Jonathan Haidt quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jonathan Haidt on Wise Famous Quotes.

Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.

Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.

we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection.

Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.

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

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other

acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.

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.

That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.18

When corporations are given the ring of Gyges, we can expect catastrophic results (for the ecosystem, the banking system, public health, etc.).

After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.

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

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

If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants.

Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.

Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).

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

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

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

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

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

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

The author says we enlist reasons to convince others to join the direction of our instincts.

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

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

Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon's view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.

A Liberal authority is someone or something that earns society's respect through making things happen that unify society and suppress its enemy.

The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

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

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.

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

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

As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, Love and work.

Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics.

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

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.

But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.

Adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for more, but adversity makes them strong.

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.

The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives

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

Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.

This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.

Skilled arguers ... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it.

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

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. - EPICTETUS

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

We're all stuck here for a while, so let's try to work it out.

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.

People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.

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

If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.

You don't need a social scientist to tell you that people behave less ethically when they think nobody can see them.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.

Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process.

each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Morality binds and blinds.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.

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

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

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

Authorities often exploit their subordinates for their own benefit while believing they are perfectly just.

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

Human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.

I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.

Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society."46

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

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.