Dr. Kurt Gray

And so this theory, I think, is not only bad for discourse because it says conservatives have a bigger, better morality than liberals.

It's also, I think, scientifically not supported.

So it is the case that conservatives are more likely to care about the opinion of church leaders or to care about premarital sex as a purity.

But progressives also care about purity, like hot yoga, juice cleanses, right?

Those are kind of liberal purity concerns.

Right.

Liberals are concerned about listening to civil rights leaders as authorities.

There's really no difference in these kind of values.

And really where there's no difference is in the fact that liberals and conservatives are all ultimately grounding their moral convictions in concerns about harm.

And so we've run so many studies that show that no matter what value you're talking about, no matter what moral key word you bring up, industriousness, punctuality, compassion,

bravery.

But it turns out that how much you care about those values, those kind of core moral convictions, is connected to how much you see them as connected to harm.

And so at the end of the day, if you kind of dig deep down, it's harm underneath whatever seems to be lying on top.

I think it does have an effect.

And that's because if you think that there is some moral basis that you can't understand, right?

So the argument is, look, maybe conservatives have a sense of purity and liberals don't.

And so they can never understand each other, right?

There's some unbridgeable chasm between the morals of the left and the right.

On the other hand, if it's the case that we all share a common currency in our moral minds, then we can always find a way to understand someone on the other side if we can understand the harms they see.

And I think that's a powerful way of bridging these chasms that have been created from social media, from political outrage.