Latest Jonathan Haidt Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• We are like a rider on top of a gigantic elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it's terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don't have working brains yet.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Teenager, Maturity, Brain

  Source: bigthink.com

• Psychotherapy can help some people, especially people who are neurotic, who are always making problems for themselves. We are like a rider on an elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll go where he wants. They need to get a better relationship between the rider and the elephant. In part, you get it just from watching yourself stumble around in life, make mistakes, then read a little psychology and stop blaming yourself. Realize that I am flawed. I am complicated. I am divided, and I'm doing the best I can.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Mistake, People, Psychology

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Thinking, People, Trying

  Source: bigthink.com

• Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we're not aware of that. We feel like there's a circle of light. We're like the drunk who lost his keys and is looking under the streetlight, and the cop says, "Where'd you lose your keys?" You say, "Back in the alley, but the light's so much better over here." The divided self refers to the fact that we are basically animals with animal brains. These animal brains run our lives. They're very good at it.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Running, Animal, Drunk

  Source: bigthink.com

• The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Thinking, World, Psychotherapy

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think that we are passionate creatures who really live our fullest life when we are deeply engaged, when we feel successes, and exult in them, when we feel losses and tragedies and are hurt by them. So I came to the conclusion that Eastern ideas of withdrawal may not be right for modern Westerners. If you read the ancient texts, they're pretty severe. I mean, they really are not the sort of thing that you would think compatible with really throwing yourself into life and being a part of it.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Hurt, Mean, Loss

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think the greatest truths, the ones that you find in every culture that has any sort of history of reflection of writing, the greatest truth is that there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That's the way Shakespeare put it. But you get basically the same idea from Buddha, from the Bhagavad Gita in India, and from the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Writing, Reflection, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Writing, Thinking, Psychology

  Source: bigthink.com

• We scientists have way too much a tendency to simplify problems. I guess it actually comes to us naturally. Take the simplest unit, separate out all the confusing, external factors. Study it. Make sure you understand it. And in psychology that means the person studying the individual. But if you want to study our social nature, if you want to study processes that will lead to war and peace, you don't learn all that much by looking at the single individual. A lot of the important things are emergent facts about us, things that you can only see when you get a lot of us interacting.

  Jonathan Haidt

  War, Mean, Psychology

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Thinking, Brain, Scientist

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and '60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we're making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren't yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we're on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Kids, School, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, Thinking, Psychology

  Source: bigthink.com

• In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, College, Psychology

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, Thinking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  People, Motivated, Psychopath

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Determination, Rights, Self

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Slippery Slope, Firsts, Steps

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• I believe that an evolutionary approach specifying the foundation of our moral sense can allow us to appreciate Hindu and Muslim cultures where women are veiled and seem to us to lead restricted lives.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Believe, Appreciate, Foundation

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Justice, Diversity, Virtue

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Errors, Rocks, People

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Diversity, Moral Beliefs, Aesthetic

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Children, Successful, Average

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus - apparati - that we happen to have.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Beautiful, People, Comedian

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  People, Stranger, Hominids

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Zero, Couple, Thinking

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.