HAIDT: The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.
If you and I were twins separated at birth and raised in different families, our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue, but once we’re out on our own, we’re going to both converge on our brain’s natural level of religiosity.
Same with politics, whether you’re on the right or left is not determined by your genes, but you’re predisposed. You find variety and diversity and challenging authority really exciting. If that’s the way you were as a kid, even if you’re raised in a conservative household, once you go to college you’re going to be attracted to more radical left‑wing politics.
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COWEN: Reading through a lot of your past work, which I did to prepare for this conversation. This struck me, and I didn’t expect it to be the case, but at times I was thinking more of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, than I thought I was going to. Underrated or overrated?
HAIDT: Again, well I can’t say, because again it depends where you are. In symbolic anthropology I think he is still quite highly rated, outside of that I think very few people know about him. I read a little bit about, a little bit of his work when I was a postdoc in Chicago with Richard Shweder.
What I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as people are making symbols, we live in a rich symbolic world, a world of narrative, we need to interpret those, that I think is quite right, and that’s again what I love about cultural anthropology is it gives you a way of interpreting cultures.
Where it then leads you to deny that there’s also human nature that is based in our evolution, then it becomes a problem. But I just can’t remember which part of those is attributable to Lévi-Strauss.
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If you and I were twins separated at birth and raised in different families, our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue, but once we’re out on our own, we’re going to both converge on our brain’s natural level of religiosity.
Same with politics, whether you’re on the right or left is not determined by your genes, but you’re predisposed. You find variety and diversity and challenging authority really exciting. If that’s the way you were as a kid, even if you’re raised in a conservative household, once you go to college you’re going to be attracted to more radical left‑wing politics.
[---]
COWEN: Reading through a lot of your past work, which I did to prepare for this conversation. This struck me, and I didn’t expect it to be the case, but at times I was thinking more of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, than I thought I was going to. Underrated or overrated?
HAIDT: Again, well I can’t say, because again it depends where you are. In symbolic anthropology I think he is still quite highly rated, outside of that I think very few people know about him. I read a little bit about, a little bit of his work when I was a postdoc in Chicago with Richard Shweder.
What I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as people are making symbols, we live in a rich symbolic world, a world of narrative, we need to interpret those, that I think is quite right, and that’s again what I love about cultural anthropology is it gives you a way of interpreting cultures.
Where it then leads you to deny that there’s also human nature that is based in our evolution, then it becomes a problem. But I just can’t remember which part of those is attributable to Lévi-Strauss.
- More Here
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