The Other Side of the Elephant: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Modules and a Look at Political Tribalism Through an Ethical Lens

Social psychologist Jonathan' Haidt’s six “moral modules” provide a useful lens for today’s increasingly divisive political scene. Photo by Haanala.

The old Buddhist parable goes something like this: A king, eager to see how people perceive things they are unable to see, calls to order all the blind men in his kingdom. He then places each blind man at a different point surrounding an enormous elephant. “Describe this beast,” demands the king. So the men reach out with their hands, taking turns describing what they perceive.

One man, placed at the elephant’s leg, says, “The elephant is like a tree trunk.” Another, placed at the elephant’s trunk, says, “The elephant is like a thick snake.” A third, placed at the elephant’s ear, says, “The elephant is like a fan.”

Soon enough, the men begin bickering. It’s a snake! No—a tree trunk! A fan! Back and forth, back and forth, till one man raises his fists and a brawl breaks out. “O how they cling and wrangle,” the Buddha is fabled to have said of this episode. “Each to his view they cling. Such folk see only one side of a thing.”

Not that the blind men should be expected to grasp the elephant’s every mound and crevice. Or that any one person ever could. The lesson here is one of intellectual humility, of the importance of confronting the human impulse towards tribalism and one-sidedness, of remembering that one person can probably never know the full story. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has reminded us, rather unsettlingly, that there is almost always at least an ounce of truth in the opponent’s position. It is up to us, this story reminds us, to identify that bit of truth and integrate it with our preexisting perspective—so as to approximate, with any hope, the real nature of the elephant.

Many commentators, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Daniel Bell, have noted the explosion of self-righteousness and ideology in the political sphere in the absence of religion. And it is by now banal to emphasize the importance of public discourse in maintaining a healthy body politic. But if that point still means anything — and if our politics can best be understood as the sum of our individual political “taste buds,” as the research of NYU moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests — it’s time we sat down and at least looked at the taste buds of the other side. 

Our investigation begins with what Haidt calls “moral modules,” a set of intuitive and evolutionarily acquired moral senses that undergird our reaction to “ethically relevant” phenomena. Each module—suffering/compassion, hierarchy/respect, reciprocity/fairness, and purity/disgust—is divided into two “domains” of analysis, explains Haidt:

One useful distinction in the modularity literature is that between the proper and actual domains of a module. The proper domain is the set of special scenarios or stimuli that the module was evolved to handle. In the case of a suffering/compassion module, the proper domain is the sight of one’s own child showing the stereotypical signs of distress or fear. The proper domain may have extended to distress shown by all kin as well. The actual domain, in contrast, is the set of all things in the world that now happen to trigger the module. This includes the suffering of other people’s children, starving adults seen on television, images of baby seals being clubbed to death, and our pet dogs that droop, mope, whine, and break our hearts as we prepare to go off to work each morning.

As one might expect, liberals (denoting, in the contemporary American sense, the political left) test significantly higher than conservatives in the suffering/compassion module, displaying a “much keener ability to detect victimization” and to feel sympathy for out-group members. Their stronger inclination to protect marginalized classes, then—to be outraged, say, by the detainment of refugee children at the border—makes sense.

Also front-and-center in the liberal psyche is the reciprocity/fairness module. Evolving out of a need to share resources, cooperate in a hostile environment, and punish those who cheat, this module manifests itself in the actual domain each time a leftist cries, “It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share!” The sense that three people should not own more wealth than the bottom half of society, in other words, is the same sense that elicited outrage in prehistoric times when a tribe-member hoarded food or other resources, thereby presenting an immediate threat to the survival of the collective.

While conservatives understand and sometimes even invoke these impulses towards compassion and fairness—as former President Donald Trump does when he complains that Mexicans are stealing jobs that he feels belong to native-born Americans—other moral modules take on a more important role in their political calculus. First and foremost is the hierarchy/respect module, which developed out of an innate sense of “domination,” “protection,” and “physical size.” That someone owns more wealth or enjoys another advantage in society is not necessarily the result of an injustice, in the eyes of a conservative: Perhaps this person is in a position of authority for good reason, elevated in a hierarchical structure for their intelligence or general competence. Respect for authority can quickly devolve into subservience or blind loyalty, true. But it’s something each of us possesses to varying degrees—as when we refer to a teacher with the honorific “Ms.” or “Mr.,” or defer to “expert” judgment on complex matters. (Worth noting is that Haidt’s research on the hierarchy module is a far cry from previous politico-psychological literature on the topic, namely Theodore W. Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which sloppily conflated respect for authority and tradition with a pernicious impulse for authoritarianism.)

The final moral module, purity/disgust, also trends conservative. Early human existence—and indeed the existence of many people in developing nations today—demanded a sensitivity to potentially contaminating people and objects, such as “rotting corpses, excrement, and scavenger animals.” Conservatives, in the actual domain, prefer homogeneous environments where unknown entities are less likely to come their way, shedding some light on their tendency to cluster in homogenous rural areas rather than heterogeneous urban areas. To be sure, though, Haidt notes that “even contemporary American college students, when we interview them in our studies of moral judgment, will confess to feeling flashes of disgust and disapproval when asked about violations of purity taboos.” The phenomenon of cancelation, in which a single departure of opinion on a wedge issue can constitute reason for public castigation, may be the best example of left-wing puritanism. 

It’s easy to see, now, how these moral modules can be used as an interpretive framework to understand contemporary political conflicts. The issue of immigration, I think, offers the clearest conceptual bridge between the actual and proper domains. Imagine for a moment that the year is 2000 B.C. A hunter-gatherer society is fiercely divided over whether to admit foreigners into their community. One camp—the proto-liberals—firmly believes their community has a moral obligation to accept new arrivals and insists, moreover, that more immigration means a larger talent pool for the tribe. The other camp, however—the proto-conservatives—disagrees. They are concerned that new arrivals might introduce dangerous pathogens to the tribe or disturb its hierarchical equilibrium with a flood of new and unvetted individuals. Too much of this latter perspective means excessive insularity—insufficient exposure to new ideas and ways of life—and thus stunted development for the tribe; too much of the former perspective, meanwhile, means possible epidemiological disaster or hierarchical disarray. And although we can debate the extent to which each of these proper-domain concerns remains reasonable in the context of contemporary immigration discourse, they remain invaluable in elucidating the most primal impulses driving each side of the debate. 

But fear not: if all this is a warning against cocksure ideology, it is not a call for political centrism per se. Empathizing with the manifold moral sensibilities need not mean abandoning one’s political commitments or standing spinelessly for the middle ground. Cornel West, the great democratic socialist and Black public intellectual, recognizes what he calls the “conservative insight” and participates regularly in debates with conservative colleagues. In a joint statement with Robert George, a noted conservative legal scholar and a close friend of West, George and West argue that “a recognition of the possibility that we may be in error is a good reason to listen to and honestly consider—and not merely to tolerate grudgingly—points of view that we do not share, and even perspectives that we find shocking or scandalous.” If we are to take a page from West and George’s book, we can begin by seeing the conservative sensibility not as wistful backwardness and the liberal sensibility not as naive humanitarianism, but as two legitimate, and even mutually complementary, lenses through which to see the world. Only then will the elephant begin to emerge from the mist. 

Tim Vanable (CC ‘24) is a rising sophomore at Columbia College studying American Studies. A jazz guitarist from Syracuse, NY, he is pursuing a Special Concentration in Jazz Studies and loves to talk politics.