Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“biggest surprise was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. I had written the stories carefully to remove all conceivable harm to other people, yet in 38 percent of the 1,620 times that people heard a harmless-offensive story, they claimed that somebody was harmed...it was obvious that most of these supposed harms were post hoc fabrications.”

“In other words, well-educated people in all three cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class neighbors. I had flown five thousand miles south to search for moral variation when in fact there was more to be found a few blocks west of campus, in the poor neighborhood surrounding my university. ”

“There were separate significant effects of city (Porto Alegreans moralized more than Philadelphians, and Recifeans moralized more than Porto Alegreans), of social class (lower-class groups moralized more than upper-class groups), and of age (children moralized more than adults). Unexpectedly, the effect of social class was much larger than the effect of city. ”

“as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as where you're visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions—new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote about.”

“Kids can't talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.”