Moral Foundations of our Coronavirus Response

This week I'd like to acknowledge a previously unrecognized source for Two Minds Theory, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt didn't make it into the reference list for our original article on TMT, but he contributed important ideas and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I first heard his ideas during a 2016 keynote address at the American Psychological Association meeting, which was about the contribution of people’s moral frameworks to their political views. I plan to blog about that a different time. But today, I’d like to explore some specific ideas from Dr. Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, that seem related to how people are feeling during the coronavirus epidemic.

Dr. Haidt argues that two specific moral values, caring for others and personal freedom, are particularly beloved by American liberals. (People who care only about personal freedom, even when there are greater risks that other people will be harmed, tend to be classified as libertarians). According to Dr. Haidt, the highly public conflict between social safety nets and small government is really about how much an ethic of caring should be considered relative to an ethic of personal freedom. Haidt points out that these viewpoints may seem normal to us but they are statistically unusual for humanity as a whole. They occur only in societies that are WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Across the world and also among American conservatives, a total of six moral principles are used in people’s decision-making. In addition to freedom and caring for others, the other four are fairness (particularly in the sense of karma or “just deserts”), loyalty to one's own group, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity, holiness, or purity. Liberals in WEIRD societies tend to disregard or even disparage these other four values, yet they are of equal importance to a great many people. All six components, along with their dark side or negative aspect, are shown in the diagram at the top of the page -- e.g., the fourth column represents an ethic of valuing group loyalty and being opposed to any betrayal of the group.

Dr. Haidt's explanation of moral decision-making -- called Moral Foundations Theory -- is based on some of the same neurocognitive evidence as Two Minds Theory. Similar to TMT, Moral Foundations Theory explicitly differentiates between our Intuitive and Narrative selves. Dr. Haidt's book describes the two minds as "the rider and the elephant." The Intuitive mind -- the elephant -- instinctively leans in one direction or another, and the rider goes along. The elephant's decisions are based on lots of things -- group affiliation, caring for others, sense of hierarchy and social status -- and its primary concerns match up with the six moral foundations seen in political systems. The rider, which is the Narrative mind, is just going along with the elephant. The Narrative mind 

can see further in the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefore it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new technologies, which can be deployed to help the elephant reach its goals and avoid disasters. And, most important, the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn't necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. (p. 54)

All of these aspects of the "rider's" role are very much in line with how we have characterized the Narrative system in Two Minds Theory. And in fact, the choice of "narrative" as our name for the system (Kahneman just called it "system 2") probably has a lot to do with Dr. Haidt's metaphor.

Daniel Kahneman, who had been my primary source up until I encountered Haidt’s ideas, to some extent idealizes System 2 (the Narrative mind). Kahneman argues that things would be better in many circumstances if we could just "slow down and let [our] System 2 take control" (Thinking: Fast and Slow, p. 30). He characterizes the Narrative system as basically accurate; it's only problem is that it is slow-moving and "lazy," content to let us operate most of the time using heuristics and biases. And in fact, Kahneman’s view is right about how humans’ Narrative minds are helping to navigate the current crisis. It is the Narrative system’s ability to project into the future that allows us to understand the strategy of “flattening the curve” and what will happen if we don’t achieve it. Our Narrative capabilities are what allow Army engineers to convert stadiums into hospitals; what help scientists design new tests, treatments, and vaccines; and what help epidemiologists and public health specialists to identify key transmission risks and how to mitigate them.

Unfortunately, the Narrative mind (the rider on the elephant) also can come up with post hoc justifications for a surprising range of bad behaviors. The single most important job of the Narrative mind, in Haidt’s view, is to explain and justify the elephant's actions. "Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other," writes Haidt, "it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm" (Righteous Mind, p. 54). Therefore the Narrative system also can be wrong. In fact, it can be badly wrong. The rider's primary job is simply to rationalize what the elephant does, not to make the right decisions. We are seeing some of these harmful narratives in the current situation as well: For example, people blaming “others” for bringing the virus into their communities, whether that means Chinese-Americans, people who had the means to travel abroad earlier this year, or second-home owners waiting out the epidemic in a rural community. In-group loyalty is a basic moral foundation, but narratives based on this foundation can turn destructive when people blame “outsiders” for the epidemic. The longer the situation goes on, the more strongly people may be tempted to exile outsiders from their communities, close their roads, or blame people who look different. These responses may be understandable in terms of human psychology, but they don't actually help to fight the virus.

Similarly, the moral foundation of purity has led to many wonderful things in society including the setting aside of sanctified spaces like cathedrals, shrines, and public parks. But in a pandemic situation this foundation can lead people to form narratives about how some spaces are contaminated, items handled by others are dangerous, or some groups of people themselves are unclean. In the context of a virus, a stronger focus on cleanliness is probably adaptive. But in our fear of contamination, we again may formulate narratives in which some people are “dirty” and disease-bearing, while focusing on our own personal virtue of cleanliness. In extreme forms, this has led some Christian communities to assert that their personal sanctity protects them from coronavirus infection. A focus on keeping ourselves pure is actually the opposite of what public health experts advise as the optimal virus-containment strategy, which would be for each of us to assume that we ourselves are the vector of disease, and to take necessary precautions so that we don’t inadvertently infect others. 

The moral foundations of liberty and respect for authority are to some degree in conflict during the coronavirus crisis, because authorities are actively constraining people’s activities in order to reduce transmission risk. And we also have competing authorities advocating for potentially divergent solutions to the crisis – a typical problem in pluralistic American society, but one that has been exacerbated by a great deal of uncertainty and fear in recent weeks. In general, respect for authority will be helpful in getting us through the crisis period of the coronavirus pandemic as long as the authorities are basing their instructions on good information rather than fear or some of the mistaken thinking described above. But with essential information still hard to come by (are masks useful? how long does the virus live on surfaces? what's the actual rate of people who are infected but asymptomatic? what's the actual community transmission rate?), all decisions by authorities are vulnerable to error. And for liberty-loving Americans who are prone to question their leaders at the best of times, this uncertainty makes noncompliance with public health orders more likely.

In our worst moments, our narratives may suggest a form of fairness in which people “get what they deserve” if they get sick after flouting social-distancing rules. Here in Colorado, our governor said that enforcement of his stay-at-home order would be done by the Grim Reaper. Yet the evidence so far suggests that the distribution of coronavirus cases is actually profoundly unfair, striking more people in lower socioeconomic groups, older and vulnerable people who already have chronic illnesses, and people in minority racial/ethnic groups. Some commentators have actually used this as an excuse to argue that the coronavirus victims don't matter so much and that their survival should be given less weight in decisions about when to re-open society. Few people would be willing to go this far in abandoning an ethic of care for others. But as the days go on, many of us are finding that the moral foundation of caring is stretched to the limit: We should be concerned for people who are sick and dying, for the health care workers who serve them, for people who are vulnerable to getting sick, for people who are out of work, for people who are stuck at home, for children out of school … the list goes on, and fatigue may be setting in even for those who are highly motivated by an ethic of caring. In this situation, an increasing number of people might begin to develop narratives that suggest some people or groups are more worthy of care than others.

Although this blog post has mainly focused on the dark side of our moral tendencies, it is important to note that the moral foundations themselves are neither right nor wrong; they are simply a description of humans' Intuitive-level gut feelings about what is good or bad. In some of studies, Haidt pushed people to justify their moral intuitions even in situations where they were not logical – for instance, by specifying that no one was harmed by a decision that seems otherwise morally repugnant. People with traditionally Liberal sensibilities couldn’t find any logical reason to say that the action was wrong (it wasn’t harming anyone, and the person was making a free choice), yet it violated people’s Intuitive sense of sanctity, or group loyalty, or basic fairness. Our intuitions about right and wrong are therefore in some ways separable from the stories told by our Narrative minds. These moral intuitions can be an important check on self-protective narratives that break down the fabric of society. In the coming days it will be important for us to ask ourselves whether our current actions are still in line with our most deeply held beliefs -- for instance, have we taken all possible precautions to avoid harming others, in line with an ethic of caring? Are we acting in a way that's consistent with a belief that all human life is sacrosanct? Or are we respecting the role of persons in authority even when those authorities' decisions curtail our personal freedoms? There are likely to be continued trade-offs and even conflicts between the six moral foundations. But when a narrative based on one moral foundation takes us too far afield, a gut feeling based on a different moral foundation can help to bring us back to center and avoid actions that our better selves would regret.