Stephen J. Dubner
05/15/2012 | 10:28 am

A while back, we solicited your questions for social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. (He recently appeared on The Colbert Report.)

Below are his responses about confirmation bias in religion, the “score” of our morals, the power of branding, how his research has made him a centrist, and how the search for truth is hampered by our own biases. Big thanks to him and all our readers for another great Q&A.

Q. Why is it that both “sides” of the religion/atheism debate have what appears to be a systemic insistence on talking past each other, each one constructing a straw man of the other, beating that into submission, and then smugly declaring victory?  Clark W.

A. Public debates often look like professional wrestling matches, except that in wrestling the combatants are just pretending to hate each other.  In the religion-atheism debate, they really see each other as evil, and so they feel free to use more low-blows and illegal holds than do wrestlers.

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