Quote

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Jonathan Haidt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Ever
Destruction
Human
Planet
Humans
Motivation
Planets
Inspiration
Powerful
Known
Construction
Force
Cooperation

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

Image
People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It's our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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