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
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
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
If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness. - Jonathan Haidt
The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. - Jonathan Haidt
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction. - Jonathan Haidt
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
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. - Jonathan Haidt
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
Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies. - 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
If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide. - Jonathan Haidt
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
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
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth. - Jonathan Haidt
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
Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice. - Jonathan Haidt
Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you. - Jonathan Haidt
When 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