This book is an attempt to understand the foundations of morality. What is morality? What are the various ways in which it manifests among different people? How to guide and leverage it in improving our institutions. Before going on into the details of the book, I have to commend the sheer audacity that is required to even begin a scientific analysis of a complex phenomenon of morality. Taking a step back, it seems that the western academia has immense confidence in the process of science and will subject anything and everything to the discipline of scientific inquiry. This book presents the evolution of the author in a chronological way and the formulation of moral foundation hypothesis. When his world was altered in a fundamental way (John Kerry losing elections), Haidt did not retrieve into the echo chamber. Instead, he sought out to read opposing perspectives and re-calibrate his understanding of the social and moral principles that guide the political discourse. Haidt goes further...
This book is an accessible summary of some of the interesting studies in the domain of Psychology and Education. Some foundations about the structure and modular components of brain are first explained and then some of the recent research (that are widely popular) in the domain of Psychology and Education, along with some counter intuitive advice is given by the end of the book. As an instructor teaching courses to undergraduate students, I think some of the "research" in Education are mere commonsense observations. I have seen the students fall into the same traps during the course of studying far too often. This book also provides some interesting solutions. I could summarize the book in 50 pages, but it would be very boring and dry and jam packed with information. This book was very easy to read and finding about the studies is somewhat entertaining. The knowledge about the studies helps us contextualize the observations made. As usual, you can always nit-pick the studi...