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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.

Jonathan Haidt

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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Goal
India
Understand
Morality
Comparing
Culture
Across
Varied
School
Judgment
Graduate
Research
Graduates
Late
Cultures
Moral
Compare
Nations
Began

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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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.
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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.
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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
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Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
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If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.
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Morality binds and blinds.
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If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.
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The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
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It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
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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.
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It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
Jonathan Haidt
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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
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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
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I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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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
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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.
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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
Jonathan Haidt