Jonathan Haidt Quotations

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.

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

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.

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, thats fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

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.

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

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

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

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

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

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?

In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.

Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it's the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates wealth in society, and they see government as the oppressor, which makes it hard for especially small businesspeople.

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

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

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

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

Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children.

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

The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.

When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.

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.

We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.

On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us.

There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group.

The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.

Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.

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

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.

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.

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.

The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

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.

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

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

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."

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.

Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.

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.

Religion and science, for example, are often though to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, physics, but many were good psychologists.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.

While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is doing it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. . . . We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

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.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

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

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

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.

Morality binds and blinds.

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

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

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.

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

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

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. 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.

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

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.

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.

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.

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.

If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.

There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk.

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.

Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.