JHJonathan Haidt

47 collected words

Jonathan Haidt

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

02Undated

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

03Undated

The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong. ... This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning. If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

04Undated

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Jonathan Haidt / quote

05Undated

When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

06Undated

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

07Undated

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

08Undated

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

09Undated

We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

10Undated

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

11Undated

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clapping by studying only the left hand.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

12Undated

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

Jonathan Haidt / quote

13Undated

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

14Undated

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

Jonathan Haidt / quote

15Undated

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

16Undated

In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status. . . . Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy. Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty , and you feel lifted “up.” But it is not the “up” of hierarchy, it’s some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

17Undated

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

18Undated

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

19Undated

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

Jonathan Haidt / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

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 / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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 / quote