In chapter five of Haidt’s The Righteous Mind he defines a second principle of moral psychology: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. To support this claim he did some research showing that people who grow up on Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures. Haidt conducted his research by asking University of Pennsylvania students about their thoughts on the dog and chicken question from the previous chapters, and he found that their responses were the “unusual” ones compared to the working-class individuals that he interviewed outside of McDonald’s. Haidt later stated that it has been shown that this “WEIRD” population is the least representative population you could study if you want to make generalizations about the human population, because “The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

I found this part about chapter five very interesting because it reminded me of the 2016 election. For most WEIRD people, or at least for me, it seemed as if Hillary would undoubtedly win the election and unfathomable to think of Trump winning. However, in my scope of the world, I was only paying attention to the fellow WEIRD population and following news sources that reported Hillary was the correct candidate. The media and the polls seemed to cover the WEIRD population and the “non-WEIRD” population was not well accounted for. It is clear in this case that the WEIRD population was not representative of the whole United States population, as many people clearly voted for Trump. After the election, I was obviously surprised and it made me realize how little I know about the American people outside of the WEIRD population and the way in which they think. After this chapter and the election, I am realizing how completely different one’s morals can be within the same country.