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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

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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Face
Cooperation
Inefficient
Turns
Solution
Dismiss
Faces
Atheist
Kinship
Problem
Hardest
Costly
Humans
Solutions
Atheists
Without
Problems
Practices
Turn
Irrational
Practice
Ritual

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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
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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.
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Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.
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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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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.
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Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
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People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
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Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
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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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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.
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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 I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
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Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.
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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
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