At the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in Austin, Joshua Greene of Harvard talked about how moral questions can be broken down into “me vs. us” and “us vs. them.” When we’re thinking about “me vs. us,” our intuitions are good. We automatically tune into guilt, gratitude, and empathy to lead us to cooperate with others. But when it comes to questions of “we vs. us,” we run into clashes between communities and how we perceive fairness. The very forces that bring us closer together also build group loyalties that are difficult for us to break free of. To think about the greater good, we have to switch into “manual mode.”
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