Jonathan Haidt Quotes

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

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us.

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.

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

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

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

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

Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.

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.

Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?

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.

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

[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.

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.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

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

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.

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

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

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

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

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

If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.

America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.

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

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

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

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

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.

Morality binds and blinds.

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

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

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.

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

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.

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.

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