People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds.… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Psychotherapy can help some people, especially people who are neurotic, who are always making problems for themselves. We are like a rider… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative,… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish,… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism,… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people… Conflicts in relationships--having an annoying office… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years or research on morality is that nearly all people are… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong,… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
“The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
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. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals. — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red… — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image
“Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other” — Jonathan Haidt Copy Share Image