Jonathan Haidt – self-confessed liberal professor of psychology, now at NYU – is the author or a really fascinating book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. What makes this book fascinating, in part, is that he argues conservatives are inherently more effective than liberals at communicating on issues with moral content. This is so because Haidt has identified through his empirical psychological research six “moral receptors,” rather like six types of taste buds through which we experience the flavor of moral argumentation. Conservatives are more effective at moral communications because we tend to engage
