Joshua D. Greene > Quotes

“Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“We can use manual mode thinking to explicitly describe our automatic settings (Aristotle); we can use manual mode thinking to justify our automatic settings (Kant); and we can use manual mode thinking to transcend the limitations of our automatic settings (Bentham and Mill).”
― Joshua D. Greene , Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“We face two fundamentally different kinds of moral problems: Me versus Us (Tragedy of the Commons) and Us versus Them (Tragedy of Commonsense Morality). We also have two fundamentally different kinds of moral thinking: fast (using emotional automatic settings) and slow (using manual-mode reasoning). And, once again, the key is to match the right kind of thinking to the right kind of problem: When it’s Me versus Us, think fast. When it’s Us versus Them, think slow.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In a later study, some of the same researchers had Arabs and Israelis watch news coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre. The two groups saw the same coverage, yet both concluded that it was biased in favor of the other side, a phenomenon the researchers dubbed the “hostile media effect.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In short, there’s now a lot of evidence—and a lot of different kinds of evidence—telling us that people say no to pushing the man off the footbridge (and other “personally” harmful utilitarian actions) because of emotional responses enabled by the VMPFC and the amygdala.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Numerous lab experiments confirm that people are, indeed, pro-social punishers. The most famous such experiment was conducted by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, using what’s called the “Public Goods Game,” a multiperson prisoner’s dilemma that is analogous to the Tragedy of the Commons.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The right kind of manual-mode thinking can bring us closer together. Simply forcing people to justify their opinions with explicit reasons does very little to make poeple more reasonable, and may even do the opposite. But forcing people to confront their ignorance of essential facts does make people more moderate.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Biased fairness is sufficiently destructive that, in some cases, we’re better off putting morality aside and simply trying to get a good deal.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Empathy, familial love, anger, social disgust, friendship, minimal decency, gratitude, vengefulness, romantic love, honor, shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, self-consciousness, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation: These are all familiar features of human nature,* and all socially competent humans have a working understanding of what they are and what they do.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“If the modular myopia hypothesis is correct, then the intuitive moral distinction we draw between harm caused as a means and harm caused as a side effect may be nothing more than a cognitive accident, a by-product. Harms caused as a means push our moral-emotional buttons not because they are objectively worse but because the alarm system that keeps us from being violent lacks the capacity to keep track of side effects.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage. . . .

From simple cells to supersocial animals like us, the story of life on Earth is the story of increasingly complex cooperation. Cooperation is why we’re here, and yet, at the same time, maintaining cooperation is our greatest challenge. Morality is the human brain’s answer to this challenge. . . .

We have cooperative brains, it seems, because cooperation provides material benefits, biological resources that enable our genes to make more copies of themselves. Out of evolutionary dirt grows the flower of human goodness.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The Tragedy of the Commons is averted by a suite of automatic settings--moral emotions that motivate and stabilize cooperation within limited groups. But the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality arises because of automatic settings, because different tribes have different automatic settings, causing them to see the world through different moral lenses. The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy of selfishness, but the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is a tragedy of moral inflexibility. There is strife on the new pastures not because herders are hopelessly selfish, immoral, or amoral, but because they cannot step outside their respective moral perspectives.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Our taste for punishment is useful, but it’s not infallible. Just as our taste for fat and sugar can make us obese in a world full of milkshakes, our taste for retribution can crate a criminal justice system that satisfies our taste for punishment while undermining our social health.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“My collaborators and I did this and found, as predicted, that giving people a simultaneous secondary task (i.e., putting people under “cognitive load”) slowed down people’s utilitarian judgments but had no effect on nonutilitarian judgments. This is consistent with our idea that utilitarian judgments depend more on cognitive control.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Today, you can't excuse yourself from helping on the grounds that helping is impossible. International aid organisations are more effective and more accountable than ever. And even if some of them are bad, you only need one good one to be on the hook.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The functions of some emotions are revealed in their characteristic facial expressions. Fear expressions widen the eyes and expand the nasal cavity, thus enlarging the field of view and enhancing the sense of smell. Disgust expressions do the opposite, crinkling up the face and thus reducing the likelihood that a pathogen will enter the body through the eyes or nose. Not all emotions have characteristic facial expressions, but, generally speaking, emotions exert pressure on behavior.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Nowhere is our concern for how others treat others more apparent than in our intense engagement with fiction. Were we purely selfish, we wouldn’t pay good money to hear a made-up story about a ragtag group of orphans who use their street smarts and quirky talents to outfox a criminal gang. We find stories about imaginary heroes and villains engrossing because they engage our social emotions, the ones that guide our reactions to real-life cooperators and rogues.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The Tragedy of the Commons is averted by a suite of automatic setttings - moral emotions that motivate and stabilize cooperation within limited groups. But the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality arises because of automatic settings, because different tribes have different automatic settings, causing them to see the world through different moral lenses.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Empathy, familial love, anger, social disgust, friendship, minimal decency, gratitude, vengefulness, romantic love, honor shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, self-consciousness, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation: These are all familiar features of human nature, and all socially competent humans have a working understanding of what they are and what they do. . . . All of this psychological machinery is perfectly designed to promote cooperation among otherwise selfish individuals . . . There’s currently no way to prove that all of this psychological machinery evolved, either biologically or culturally, to promote cooperation, but if it didn’t, it’s a hell of a coincidence.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“People readily replace racial classification schemes with alternative coalitional classification schemes, but they don’t do the same for classification by gender, as predicted by evolutionary accounts of human coalitional psychology.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation is why we’re here, and yet, at the same time, maintaining cooperation is our greatest challenge. Morality is the human brain’s answer to this challenge.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Our gut reactions were not designed to form a coherent moral philosophy. Thus, any truly coherent philosophy is bound to offend us, sometimes in the real world but especially in the world of philosophical thought experiments. ... We've underestimated utilitarianism because we've overestimated our own minds. We've mistakenly assumed that our gut reactions are reliable guides to moral truth.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The idea of a universal moral philosophy is not new. It’s been a dream of moral thinkers since the Enlightenment. But it’s never quite worked out.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Liberals liked extreme conservative policies in liberal clothing better than they liked extreme liberal policies in conservative clothing. The conservatives did the same thing, valuing conservative endorsement well above conservative substance. And, as you should expect by now, most subjects denied that their judgments were affected by the partisan packaging. It’s all unconscious.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Morality is nature’s solution to the problem of cooperation within groups, enabling individuals with competing interests to live together and prosper. What we in the modern world need, then, is something like morality but one level up. We need a kind of thinking that enables groups with conflicting moralities to live together and prosper. In other words, we need a metamorality. We need a moral system that can resolve disagreements among groups with different moral ideas, just as ordinary, first-order morality resolves disagreements among individuals with different selfish interests.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Utilitarianism does not require us to constantly calculate the expected costs and benefits of our actions. On the contrary, it requires us to trust our moral intuitions most of the time, because that's more likely to serve us well than constant moral calculation.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good? Every major moral issue—abortion, affirmative action, higher versus lower taxes, killing civilians in war, sending people to fight in war, rationing resources in healthcare, gun control, the death penalty—was in some way about the (real or alleged) rights of some individuals versus the (real or alleged) greater good.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them