Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Author Image

Jonathan Haidt

Profession : Psychologist

Birth : October 19, 1963

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.

Jonathan Haidt

When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's 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.

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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?

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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

Jonathan Haidt

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.

Jonathan Haidt