Top 100 Jonathan Haidt Quotes
#1. People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
Jonathan Haidt
#2. The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, Joy's soul lies in the doing.
Jonathan Haidt
#3. We have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. I called this ability the hive switch.
Jonathan Haidt
#4. Life is a journey, the metaphor guides you to some conclusions: You should learn the terrain, pick a direction, find some good traveling companions, and enjoy the trip, because there may be nothing at the end of the road.
Jonathan Haidt
#6. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
#7. Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.
Jonathan Haidt
#8. Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.
Jonathan Haidt
#9. Even if we take Nietzsche figuratively (which he would have much preferred anyway), fifty years of research on stress shows that stressors are generally bad for people,3 contributing to depression, anxiety disorders, and heart disease.
Jonathan Haidt
#10. If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.
Jonathan Haidt
#11. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.
Jonathan Haidt
#12. Science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
Jonathan Haidt
#13. Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
Jonathan Haidt
#14. By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.
Jonathan Haidt
#15. If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.
Jonathan Haidt
#16. Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life.
Jonathan Haidt
#17. We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That's what religion is all about.
Jonathan Haidt
#18. If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.
Jonathan Haidt
#19. Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
Jonathan Haidt
#20. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Jonathan Haidt
#21. I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Jonathan Haidt
#23. People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.
Jonathan Haidt
#24. acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.
Jonathan Haidt
#25. The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
#26. Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
Jonathan Haidt
#27. Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.
Jonathan Haidt
#28. Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Jonathan Haidt
#29. We're all stuck here for a while, so let's try to work it out.
Jonathan Haidt
#30. We've all heard that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, but that is a dangerous oversimplification. Many of the things that don't kill you can damage you for life.
Jonathan Haidt
#31. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic.
Jonathan Haidt
#32. We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
Jonathan Haidt
#33. With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.
Jonathan Haidt
#34. Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
Jonathan Haidt
#35. When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, Love and work.
Jonathan Haidt
#36. Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
#37. In Lerner's experiments, the desperate need to make sense of events can lead people to inaccurate conclusions (for example, a woman "led on" a rapist);
Jonathan Haidt
#38. Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt
#39. Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
Jonathan Haidt
#40. each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons.
Jonathan Haidt
#41. Eric Helzer and David Pizarro asked students at Cornell University to fill out surveys about their political attitudes while standing near (or far from) a hand sanitizer dispenser. Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.27
Jonathan Haidt
#42. Skilled arguers ... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.
Jonathan Haidt
#43. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).
Jonathan Haidt
#44. With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.
Jonathan Haidt
#45. The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism - we think that minds and bodies are different but equally real sorts of things - and so we readily believe that we have immortal souls housed in our temporary bodies.
Jonathan Haidt
#46. If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.
Jonathan Haidt
#47. I believe that an evolutionary approach specifying the foundation of our moral sense can allow us to appreciate Hindu and Muslim cultures where women are veiled and seem to us to lead restricted lives.
Jonathan Haidt
#48. And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
Jonathan Haidt
#49. Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon's view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations.
Jonathan Haidt
#50. Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas (not their genes) spread.
Jonathan Haidt
#51. Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould
Jonathan Haidt
#52. Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics.
Jonathan Haidt
#53. Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
Jonathan Haidt
#54. Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.
Jonathan Haidt
#55. Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
Jonathan Haidt
#56. The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin
Jonathan Haidt
#57. The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
Jonathan Haidt
#58. The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
Jonathan Haidt
#59. Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.
Jonathan Haidt
#60. This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.
Jonathan Haidt
#61. A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.
Jonathan Haidt
#62. I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the "New Atheists") have argued in recent years.
Jonathan Haidt
#63. When corporations are given the ring of Gyges, we can expect catastrophic results (for the ecosystem, the banking system, public health, etc.).
Jonathan Haidt
#64. Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To
Jonathan Haidt
#65. Leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children's lives.
Jonathan Haidt
#66. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Jonathan Haidt
#67. In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.
Jonathan Haidt
#68. I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as "religious" or
Jonathan Haidt
#69. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. ... "Built-in" does not mean unmalleable; it means "organized in advance of experience."3
Jonathan Haidt
#70. figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he
Jonathan Haidt
#71. Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.
Jonathan Haidt
#72. Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.
Jonathan Haidt
#73. It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one's own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.5
Jonathan Haidt
#74. We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.
Jonathan Haidt
#76. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other
Jonathan Haidt
#77. The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic.
Jonathan Haidt
#78. Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society."46
Jonathan Haidt
#79. We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.
Jonathan Haidt
#80. Having once reviewed the literature on the catharsis hypothesis, I knew that there was no evidence for it.31 Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.
Jonathan Haidt
#81. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.
Jonathan Haidt
#82. The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives
Jonathan Haidt
#83. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13
Jonathan Haidt
#84. The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.
Jonathan Haidt
#85. People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.
Jonathan Haidt
#86. If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants.
Jonathan Haidt
#87. Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring. (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)
Jonathan Haidt
#88. Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising.
Jonathan Haidt
#89. I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.
Jonathan Haidt
#90. After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.
Jonathan Haidt
#91. If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.
Jonathan Haidt
#92. Authorities often exploit their subordinates for their own benefit while believing they are perfectly just.
Jonathan Haidt
#93. [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
#94. What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us.
Jonathan Haidt
#95. Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
Jonathan Haidt
#96. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
Jonathan Haidt
#97. If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.
Jonathan Haidt
#98. When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.
Jonathan Haidt
#99. findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean.
Jonathan Haidt
#100. Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.
Jonathan Haidt
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