The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.

Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.

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.

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.

the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists.

that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups.

collapse of cooperation across party lines.