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>>Male Presenter: Glad to see you all here today. A few months ago I got into the car
and turn on NPR and the program that was on the air immediately captured my full attention.
The guest was commenting about how we've gotten to a point where America's different ideological
factions could no longer even understand each other at all, let alone work together constructively
for the common good. He pointed out that while it maybe convenient for us to look at our
opponents as evil or stupid, they're not evil or stupid, they believe in making a better
world, just like we do. The guest was Jonathan Haidt who's here to talk to us at Google today.
He mentioned to me that he's sick of talking about politics, so he's not going to be talking
about that subject. Instead he's going to talk about the group dynamics and psychology
that make effective organizations like Google function as well as they do. He's been a professor
of psychology at the University of Virginia for 16 years. In the summer, he moved to NYU
where he's starting a program to study complex social systems. He's the author of "The Happiness--
>>Jonathan Haidt: Hypothesis
>>Male Presenter: Hypothesis" and
>>Jonathan: Righteous Mind
>>Male Presenter: "The Righteous Mind" which opened up at number 6 on the New York Times
bestseller list. By the way, the book is for sale over in the corner here, Nadine from
Books, Inc. has the book for $10, which is heavily subsidized courtesy of Google. So
grab a copy and get it autographed at the end. Now, fresh from an interview with Michael
Krasny on Forum, please welcome Dr. Jonathan Haidt.
[Applause]
>> Dr. Jonathan Haidt: Thanks so much, David. So, Hive Psychology, bees. That's kind of
creepy and gross. Why would I come here and give you guys a lecture about hives and bees?
Well, as David mentioned, my last book was "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern
Truth in Ancient Wisdom" and I reviewed great ideas from across cultures, across the eras
and evaluated them in terms of what we now know in modern psychology. And chapter 10
reviewed ideas about happiness, where it comes from. And how really, the deepest forms of
happiness come from between, from getting the right kinds of connection and embeddedness.
There wasn't that much research to review, just a lot of claims from people long dead,
but the way I summarized it was "Mystical experience is an off button for the self.
When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in a larger body, a bee in a larger
hive." And I reviewed religious experiences, all kinds of awe experiences and I've long
been an awe junkie myself. I would do almost anything to get experiences of awe. So, I
really was kind of proud of this sentence. I thought, "Oh great, this is one of the things
that I care most about". But there wasn't much more to say about it. Well, I went on
to then write this new book "The Righteous Mind" and in the interim, there has been a
little bit of research around this and thinking about morality and where it comes from helped
me think through this hivishness, this groupishness, that is one of the most important facts and
features of human nature.
So, this is the cover of my book in the United States, where the slash, I think, perfectly
captures what it feels like to be an American these days, something is torn, something is
ripped, something is wrong. In the UK, they have a different cover which I think works
just as well as in the United States. It looks like that.
[laughter]
Now the book is, in a sense, very simple, in that it's really just about 3 ideas. If
you get these 3 ideas, you get moral psychology. So the three ideas are first: intuitions come
first, strategic reasoning second, that's what my early research was on. And if you've
read Malcolm Gladwell and Blink, and know about all the research on implicit cognition,
you're familiar with some of that work.
The second part is on the principle that there is more to morality than harm and fairness.
This is about how liberals and conservatives build their moral worlds on different sets
of moral foundations. This is what every newspaper and radio station that interviews me wants
to talk about because of the election year and as David said, I'm sick and tired of talking
about it. And I'd much rather talk to you about hivishness and awe. So that comes out
of part 3 of the book, mortality binds and blinds. That's where it comes from. It comes
in part from this novel ability we humans have, to be bound together into teams that
are not kin. That can work together towards higher goals. And one particular chapter is
on hive psychology and I thought it'd be fun since I'm here talking to one of the most
novel and interesting companies in the world, to talk about hive psychology and let's see
in our discussion afterwards how well these ideas apply to what you experience here at
Google.
So, perhaps the most over-rated or over-hyped idea in the social sciences in the last 70
years has been the idea that people are basically selfish. That our fundamental nature is selfish.
Economists have told us that for decades. Political scientists have told us that people
vote for their self-interest. Evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins told us about selfish
genes. Which, they can make us cooperate with our kin in cases of reciprocity. But by and
large as Dawkins said, "let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born
selfish." George Williams, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists, said it even more
bluntly. "Morality is an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a
biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability." So
the view is, human nature is selfish. We can transcend it, we can act in ways that go against
our fundamental nature, but our fundamental nature is selfish.
Now, this view has been widely embraced in business schools and the business community
and it's been embraced even more strongly by people who hate business. Here's an essay
that was published in The New York Times last week, "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths".
It reported, down at the bottom you can see it reported when it came out in paper it said
"2010 study found that 10% of a sample of corporate managers met a clinical threshold
for being labeled 'psychopaths'". I read that and I said "that's nonsense, it can't possibly
be true". And I was right, the guy just made up that number. The actual study that he was
quoting said 4% which is even still probably too high. But the point is that there's a
narrative out there about business which is that it is a bunch of psychopaths and that
explains why businesses act the way they act. It's because of that narrative, that long
standing narrative which I suppose goes back to the 19th century that Google, of course,
came up with its identity, its brand. Which is "Don't be evil", but then of course, people
being what they are, there are many cynics on the web who think that Google is evil.
[laughter] So, now my talk today is about how our nature
is other than this. Our nature is not entirely selfish. There's been a kind of a little boomlet
in the last 10 years or so on altruism. A lot of people reject this idea and want to
prove no people are deeply altruistic. And there are cases like Mother Theresa, although
from her biography, as I understand it, even Mother Theresa wasn't exactly like Mother
Theresa. But there are cases of people who devote themselves to helping others. That's
interesting but I think actually that's not really where the action is. If you wanna understand
what's so amazing about human beings, don't go looking for all the cases where we do extreme
acts of altruism for strangers. Rather, what's really remarkable about us is our extraordinary
cooperation. We're just really cooperative, you guys have all cooperated more than a hundred
times since breakfast. It's just when you walk in the hallway, when you drive on the
road, we are all cooperating all the time.
There's a particular kind of cooperation I'll focus on which I'll call "groupishness" and
I'm calling it this to be able to make a very precise comparison to selfishness. Because
when I say, as a psychologist, that we are selfish, that our nature is in part selfish,
what I mean is that the human mind contains a variety of mental mechanisms that make us
adept at promoting our own interests in competition with our peers. Of course, we're good at that.
Of course, we evolved these complex minds that make us selfish very often. I'm not arguing
that. What I'm arguing is that's not the whole story. We are also groupish, by which I mean
our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's
interests in competition with other groups. I'm arguing that we focus too much, in the
social sciences, on the competition of individual versus individual and not enough on the competition
of group versus group. Which I believe has also shaped our mind. That's a side story
about multi-level selection, group selection versus individual selection. We don't need
to get into that today. But that's the background to part of what I'm saying here. [clears throat]
So, the reason I believe this, the reason I began studying groupishness as a moral psychologist
that is I'm a social psychologist, but I specialize in the study of morality. The reason I study
this is because I was studying the moral emotions, like moral elevation and I just found there
are so many ways that people have found to shut down their selves, shut down self-interest,
transcend the self. The metaphor that I'll use is that it's as though there's a staircase
in our minds and there's a kind of a door that sometimes opens, very rarely, but most
of us have had it open. There's a kind of door that opens, it's as though there is kind
of a secret staircase, and when this door opens, it invites us to go up, we climb the
stair case and we emerge into a different realm. A realm in which we are fundamentally
different. We transcend ourselves and it isn't just different, it's ecstatic, it feels wonderful.
Most of us are familiar with these experiences in nature. Raise your hand if you have ever
climbed a mountain or gone out in nature specifically to experience some sort of an altered state
of consciousness, a state of self-transcendence, please raise your hand. OK, so right, especially
here in Northern California, you kind of stumble out to get the milk and that seems to happen
to you. But anyway. Most of us are familiar with this kind of experience. Ralph Waldo
Emerson described it, I think, in the most eloquent way that it has even been described.
Just describing what it's like to go for a walk in the woods in New England. And I've
had some animators animate his words, these are from an essay from, I think, 1839 and
again, it's as though this staircase opens, the door opens, you go up the staircase and
here's what he said about it.
>>male narrator: In the woods these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign. Standing
on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball, I am nothing, I see all. The currents
of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal
beauty.
>> Dr. Jonathan Haidt: So, he had lines like "all mean egotism vanishes" again, this self-transcendent
nature of nature experiences. William James, one of the founders of American psychology,
wrote a book called "Varieties of Religious Experience" were he cataloged all these sorts
of experiences and he noted that they don't just make us happy; they don't just make us
feel good. They make us feel different. That our self is fundamentally changed. People
don't come back from these experiences saying "I can do anything. Now I'm going to make
as much money as I can as quickly as I can." Rather, they come back experiencing a moral
commitment and a desire to serve, to be part of something larger. Many of the world's religions
have developed techniques and technologies to foster these self-transcendent experiences.
Meditation is one developed especially in most of the eastern religions. Many of the
world's religions discovered psychedelic drugs. Substances that can, within 30 minutes, attain
the kind of self-transcendence that takes years of study through meditation to achieve.
This is from a sixteenth century scroll showing a mushroom eater about to consume a mushroom.
And as soon as he eats it, this god is going to yank him up the staircase into the other
world. We don't know much about the Aztec's religion and to what degree it was a moral
transformation. But in the '60s there was a great deal of interest in psychedelic drugs,
there was research on it.
A famous study by Walter Pahnke, in conjunction with Timothy Leary, gave psilocybin or niacin
pills. It was a placebo controlled study. They gave the pills to divinity students in
a basement in a chapel at Boston University. And all 10 of the students who took psilocybin
had religious experiences and those who took niacin, they first felt a flush, you feel
like something is happening, they were really psyched. They said "Yes, I'm one of those
who got the pill." But it was just niacin and that quickly faded and nothing else happened.
So the subjects who got psilocybin experienced profound transformations,