Moral Understanding: The Science of What Divides and Unites Us:
A Preview
Welcome to Moral Understanding by me, Kurt Gray, Associate Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a newsletter for people who want to understand how to bridge divides.
Our country and our everyday lives are filled with disagreement about politics, religion, and race. Ultimately, many of these disagreements boil down to one thing: conflicting views about morality. Although disagreement and conflict are not necessarily bad, when we become so entrenched in ‘us-vs-them,’ mutual understanding becomes difficult. When we disagree about morality, each side thinks the other side is stupid, evil, or both.
Of course, the ‘other side’ is not evil. It is filled with people who care about their families, their moral values, and the future of the country. What is happening in America right now, in our boardrooms and dining rooms, is moral misunderstanding. We fail to see and understand the morality of other people.
Moral misunderstanding causes serious problems for the health of our personal relationships, our civic institutions, and our democracy. Every time we navigate discussions around controversial topics, it feels like stepping through a minefield, with every conversational step threatening to blow up into generational, racial, political, class, gender, religious, and moral clashes.
Only 17% of Americans say they feel very comfortable discussing politics with someone they don’t know well. And the quarter who do feel most comfortable when discussing politics are often the ones who are most polarized and argumentative, which increases our distaste for these discussions even more. How do we encourage people to have civil discussions and see the common humanity in those on the ‘other side?’
We need to build moral understanding. But creating moral understanding is not easy. We all have intuitions about how to best bridge divides, but sometimes these intuitions are wrong and can make things worse. Have you ever thought that you could argue someone into moral submission, that with the right statistic, a political opponent might surrender and change their view on immigration or abortion? If so, you’re not alone. And chances are, it didn’t work.
To uncover how best to bridge moral divides, we need science. The Center for the Science of Moral Understanding (a project I founded and direct) is catalyzing an interdisciplinary scientific understanding of what actually works to build understanding. It conducts original research, fosters scholars, and connects science and society through talks, op-eds, and this newsletter.
I'm excited to share scientific insights on bridging divides with you. Every other week, I'll deliver science-backed analyses about the drivers of moral conflict, the nature of the moral mind, and concrete ways to bridge divides in the country and your own life. I’ll cover the latest discoveries not only from the Center but also from other labs and scholars around the world.
Thanks for joining us on our quest to create more moral understanding.
-Kurt
Editing and Research by Will Blakey (@blakey_will)