Jonathan Haidt > Quotes

“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Those who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop … People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction. People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward even larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run and wealthier, if they bought basic functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans and in particular spend almost everything they have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“[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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“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 individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. How many of your New Year’s resolutions have been about fixing a flaw? And how many of those resolutions have you made several years in a row? It’s difficult to change any aspect of your personality by sheer force of will, and if it is a weakness you choose to work on, you probably won’t enjoy the process. If you don’t find pleasure or reinforcement along the way, then—unless you have the willpower of Ben Franklin—you’ll soon give up. But you don’t really have to be good at everything. Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, and often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“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”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure