Jonathan Haidt quotes

Jonathan Haidt is a renowned psychologist, author, and social scientist known for his research on moral psychology and political psychology. He is the author of several bestselling books, including "The Righteous Mind" and "The Coddling of the American Mind." Haidt is a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and a co-founder of the Heterodox Academy, an organization dedicated to promoting viewpoint diversity in academia. His work has been widely acclaimed for its insights into human behavior and the causes of political polarization. Learn more about Jonathan Haidt and his groundbreaking research today.

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

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

- Jonathan Haidt

Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.

- Jonathan Haidt

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

- 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

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

- 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

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

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 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

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

- Jonathan Haidt

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

- 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

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

- 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

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

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

- Jonathan Haidt

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

- 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

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

- Jonathan Haidt

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

- Jonathan Haidt

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

- 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

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

- Jonathan Haidt

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

- 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

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