Jonathan Haidt Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.

Jonathan Haidt
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

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

Jonathan Haidt
The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.

Jonathan Haidt
To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

Jonathan Haidt
Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.

Jonathan Haidt
The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt
Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.

Jonathan Haidt
Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

Jonathan Haidt
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Jonathan Haidt
Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

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
I'll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.

Jonathan Haidt
The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

Jonathan Haidt
We can call this "the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."

Jonathan Haidt
If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.

Jonathan Haidt
In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.

Jonathan Haidt
The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It's our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.

Jonathan Haidt
Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.... Conflicts in relationships--having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse--is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

Jonathan Haidt
Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that's not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.

Jonathan Haidt
Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.

Jonathan Haidt
The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

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

Jonathan Haidt
Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

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

Jonathan Haidt
Gossip and reputation make sure that what comes around - a person who is cruel will find that the others are cruel hack to him, and a person who is kind will find others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully.

Jonathan Haidt
But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years or research on morality is that nearly all people are morally motivated. Selfishness is a powerful force, particularly in the decisions of individuals, but whenever groups of people come together to make a sustained effort to change the world, you can bet that they are pursuing a vision of virtue, justice, or sacredness.

Jonathan Haidt