Why Do We Always Think We're Right? (Rerun)

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What transforms reasonable people into an angry mob? Why are we so eager to dismiss those who disagree with us as inherently evil? These are questions which Jonathan Haidt has spent his career trying to answer. One of the world’s most influential social psychologists and a member of Persuasion's Board of Advisors, he argues that a lot of recent cultural shifts are encouraging emotional fragility rather than resilience. A professor of ethical leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business, Haidt seeks to employ moral psychology to promote dialogue rather than division. In this week’s episode of The Good Fight, Yascha Mounk sits down with Jonathan Haidt to discuss psychological differences between the left and the right, the human tendency to discriminate in favor of the in-group, and how to build a less tribal culture and country. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: goodfightpod@gmail.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll now hand you over to my best man, Eddie.
0:04.0	Wow, wow, wow, second time's a charm, eh, Billy Boy?
0:09.0	Oh God.
0:10.0	Substitution, courtesy of Paddy Power, embarrassing Eddie, makes way for sensible Samuel.
0:15.0	Cool, that was close.
0:16.0	You might not always pick the right starter, but your sub can still deliver.
0:19.0	Because with Paddy's super sub, your bet rolls over to the player coming on.
0:22.4	Panny power.
0:38.9	Valid on selected leagues and markets only. Pre-match and in-play bets on qualifying player outcome selections only. T's and Clusions apply. 18 plus scummelaware.org. The good fight is on holiday, but we don't want to deprive you of our content. And in fact, we thought this was a great opportunity to go back to some of the big bangers in our stable. Most of those were recorded in the last year. So we are
0:46.1	re-releasing great conversations with Ali Hochschild, with Tadak Howen and with Musa Al-Garvi.
0:52.5	But, you know, I was recently speaking to somebody about
0:55.6	a friend of the podcast and of persuasion, Jonathan Haidt. Of course, he is being much discussed
1:01.3	and debated right now because of his book, The Anxist Generation and his arguments about the
1:06.2	harms of social media. But I keep telling everybody, while I really appreciate that book,
1:11.7	his best book,
1:17.5	his most interesting book, is The Righteous Mind, his really deep introduction to political psychology. And I remembered that Jonathan and I recorded an episode about that book a good number of
1:24.3	years ago, and by the way that we'd never produced a transcript for it.
1:28.4	So, we are re-releasing John and my conversation from a good number of years ago about the righteous
1:35.5	mind. And we have also gone back to produce a written transcript of that.
1:41.9	So if you want to listen to this whole conversation, go to yashamunk.subsdeck.com.
1:48.7	Become a paying subscriber, yashamunk.com.
1:52.1	com. Well, it's my real, real pleasure to have Jonathan Haidt on the podcast today.
	...

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