Jonathan Haidt Quotes

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring. (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

~ Jonathan Haidt

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

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

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

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

~ Jonathan Haidt

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

~ Jonathan Haidt

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

~ Jonathan Haidt

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Those who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop … People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction. People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward even larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run and wealthier, if they bought basic functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans and in particular spend almost everything they have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls the myth of pure evil. Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.

~ Jonathan Haidt

I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. ... Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity. If you are pro-choice on the issue of abortion, would you prefer that there be a wide variety of opinions and no dominant one? Or would you prefer that everyone agree with you and the laws of the land reflect that agreement? If you prefer diversity on an issue, the issue is not a moral issue for you; it is a matter of personal taste.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

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

The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong. ... This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning. If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.

~ Jonathan Haidt

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

~ Jonathan Haidt

We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clapping by studying only the left hand.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

~ Jonathan Haidt

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

~ Jonathan Haidt

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

~ Jonathan Haidt

In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status. . . . Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy. Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty , and you feel lifted “up.” But it is not the “up” of hierarchy, it’s some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.

~ Jonathan Haidt

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

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

~ Jonathan Haidt