Jonathan Haidt Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Evil, Politics, Opponents

  Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.242, Basic Books

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• 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

  Order, Conservative, Easy

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Order, Supernatural Beings, Groups

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.12, Vintage

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• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Sex, Motivation, Inspiration

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Differences, Twenties, Mammals

  Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.233, Basic Books

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• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  People, Gossip, Partners

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Team, Reality, Morality

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• 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.

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• To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Jobs, Ideas, Psychology

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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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Strong, Struggle, Elephants

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.50, Vintage

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• 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

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• 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

  Dog, People, Political

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.48, Vintage

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• 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.

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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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Jesus, Hero, Names

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.179, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Happiness, Hard Work, Wind

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• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Team, Mean, Groups

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• 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

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Sacrifice, Often Is, Self

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

  Jonathan Haidt

  Organization, Brain, Doe

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• 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

  Philosophy, Believe, Passion

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• 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.

  Jonathan Haidt

  People, Challenges, Feelings

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