Why can’t our political market leaders work together mainly because threats loom and complications mount? Why perform people so easily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow residents? In The Righteous Brain, interpersonal psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the roots of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition-the nearly instantaneous perceptions most of us have about other people and the items they actually. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, about The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion making us righteously sure that those who discover things differently are wrong. Haidt displays us how these intuitions differ across civilizations, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research results with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to attract a map of the moral domain, and he points out why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution produced us fundamentally selfish animals. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more refined claim-that we are fundamentally groupish. It really is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to your greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our politics affiliations. In a sensational final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt displays what each part is best about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish like a nation.