The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Published 2012 · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics & Society, Psychology
How hard is The Righteous Mind to read?
The Righteous Mind scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Psychological and philosophical vocabulary. Well-defined.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Moral philosophy grounded in psychology and evolution.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with research, theory, and cross-cultural analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Three-part argument. Systematic.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The elephant and rider as central metaphor.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- A liberal who came to understand conservatives. Self-aware.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Understanding is offered, not agreement.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Three parts building a cumulative theory.
How The Righteous Mind is regarded
The Righteous Mind holds a literary regard score of 54 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.