Claude on Haidt

For what it’s worth:

“In The Righteous Mind he describes a move from partisan liberalism toward centrism. A PolitiFact interview puts it as moving from being a self-described liberal to a centrist, and one reviewer also takes centrist to be how Haidt identifies himself. In a 2011 NPR segment he said the people writing to him were mostly centrists or liberal Christians rather than conservatives…

Jason Collins, a sympathetic reviewer, wrote that Haidt's swing toward conservatism makes him disinclined to critique the conservative moral foundations. He added that Haidt applies little substantive judgment to the merits of those foundations. The usual criticism is that his framing is friendlier to conservative intuitions than to progressive ones. Others read him as a liberal trying to enrich liberalism: one review says he seeks to enrich liberalism with a deeper awareness of human nature…

In the study with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, participants took the Moral Foundations Questionnaire as themselves and also as they imagined liberals or conservatives would. In his words from the book, moderates and conservatives were the most accurate in either role, and liberals were the least accurate, especially those who called themselves "very liberal". The biggest errors came when liberals answered care and fairness items while pretending to be conservatives, because they assumed conservatives would disagree. His explanation, as reported in the New York Times, is that liberals put little weight on the group-protecting foundations. Conservatives, who weigh all the foundations, often understand liberal views better than liberals understand conservative ones.

Two caveats. Critics have questioned the study's sample and the moral foundations framework more broadly. And the finding concerns accuracy in predicting the other side's survey answers, not who is more empathetic in general.”