Since my last journal, my coordinator, Mr. Bott, sent me an article on Wired titled: “Sam Harris and The Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought.”
In the beginning of this piece, Sam Harris is described as being part of a group called “The New Atheists” who is against Tribalism; there already seems to be some irony here. When a case study was done to investigate the effects of his “Tribal Psychology,” plenty of cognitive biases were found. For example, regarding the 9/11 attacks, he claimed that “We are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam.” To refute other causes — poverty being an example — he claimed that the world is full of poor people who don’t commit terrorism therefore poverty can’t be a cause.
But in the same vein, one could say: “Religion can’t be a cause of terrorism, because the world is full of religious people who aren’t terrorists.” Now what?
This is simply a cognitive bias known as “attribution error” where one tries to explain the behavior of others based on situational factors. So rivals in the other “tribe” will be described as “bad” and allies in your tribe will be described as “good.”
When I got to this point, the first thing I immediately thought of was Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model. Basically, a triggering event leads to person A’s moral intuition, then A’s moral judgement, and finally A’s reasoning. What should be noted here is how the reasoning comes after the moral intuition and judgement. To me, this seems to be exactly what Harris is doing in his thinking.
To use another example, after Israel’s 2014 conflict with Gaza that resulted in the death of 70 Israelis and 2300 Palestinians, he immediately leapt to Israel’s defense claiming they had been made brutal by all the fighting. Yet with the Palestinians, their killings were a matter of “character.” I think it is quite clear that Harris had already identified with the Israeli “tribe” and made his moral intuition and judgement right then and there; that is, that they were not at fault. Soon afterwards came his reasoning on why they were the good guys. The same logic applies with his moral judgement of the Palestinians.
I thought this was an interesting example of Haidt’s described moral theories seen in effect in the real world.