Jonathan Haidt
Psychologist
1963-10-19
Quotes by Jonathan Haidt
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The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).
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The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.
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Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.
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Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
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Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
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Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
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You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.
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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
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Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.
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It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.
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Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass
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Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.
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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 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 & ideological diversity.
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Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.
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Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.
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Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring. (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)
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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.
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The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.
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