6 ideas
The mind is a small conscious rider (controlled reasoning) sitting on a large elephant (automatic intuition), and the elephant does most of the steering. The rider's main job is to serve the elephant: it predicts where the elephant will go and justifies the direction afterward. So changing someone's mind means speaking to their elephant through feelings, relationships and framing, not refuting their rider's arguments.
Moral judgments come first as fast intuitions, and reasoning mostly arrives afterward to build a case for a verdict already reached. Like a press secretary, reasoning defends positions it did not choose, and it is tuned to protect reputation rather than to find truth. Because of this, individual reasoners are poor at finding their own errors but good at spotting other people's, so good thinking depends on social systems where people check each other.
Subjects heard carefully built scenarios that were offensive but harmless, such as consensual one-time sibling sex with contraception, or a family eating its dog after it was killed by a car. They quickly judged these acts wrong. When every harm-based reason they offered was ruled out by the scenario, they kept the verdict anyway and said things like 'I just know it's wrong.' This shows that the judgment came from intuition and the reasons were built afterward.
Morality rests on six evolved intuitive systems, which work like taste receptors: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Each foundation first evolved to meet an adaptive challenge, such as protecting children or forming coalitions, and cultures then attach it to different current triggers. Moral and political differences come from how strongly each group weights these receptors.
Survey data show that liberals rely mainly on care and fairness (and liberty), while conservatives draw roughly equally on all six foundations, including loyalty, authority and sanctity. As a result, conservatives understand liberal moral appeals better than liberals understand conservative ones. It also means political messages that address only harm and equality leave many voters' moral intuitions untouched.
Human nature is mostly selfish, but groupish selection also gave us a 'hive switch.' Under certain conditions it turns off the self and merges us into something larger, for example through synchronized ritual, shared threat or collective effervescence. Religion and other sacred groups work as moral communities that trigger this switch. They bind people into trusting teams, and the same process blinds those teams to outsiders.