Conservatives Have Broader Moral Sense Than Liberals, says ‘Righteous Mind’ Author

In 2004, Jonathan Haidt had an experience that changed his intellectual life.

The influential moral and social psychologist — at the time an atheist and a liberal — was at the Strand, a used-book shop in New York, when the brown spine of a book called “Conservatism” caught his eye. Edited by historian Jerry Z. Muller, it was an anthology of readings from David Hume to Philip Rieff.

Three pages into the book, Mr. Haidt was floored — that is, sitting on the ground of the bookstore — paging through “all these gems of insight on the relationship between human flourishing and society,” the spirited 48-year-old academic recalled over tea and chocolate in his office at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

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