Jonathan Haidt famous quotes

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#People #Mind #Religion And Politics

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

#Team #Mean #Groups

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Success #Memories #Self Esteem

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Motivation #Powerful #Inspiration

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Practice #People #Together

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

#Philosophy #Believe #Passion

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

#Getting What You Want #Want #What You Want

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Strong #Struggle #Elephants

The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Organization #Brain #Doe

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Growing Up #Ethics #Oppression

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

#Passion #Men #Battle

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Jobs #Elephants #Mind

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Empathy #Moral #Righteousness

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Life #Art #Real

You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Dog #People #Mind

Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Running #Oil #Car

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Team #Reality #Morality

Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that's not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Use #Consciousness #Environment

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

#Order #Conservative #Easy

And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. . . . We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Jobs #Home #Caring

Sports is to war as ***** is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Sports #Sex #War

The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Happiness #Hard Work #Wind

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

#Giving #Personality #Peers

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Ideas #People #Diversity

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

#Selfish #Party #Thinking

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Gun #Evil #House

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

#People #Connections #Done

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

#Impact #Long #People

Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.... Conflicts in relationships--having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse--is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Happiness #People #Good Relationship

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#People #Gossip #Partners

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Country #Views #People

Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Voters #Moral #Program

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Elephants #Riders

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Jesus #Hero #Names

But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years or research on morality is that nearly all people are morally motivated. Selfishness is a powerful force, particularly in the decisions of individuals, but whenever groups of people come together to make a sustained effort to change the world, you can bet that they are pursuing a vision of virtue, justice, or sacredness.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Powerful #Selfish #Years

Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Happiness #Attitude #Acceptance

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#God #Self #Soul

Morality binds and blinds.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Religion #Morality

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

#Thinking #People #Frustrated

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

#Team #Fighting #Fate

[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

#Thinking #People #Sacred

science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Google #Study #Guides

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Reason #Should #Values

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#School #Goal #Research

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#People #Giving #Feelings

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Dog #People #Political

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Order #Groups #Universe

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Intuition #Firsts

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Europe #Generations #Lasts

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

#Atheist #Practice #Faces

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

#Simple #Understanding #Mind

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Sunshine #People #Water

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

#Believe #Keys #People

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Believe #Rights #People

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Mind #Stories #Logic

If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Team #People #Diversity

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

#War #Growth #Culture

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Social #Primates

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

#Believe #Issues #Long

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

#War #People #Giving

Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it's the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates wealth in society, and they see government as the oppressor, which makes it hard for especially small businesspeople.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Government #Opposites #Looks

While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is doing it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Sex #Motivation #Inspiration

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

#Track #Role Models #Brain

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

#Country #Belief #Emotion

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

#Evil #Politics #Opponents

Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Thinking #Expectations #Judging

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Smart #People #Public Service

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Issues #Moral #Economic

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Order #Giving #Groups

If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Support #Feelings #Argument

Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Degrees #Let Me

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#Team #Order #Together

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
-- Jonathan Haidt

#World #Social #Colleagues

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

#Stress #Thinking #Income

When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, thats 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

#Being Positive #Racist #Hearing