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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

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
Explain
Beings
Groups
Create
Universe
Order
Supernatural
Societies

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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
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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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America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.
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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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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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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.
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Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.
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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.
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Happiness doesn't come from getting what you want. It doesn't come from within, either. Happiness comes from *between*--from finding the right relationship between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.
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The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. 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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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 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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science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
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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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We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
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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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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
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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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