Welcome to Litsy!

This was a bit repetitive and could be a bit slow in places, but it was really interesting and I learned a lot. I think it‘s a great introduction the intersection of psychology and anthropology.
Main take away: People are emotional creatures who are group focused and republicans are way better at appealing to that than democrats.
3/5 read for a dense psychological look at human behavior and American political habits

This was my November #Doublespin (very fitting for non-fiction November!) and boy did I have to work to get it done! This is not light reading! The set up is long and slow. The payoff finally comes in the last chapter. Generally, I think he has some good points and it did help my understanding of differences in liberal vs conservative thinking.

@TheAromaofBooks

⭐️⭐️⭐️ I enjoyed the beginning of this book - it‘s been a long time since I‘ve used my brain this way, taking in such cerebral info outside the Literature realm. Near the end it started to run long & I disengaged - either due to less interest or burnout with the subject matter. Either way, it was interesting &something I never would have picked up without Sharon McMahon‘s book club. Definitely looking forward to the discussions later this month!

⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book addresses our divisions in a very calm and calculated manner.
Anyone who's willing to consider the opinions and beliefs of others will benefit from this book. If you're not willing then it's not for you.
I did find the amount of time spent on Evolution a bit excessive and unnecessary.
I did find the explanation of how we can better understand each other refreshing.

#nonfiction #religion #politics

"We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects."

#nonfiction #religion #politics

Haidt, a self-proclaimed Liberal, makes a valid counterpoint to religions being exclusive.

"Our graduate program at UVA is more exclusive than the church - we reject almost all applicants."

#nonfiction #religion

"Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we've done, or to support the groups we belong to."

#nonfiction #religion

Ways to improve your team.
1. Increase similarity, not diversity.
2. Exploit synchrony.
3. Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals.

"The 1st step's to stop thinking so much about leadership....leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership. Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand....it's no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow."

"Morality is the key to understanding humanity."

"The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum."

#nonfiction #politics

"These foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) are used differently, and to different degrees, to support moral matrices on the political left and right."

#nonfiction #politics

"Progress happens when theories are tested, supported, and corrected by empirical evidence"

#nonfiction #religion #politics

"So even if we all share the same small set of cognitive modules, we can hook actions up to modules in so many ways that we can build conflicting moral matrices on the same small set of foundations."

#nonfiction #religion #politics

And ...BOOM... there it is!

#readathon #deweys24hrreadathon #readathonwhileparenting

"Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning, second."
Some good analogies like elephant and rider..

Trying audio book for the first time! 🤞

🤐

I love this book! Gives me so much to think about. Now I'm nagging my husband to read it too, so we can talk it over. I even offered to read it to him :) There's so many interesting ideas I wish everyone knew about.

(on the picture polish edition of the book)

I found this book so interesting. There were some parts that I felt went a bit over my head (I can‘t do philosophy. 🤦🏻‍♀️).. but the psychology aspects were so fascinating to me.. there are two sides to every story and of course there is some truth to both sides. How can we see it? While most of the book stayed mostly non partisan the end did took toward using the arguments to defend conservatism which is where it lost a star for me. #nfnov

Next up for #NFNov. Haidt is a social psychologist who specializes in “moral psychology”. So far his description of his studies on how people decided what is right and wrong are absolutely fascinating and also thought provoking. I hope this makes me question my own views a bit. @rsteve388 @Clwojick

Really extraordinary book. I can‘t say that I always agreed with every conclusion but the amount of research information provided was wonderful. If you like social psychology, read this book!

The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (“WEIRD”). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature...

We‘re all stuck here for a while, so let‘s try to work it out.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.

skilled arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

let‘s imagine that 95 % of the food on Earth magically disappears tonight, guaranteeing that almost all of us will starve to death within 2 months. Law and order collapse....Who among us will still be alive a year from now? Will it be the biggest, strongest, and most violent individuals in each town? Or will it be the people who manage to work together in groups to monopolize, hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves?

We‘re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

when asked to write twenty statements beginning with the words “I am …,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu).

You can‘t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can‘t change people‘s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

3.5 ⭐️

This book takes a deep psychological dive into the inner workings of the thought processes and values of people. From there it shows how it impacts our views on society, culture, religion and group involvement. The overarching concepts of homo duplex and the hive are fascinating and something I feel I can get behind. A great read to think about in current political climates.

#umn #gradlife #audiobook #audible #mpls #twincities

Finally got back on the treadmill for a good hour of incline walking and reading. Really need to get this part of my routine again!

#exercise #readingandwalking #audiobook #audible #requiredreading #gradlife #mpls #twincities

And so the tabbing begins for another books for class 😂

#requiredreading #audiobook #audible #nonfiction #student #gradlife #umn #mpls #twincities

Just a little light beach reading 🏖

This is a hilarious misrepresentation of how informative and thought-provoking this book really is.

I‘m pretty disappointed about this book. I‘ve read some articles Jonathan Haidt had written and enjoyed them and his perspective (even when I don‘t always agree). So I was really looking forward to reading his book and have had it on my TBR since long before the election. However, this book was dry and dense, and many of the arguments were deeply flawed. I ended it feeling really dissatisfied, and not feeling like I got much out of it.

Been curious about this book for ages! It‘s naturally always checked out of the library these days given the current political climate. I only have a 2-week loan on this one (versus the default year loans I‘m spoiled with) and it looks a little long, so I‘m trying to get to it right away!

Mutual understanding is complicated

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

Thought I would try to audio book it this week. I don't get many of these done. So far, it's holding my interest.

Willfully superficial philosophy littered with hamfisted & rather ridiculous metaphors

I have doubts about the quality of this...

Understatement of the year.