Righteous Minds Genius

What Actually Happens When You Use This Thing

Righteous Minds Genius is a decision-making framework that overlays moral psychology onto strategic thinking. It was originally built to help organizations understand why people with different moral foundations react to the same policy proposals in fundamentally incompatible ways. Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations theory feeds directly into it. The framework maps decisions against six axes: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Most people only consciously operate on two or three of those at any given time, which is why group decisions often feel impossible. Start by identifying the decision you're trying to make. Not the decision you think you're making. Write down what actually needs to be resolved in one sentence. Then pull up the six moral foundations and score your own reaction to that decision on each one. I use a simple zero to four scale. The numbers tell you where your blind spots are. If you score yourself a four on care and a one on authority, you're going to have a very hard time building consensus with someone who scores the opposite. That's not a problem with communication skills. That's a structural mismatch. Here's where most people mess this up. They treat the six axes as preferences instead of constraints. Each foundation has a hard floor below which any proposal becomes non-negotiable for that person. A liberty score of zero means they will reject a perfectly efficient policy simply because it involves government mandates. There's no amount of data that will change that. I learned this the hard way during a policy redesign project for a mid-sized healthcare system. We had built what we thought was an optimal triage protocol. It scored high on care and fairness. It also required mandatory reporting to a central authority, which tanked our authority score with half the surgical staff. The protocol died in review within forty-eight hours. I rewrote it to frame the reporting as a professional standard rather than a mandate. The mechanics didn't change. The language did. The proposal passed unanimously after that.

The framework itself is available through their official site. There isn't a single free download that covers everything. The core methodology is documented in their published materials, and there are community-maintained spreadsheets that map decision templates. I use a modified version of the standard canvas that adds a dissenting voice column. Every proposal gets a dedicated section where someone argues against it using whichever moral foundation is lowest on the champion's scorecard. It catches things you'd otherwise miss until the vote fails. One thing the documentation doesn't emphasize enough is temporal decay. Moral foundations shift under sustained stress. During the pandemic, I watched several teams completely rewire their fairness calculations overnight. What looked like a solid consensus in January collapsed by March when people started feeling like the burden was distributed unequally. The framework doesn't account for this on its own. You need to rebuild the analysis after any major external shock. I schedule a fifteen-minute reassessment every six weeks during active projects. It usually reveals that two or three people have moved enough between foundations that previously agreed strategies now fail. There are situations where Righteous Minds Genius breaks down entirely. When the decision involves deeply personal identity markers rather than organizational policy, the six-axis model flattens important distinctions. People will tell you they're operating on care when they're actually operating on sanctity, and the framework won't catch that confusion. In those cases you're better off using a traditional stakeholder mapping exercise that focuses on values rather than moral foundations. The framework works best for policy-level decisions with clear competing interests. It works poorly for interpersonal conflicts that have been going on for years.

If you want to start using this, the simplest path is to print the standard canvas and sit down with a colleague who disagrees with you on something minor first. Not something important. Something like office scheduling or meeting structure. Run through the six scores together. You will learn more in ten minutes than you will from reading the documentation. The framework is designed to be used, not studied.