Frameshop: How to Understand Conservative Psychology

The key to persuading anyone is not always just to have a better argument, or even have the facts on your side. Sometimes the key to persuasion is to understand how those you seek to influence think. We liberals often have difficulty understanding why conservatives act and believe as they do when the "truth" is so manifestly clear to us. I often hear (heck, I often say), "how could they be so stupid?" Well, they are no stupid than average person (who, admittedly, can sometimes be amazingly stupid), but they are operating on a different moral framework.

There has been popular awareness and appreciation for the mental differences between liberals and conservatives for several years now, but much of that difference is explained in terms of rigidity vs. flexibility, change vs. inertia, and, frankly, smart and adaptable vs. dumb and plodding. The explanation of the mental differences between liberals and conservatives is often frankly denigrating to conservatives.

But Jonathan Haidt, who studies the neuro-biological basis for morality, has an explanation for the mental differences that is actually more powerful, explanatory, and nuanced. He suggests a mental moral equalizer with five sliders: harm, fairness, in-group, authority, and purity. In liberals, the first two are high and the last three fairly low. In conservatives, all five are about equal, with all being somewhat lower than liberals’ harm and fairness settings. In this view, conservatives are actually better-rounded and more attuned to the full spectrum of human morality. I predict that this view of the moral mind will catch on among conservatives, and thus will become a very useful way of communicating with, understanding, and influencing conservatives.

Watch Haidt’s exploration of the idea at TED: