Jonathan Haidt Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jonathan Haidt's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 120 quotes on this page collected since October 19, 1963! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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.

  • Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

  • If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.

    Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.
  • 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.

    Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.
  • Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

    Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.
  • There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.

    Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.
  • The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.48, Vintage
  • Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

    Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.70, Vintage
  • It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.

    Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.233, Basic Books
  • I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and '60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we're making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren't yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we're on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things.

    Source: bigthink.com
  • Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

    "Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture". "Moyers & Company" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. February 3, 2012.
  • Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.

  • 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 Explains Our Contentious Culture". "Moyers & Company" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. February 3, 2012.
  • Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    "The moral roots of liberals and conservatives". TED conference, www.ted.com. March 2008.
  • 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.

  • Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    "Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt". "Tavis Smiley", www.pbs.org. May 7, 2012.
  • Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

  • I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

    Source: bigthink.com
  • I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

    Source: bigthink.com
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.

    Source: bigthink.com
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 120 quotes from the Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starting from October 19, 1963! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!