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Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. His academic specialization is the psychology of morality and the moral emotions. Haidt is the author of two books: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion , which became a New York Times bestseller. He was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine.

✵ 19. October 1963  •  Other names ג'ונתן היידט, جاناتان هیت
Jonathan Haidt photo

Works

The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt: 28 quotes3 likes

Famous Jonathan Haidt Quotes

“I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liverals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyer and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that "people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.".”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

Jonathan Haidt

Cited in: Alistair Croll, ‎Benjamin Yoskovitz (2013) Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster. p. 168.
Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt Quotes about people

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

“And so, uh, uh, a wonderful book, um, American Grace by, uh, Putnam and Campbell, um, uh, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that, um, it doesn’t matter what religion you are, and it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you are part of a religious community, then on average, you’re a better citizen, you give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good, too, but on average, they give less and they give less of their time. So, I’d like to think that I simply, as a secular atheist scientist, followed the evidence, and it showed me that I was wrong in thinking that religion was evil.”

Jonathan Haidt

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

“So, we’ve reached the state that George Will described. He said there’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything, except thought. And so, we do need certain kinds of diversity. But the key to remember is that, diversity by its very nature is divisive, and so, what’s the function of your group? If your group needs cohesion, you don’t want diversity. If your group needs good, clear thinking and you want people to challenge your prejudices, then you need it. So in the academic world, we need that kind of diversity, and we don’t have it.”

Jonathan Haidt

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

“Five adaptative challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one's kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“You can take the IAT yourself at ProjectImplicit. org. But be forewarned: it can be disturbing. You can actually feel yoursel moving more slowly when you are asked to associate good things with the faces of one race rather than another. You can watch as you implicit attitude contradicts implicit associations with many social groups, such as black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the treat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

Jonathan Haidt Quotes

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”

Jonathan Haidt

TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html (March 2008).

“Evolution is a design process; it’s just not an intelligent design process.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“I think we went through — in America, at least, we went through a period in the ’60s and ’70s when the education establishment became extremely liberal, and part of that is a flirtation with relativism. And a resistance — it’s horrible to think of — of adults telling kids what’s right and wrong. What a terrible thing. That’s oppression. And so we created these sort of value-free spaces, which conveys a value, which is that there’s no right or wrong, everyone decides for themselves. Uh, everyone’s opinion is equal. You should say your opinion and then you get a lot of incivility. What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum where we teach very explicitly the long tradition of left-right. Um, we teach what each side is. You can’t say right about it, that’s my language. But, um, you teach what each side is concerned about. You know, very much like the line here. Uh, both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order.”

Jonathan Haidt

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

“The lesson Buddha and Marcus Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: "Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it."”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2005), p. 25.

“I know this is the question period, but there’s a quote here which is just so relevant. I hope I can — I hope I can read it. It’s from an article by, uh, Yossi Klein Halevi on Pesach Jews versus Purim Jews. So he talks about these — there’s these two threads, these two strands among — among — among Jews in — actually, there’s more in Israel. But it’s here, too. So he — I just love this, and it fits so well with — with — with The Righteous Mind. He says, uh, Jewish history speaks to our generation in the voice of two Biblical commands to remember.”

Jonathan Haidt

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

“Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.”

Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

“And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“Intuitions Comes First, Strategic Reasoning Second
Central Metaphor
The mind is divided, like a rider on a elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it's no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group. […] Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

“The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was "organized in advance of experience.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

Source: The Righteous Mind (2012)

“Gossip and reputation make sure that what comes around - a person who is cruel will find that the others are cruel hack to him, and a person who is kind will find others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully.”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2005), p. 55.

“First, kill all the math classes beyond algebra. Stop wasting so much of our students’ time learning math. It’s not useful, it’s not helpful.”

Jonathan Haidt

Source: Knowledge@Wharton https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-righteous-mind-why-liberals-and-conservatives-cant-get-along/ (2013)

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