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People on polar opposite sides of ideological debates tend to think of their opponents in terms of pathology rather than as people animated by different, yet still potentially legitimate, beliefs. Published in 2012, this book by Haidt is a great effort to turn down the crippling levels of polarization in U.S. politics. Unfortunately, it seems that things have only gotten worse since then, which I think has something to do with the rapidly evolving technological context of society. Nonetheless, his prescriptions still bear worth reflecting. I'll lay out the most important points below.

Pretty much everyone's beliefs are far more emotional and less rationally-grounded than they would like to believe. The resonant metaphor that Haidt uses to describe our thinking is that of a rider sitting atop an elephant. The relatively weak rider is our rational cognition, while the powerful elephant represents the force of emotional intuition. Overwhelmingly, people are guided by their elephants and not their riders. Our lofty rationality in reality tends to act merely as a post-hoc justifier for the elephant's emotional acts. Rational cognition is something like a press secretary for our emotional selves, which are the ones really in control. The more rational someone is usually means that they're just better at generating excuses for their emotion. If you are in a debate and genuinely want to convince someone of something, it's better to speak to their elephants than to their riders: address people according to emotional intuitions if you want to persuade them. This is why novels and TV shows that convey the perspectives of different groups in society are often more effective in changing public opinion than laying out rationalistic and technical arguments. It is also why if you don't make some kind of a positive emotional connection with someone in a conversation (let's say: building trust or admiration), it really doesn't matter what persuasive facts you give them thereafter. The overwhelming majority of political discussion is about talking to elephants, not riders.

Haidt is a liberal who later in life came to see that conservatives also can be motivated by legitimate beliefs. In the course of researching this book, he developed a framework of moral values that he says apply to all human beings at different levels: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity. In the United States, conservatives, Haidt argues, have an electoral advantage because their messaging addresses itself to all five of the "moral taste receptors", whereas liberals tend to focus almost exclusively on Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating. All five of these values developed in human beings for various evolutionary reasons. But according to the stories that liberals and conservatives tell themselves about the world, the relative importance of the last three is in debate. As Haidt notes, across most of the world the full five spectrum of beliefs are still considered important and U.S. progressives are in fact significant outliers in their focus on only the first initial ones. This something that puts them at a disadvantage in elections, since conservative messaging goes full spectrum, even if, as most people can see, the modern Republican Party as an institution is completely corrupt.

Human beings care deeply about their reputations and putting people's reputations constantly at stake (stressful as that sounds) is probably a way of inculcating better behavior across the board. People are also motivated by different yet still legitimate priorities: including preservation of social trust/moral capital or the empowerment of certain groups that are disadvantaged. Neither of these beliefs is illegitimate, and once that is recognized it might be possible to find acceptable compromises, rather than stagnant one-sided debates in which one sides simply tries to crush the other.

The book is relatively short on specific policy prescriptions but it does a good job at humanizing different political tribes. This in itself is a prerequisite to having any sort of normal political discussion. If you do seek to persuade people along different lines, don't forget their elephants. Building emotional rapport can be done through the cost-free mechanisms of being kind, respectful and if possible developing some sort of admiration or common ground before moving onto the thorny issues that divide. If we're all going to be talking to each other anyways its worth a shot, and would make debates more pleasant, at least.