Jonathan Haidt Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Circulation, Useful

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Jungle, Species

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Morality, Element

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Humans, Reforming

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Motor, Surprised

• There’s an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he’s a member of your ethnic group.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Voting, Ethnic

• The most important thing to realize is we’re not blank slates at birth. We don’t start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There’s something in our heads on the day we’re born, and then we grow up and make choices.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Grow Up, Heads

• The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Breakthrough, Liberals

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Blind, Join

• Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Conservatives, Reluctance

• Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Greatness, Bind

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Methods, Near

• On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Essence, Bodies

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dilemma, Reasoning

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Altruism, Genocide

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Liberals, Oppressor

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fairness, Liberals

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Addictive, Adrenaline

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Liberals

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Copy, Gravitates, Liberalism

Jonathan Haidt (42)

Birth:	19th October, 1963
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Professor

About

Haidt was born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York. He earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1985, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then studied cultural psychology at the University of Chicago as a post doctoral fellow.

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