these murders were committed against strangers who were not involved in any kind of feud with the killer. The author explained these most puzzling killings as ways that small groups of men channeled resentments and frictions within the group into a group-strengthening “hunting party,” capped off by a long night of communal celebratory singing. This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.
These ethnographies were fascinating, often beautifully written, and intuitively graspable despite the strangeness of their content. Reading each book was like spending a week in a new country: confusing at first, but gradually you tune up, finding yourself better able to guess what’s going to happen next. And as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as where you’re visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions—new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote about.
Nowhere was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call “purity” and “pollution.” Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has hair. It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable sexism of a patriarchal society. Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don’t believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”20
But it’s not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book—one of the sources of Western morality—was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses. Some of these rules were clear attempts to avoid disease, such as the long sections of Leviticus on leprosy. But many of the rules seemed to follow a more emotional logic about avoiding disgust. For example, the Bible prohibits Jews from eating or even touching “the swarming things that swarm upon the earth” (and just think how much more disgusting a swarm of mice is than a single mouse).21 Other rules seemed to follow a conceptual logic involving keeping categories pure or not mixing things together (such as clothing made from two different fibers).22
So what’s going on here? If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do many Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next to godliness”?23 And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soy-beans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically. Even if Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn’t see how kids in the West—let alone among the Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua—could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own. There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
When anthropologists wrote about morality, it was as though they spoke a different language from the psychologists I had been reading. The Rosetta stone that helped me translate between the two fields was a paper that had just been published by Fiske’s former advisor, Richard Shweder, at the University of Chicago.24 Shweder is a psychological anthropologist who had lived and worked in Orissa, a state on the east coast of India. He had found large differences in how Oriyans (residents of Orissa) and Americans thought about personality and individuality, and these differences led to corresponding differences in how they thought about morality. Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.25
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.26 The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment. The individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer culture spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires. (European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting individuals from the vicissitudes of life.)
Shweder thought that the theories of Kohlberg and Turiel were produced by and for people from individualistic cultures. He doubted that those theories would apply in Orissa, where morality was sociocentric, selves were interdependent, and no bright line separated moral rules (preventing harm) from social conventions (regulating behaviors not linked directly to harm). To test his ideas, he and two collaborators came up with thirty-nine very short stories in which someone does something that would violate a rule either in the United States or in Orissa. The researchers then interviewed 180 children (ranging in age from five to thirteen) and 60 adults who lived in Hyde Park (the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago) about these stories. They also interviewed a matched sample of Brahmin children and adults in the town of Bhubaneswar (an ancient pilgrimage site in Orissa),27 and 120 people from low (“untouchable”) castes. Altogether it was an enormous undertaking—six hundred long interviews in two very different cities.
The interview used Turiel’s method, more or less, but the scenarios covered many more behaviors than Turiel had ever asked about. As you can see in the top third of figure 1.1, people in some of the stories obviously hurt other people or treated them unfairly, and subjects (the people being interviewed) in both countries condemned these actions by saying that they were wrong, unalterably wrong, and universally wrong. But the Indians would not condemn other cases that seemed (to Americans) just as clearly to involve harm and unfairness (see middle third).
Most of the thirty-nine stories portrayed no harm or unfairness, at least none that could have been obvious to a five-year-old child, and nearly all Americans said that these actions were permissible (see the bottom third of figure 1.1). If Indians said that these actions were wrong, then Turiel would predict that they were condemning the actions merely as violations of social conventions. Yet most of the Indian subjects—even the five-year-old children—said that these actions were wrong, universally wrong, and unalterably wrong. Indian practices related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions, and there were few differences between the adults and children within each city. In other words, Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa, where, as he put it, “the social order is a moral order.” Morality was much broader and thicker in Orissa; almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force. And if that was true, then Turiel’s theory became less plausible. Children were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.
FIGURE 1.1. Some of the thirty-nine stories used in Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1987.
Even in Chicago, Shweder found relatively little evidence of social-conventional thinking. There were plenty of stories that contained no obvious harm or injustice, such as a widow eating fish, and Americans predictably said that those cases were fine. But more important, they didn’t see these behaviors as social conventions that could be changed by popular consent. They believed that widows should be able to eat whatever they darn well please, and if there’s some other country where people try to limit widows’ freedoms, well, they’re wrong to do so. Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom. The distinction between morals and mere conventions is not a tool that children everywhere use to self-construct their moral knowledge. Rather, the distinction turns out to be a cultural artifact, a necessary by-product of the individualistic answer to the question of how individuals and groups relate. When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
Shweder’s study was a major attack on the whole rationalist approach, and Turiel didn’t take it lying down. He wrote a long rebuttal essay pointing out that many of Shweder’s thirty-nine stories were trick questions: they had very different meanings in India and America.28 For example, Hindus in Orissa believe that fish is a “hot” food that will stimulate a person’s sexual appetite. If a widow eats hot foods, she is more likely to have sex with someone, which would offend the spirit of her dead husband and prevent her from reincarnating at a higher level. Turiel argued that once you take into account Indian “informational assumptions” about the way the world works, you see that most of Shweder’s thirty-nine stories really were moral violations, harming victims in ways that Americans could not see. So Shweder’s study didn’t contradict Turiel’s claims; it might even support them, if we could find out for sure whether Shweder’s Indian subjects saw harm in the stories.
When I read the Shweder and Turiel essays, I had two strong reactions. The first was an intellectual agreement with Turiel’s defense. Shweder had used “trick” questions not to be devious but to demonstrate that rules about food, clothing, ways of addressing people, and other seemingly conventional matters could all get woven into a thick moral web. Nonetheless, I agreed with Turiel that Shweder’s study was missing an important experimental control: he didn’t ask his subjects about harm. If Shweder wanted to show that morality extended beyond harm in Orissa, he had to show that people were willing to morally condemn actions that they themselves stated were harmless.
My second reaction was a gut feeling that Shweder was ultimately right. His explanation of sociocentric morality fit so perfectly with the ethnographies I had read in Fiske’s class. His emphasis on the moral emotions was so satisfying after reading all that cerebral cognitive-developmental work. I thought that if somebody ran the right study—one that controlled for perceptions of harm—Shweder’s claims about cultural differences would survive the test. I spent the next semester figuring out how to become that somebody.
I started writing very short stories about people who do offensive things, but do them in such a way that nobody is harmed. I called these stories “harmless taboo violations,” and you read two of them at the start of this chapter (about dog-eating and chicken- … eating). I made up dozens of these stories but quickly found that the ones that worked best fell into two categories: disgust and disrespect. If you want to give people a quick flash of revulsion but deprive them of any victim they can use to justify moral condemnation, ask them about people who do disgusting or disrespectful things, but make sure the actions are done in private so that nobody else is offended. For example, one of my disrespect stories was: “A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”
My idea was to give adults and children stories that pitted gut feelings about important cultural norms against reasoning about harmlessness, and then see which force was stronger. Turiel’s rationalism predicted that reasoning about harm is the basis of moral judgment, so even though people might say it’s wrong to eat your dog, they would have to treat the act as a violation of a social convention. (We don’t eat our dogs, but hey, if people in another country want to eat their ex-pets rather than bury them, who are we to criticize?) Shweder’s theory, on the other hand, said that Turiel’s predictions should hold among members of individualistic secular societies but not elsewhere. I now had a study designed. I just had to find the elsewhere.
I spoke Spanish fairly well, so when I learned that a major conference of Latin American psychologists was to be held in Buenos Aires in July 1989, I bought a plane ticket. I had no contacts and no idea how to start an international research collaboration, so I just went to every talk that had anything to do with morality. I was chagrined to discover that psychology in Latin America was not very scientific. It was heavily theoretical, and much of that theory was Marxist, focused on oppression, colonialism, and power. I was beginning to despair when I chanced upon a session run by some Brazilian psychologists who were using Kohlbergian methods to study moral development. I spoke afterward to the chair of the session, Angela Biaggio, and her graduate student Silvia Koller. Even though they both liked Kohlberg’s approach, they were interested in hearing about alternatives. Biaggio invited me to visit them after the conference at their university in Porto Alegre, the capital of the southernmost state in Brazil.
Southern Brazil is the most European part of the country, settled largely by Portuguese, German, and Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century. With its modern architecture and middle-class prosperity, Porto Alegre didn’t look anything like the Latin America of my imagination, so at first I was disappointed. I wanted my cross-cultural study to involve someplace exotic, like Orissa. But Silvia Koller was a wonderful collaborator, and she had two great ideas about how to increase our cultural diversity. First, she suggested we run the study across social class. The divide between rich and poor is so vast in Brazil that it’s as though people live in different countries. We decided to interview adults and children from the educated middle class, and also from the lower class—adults who worked as servants for wealthy people (and who rarely had more than an eighth-grade education) and children from a public school in the neighborhood where many of the servants lived. Second, Silvia had a friend who had just been hired as a professor in Recife, a city in the northeastern tip of the country, a region that is culturally very different from Porto Alegre. Silvia arranged for me to visit her friend, Graça Dias, the following month.
Silvia and I worked for two weeks with a team of undergraduate students, translating the harmless taboo stories into Portuguese, selecting the best ones, refining the probe questions, and testing our interview script to make sure that everything was understandable, even by the least educated subjects, some of whom were illiterate. Then I went off to Recife, where Graça and I trained a team of students to conduct interviews in exactly the way they were being done in Porto Alegre. In Recife I finally felt like I was working in an exotic tropical locale, with Brazilian music wafting through the streets and ripe mangoes falling from the trees. More important, the people of northeast Brazil are mostly of mixed ancestry (African and European), and the region is poorer and much less industrialized than Porto Alegre.
When I returned to Philadelphia, I trained my own team of interviewers and supervised the data collection for the four groups of subjects in Philadelphia. The design of the study was therefore what we call “three by two by two,” meaning that we had three cities, and in each city we had two levels of social class (high and low), and within each social class we had two age groups: children (ages ten to twelve) and adults (ages eighteen to twenty-eight). That made for twelve groups in all, with thirty people in each group, for a total of 360 interviews. This large number of subjects allowed me to run statistical tests to examine the independent effects of city, social class, and age. I predicted that Philadelphia would be the most individualistic of the three cities (and therefore the most Turiel-like) and Recife would be the most sociocentric (and therefore more like Orissa in its judgments).
The results were as clear as could be in support of Shweder. First, all four of my Philadelphia groups confirmed Turiel’s finding that Americans make a big distinction between moral and conventional violations. I used two stories taken directly from Turiel’s research: a girl pushes a boy off a swing (that’s a clear moral violation) and a boy refuses to wear a school uniform (that’s a conventional violation). This validated my methods. It meant that any differences I found on the harmless taboo stories could not be attributed to some quirk about the way I phrased the probe questions or trained my interviewers. The upper-class Brazilians looked just like the Americans on these stories. But the working-class Brazilian kids usually thought that it was wrong, and universally wrong, to break the social convention and not wear the uniform. In Recife in particular, the working-class kids judged the uniform rebel in exactly the same way they judged the swing-pusher. This pattern supported Shweder: the size of the moral-conventional distinction varied across cultural groups.