Top 100 Jonathan Haidt Quotes
#1. Jonathan Haidt said in another context, The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
Daniel Kahneman
#2. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
Leonard Mlodinow
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.
Jonathan Haidt
#6. we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection.
Jonathan Haidt
#7. 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
#8. That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.18
Jonathan Haidt
#9. The claim that some races were innately superior to others was later championed by Hitler, and so if Hitler was a nativist, then all nativists were Nazis. (That conclusion is illogical, but it makes sense emotionally if you dislike nativism.)13 The
Jonathan Haidt
#10. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."19
Jonathan Haidt
#11. Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process.
Jonathan Haidt
#12. 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
#14. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
#15. Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.
Jonathan Haidt
#16. Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions.
Jonathan Haidt
#17. America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.
Jonathan Haidt
#18. Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.
Jonathan Haidt
#19. It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.
Jonathan Haidt
#20. When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.
Jonathan Haidt
#21. 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
#22. If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.
Jonathan Haidt
#23. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.
Jonathan Haidt
#24. 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
#25. If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it.
Jonathan Haidt
#26. Science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
Jonathan Haidt
#27. Many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.
Jonathan Haidt
#28. Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
Jonathan Haidt
#29. 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
#30. The psychologist Mark Schaller has shown that disgust is part of what he calls the "behavioral immune system" - a set of cognitive modules that are triggered by signs of infection or disease in other people and that make you want to get away from those people.40
Jonathan Haidt
#31. If the hive switch is real - if it's a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding - then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.
Jonathan Haidt
#32. Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment - originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.18
Jonathan Haidt
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.
Jonathan Haidt
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
Jonathan Haidt
#39. 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
#40. Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.
Jonathan Haidt
#41. 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
#42. While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
Jonathan Haidt
#44. People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.
Jonathan Haidt
#45. acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.
Jonathan Haidt
#46. The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
#47. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.
Jonathan Haidt
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Jonathan Haidt
#51. Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Jonathan Haidt
#52. We're all stuck here for a while, so let's try to work it out.
Jonathan Haidt
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
Jonathan Haidt
#56. The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It's our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.
Jonathan Haidt
#57. Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.
Jonathan Haidt
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.
Jonathan Haidt
#62. The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
Jonathan Haidt
#63. Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution.
Jonathan Haidt
#64. Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
#65. Adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for more, but adversity makes them strong.
Jonathan Haidt
#66. I'll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.
Jonathan Haidt
#67. 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
#68. Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt
#69. Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.
Jonathan Haidt
#70. Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt
#71. Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
Jonathan Haidt
#72. Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
Jonathan Haidt
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. - SENECA
Jonathan Haidt
#76. Changing an institution's environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.
Jonathan Haidt
#77. Skilled arguers ... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.
Jonathan Haidt
#78. My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?
Jonathan Haidt
#79. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).
Jonathan Haidt
#80. With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.
Jonathan Haidt
#81. Human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.
Jonathan Haidt
#82. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.
Jonathan Haidt
#83. 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
#84. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. - BUDDHA
Jonathan Haidt
#85. Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.
Jonathan Haidt
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
Jonathan Haidt
#89. When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.
Jonathan Haidt
#90. 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
#91. The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.
Jonathan Haidt
#92. Happiness doesn't come from getting what you want. It doesn't come from within, either. Happiness comes from *between*
from finding the right relationship between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.
Jonathan Haidt
#93. Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Jonathan Haidt
#94. A Liberal authority is someone or something that earns society's respect through making things happen that unify society and suppress its enemy.
Jonathan Haidt
#95. 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
#96. Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon's view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations.
Jonathan Haidt
#97. 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
#98. If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.
Jonathan Haidt
#99. 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
#100. Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould
Jonathan Haidt
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
