Jonathan Haidt Quotes

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he ca...

I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. ... Once you ma...

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ...

It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because u...

But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reaso...

When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are als...

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

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religio...

In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closenes...

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For advers...

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

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of o...

Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Sh...

Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order ...

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. B...

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait ca...

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like...

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources i...

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is ...

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

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other mat...

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut...

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individual...

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

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

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

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can...

Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked ...

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to t...

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clappi...

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position...

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

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

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a goo...

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

The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together ...

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

Those who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop … People would be happier an...

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies eq...

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the con...

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, ...