Jonathan Haidt quotes - page 2

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)
The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." View quote
Jonathan Haidt
If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group. [...] Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was "organized in advance of experience. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Five adaptative challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one's kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyer and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that "people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.". View quote
Jonathan Haidt
I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liverals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy. (Jonathan Haidt)
You can take the IAT yourself at ProjectImplicit. org. But be forewarned: it can be disturbing. You can actually feel yoursel moving more slowly when you are asked to associate good things with the faces of one race rather than another. You can watch as you implicit attitude contradicts implicit associations with many social groups, such as black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the treat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Intuitions Comes First, Strategic Reasoning Second Central Metaphor The mind is divided, like a rider on a elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it's no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness. View quote
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. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life. View quote
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. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you. (Jonathan Haidt)
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. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A. View quote
Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt - Image
Photo: Miller Center of Public Affairs flickr page, Charlottesville, VA, CC BY 2.0
Occupation: American Psychologist
Born: October 19, 1963
Quotes count: 64
Wikipedia: Jonathan Haidt

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