"Surprising and remarkable…Toggling between big ideas technical details and his personal
intellectual journey Greene writes a thesis suitable to both airplane reading and PhD
seminars."-The Boston Globe Our brains were designed for tribal life for getting along with
a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have
forced the world's tribes into a shared space resulting in epic clashes of values along with
unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks the moral lines that divide us become more
salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global
warming and we wonder where if at all we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of
neuroscience psychology and philosophy Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern
conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera
with point-and-shoot automatic settings ("portrait " "landscape") as well as a manual mode. Our
point-and-shoot settings are our emotions-efficient automated programs honed by evolution
culture and personal experience. The brain's manual mode is its capacity for deliberate
reasoning which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals
turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals turning Us against Them. Our tribal
emotions make us fight-sometimes with bombs sometimes with words-often with life-and-death
stakes. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field Moral Tribes will
refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.
