We are going to discuss an engaging and insightful book by Jonathan Haidt called: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion. Haidt has studied moral emotions and intuitions across cultures and shows that five of them are key to the human psychology of morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. Bill has found Haidt’s work useful in therapy because it provides a way to listen for clients’ moral intuitions and the tensions between them. It’s also useful for self of the therapist work because how we weigh these moral intuitions may differ from our clients. We will also have some great interaction on the webinar on how Haidt applies his framework to political polarization.
