Dr. Kurt Gray

And so we needed a tool to keep us safe from other people harming us.

And if other people harmed us, we needed a way to get outraged enough to kick them out of our group, to punish them.

And so that's a force that kind of keeps us together as a society.

But I should add, it only applies to people within our group.

And if there's another group out there, well, they could be a threat too.

And so this feeling of righteousness, well, we can also use that to harm those who might attack us, those with different beliefs.

And so there's this tension with morality, right?

We're trying to protect ourselves from harm, but we're also willing to harm the villains we see out there in the world.

So no longer are we threatened by saber-toothed cats.

And no longer are we really threatened by murder from other people in our tribes or cities.

I mean, there's still crime, but people are much more afraid of crime than I think is rational.

There are studies showing that people who live in inner cities where there's lots of crime, they fear crime just as much as people who live in the suburbs where there's almost no crime, right?

So something's weird in our minds, which is that no matter how sick we are, we still fear violence in the same way.

And so what that means is if there's no obvious threats, no obvious violence around us, we begin to see as threatening more benign or ambiguous threats.

So everyone in moral psychology, scientists, believe that harm is important through our moral convictions.

We are all motivated to avoid physical and emotional suffering.

Some other psychologists, namely Jonathan Haidt.

Some other psychologists believe that the moral mind is carved up into other little mechanisms.

He calls them foundations.

And the idea there is that some people, especially conservatives, have a richer moral sense because they have more moral foundations.