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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
Societies
Explain
Beings
Groups
Create
Universe
Order
Supernatural

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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
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The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
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Morality binds and blinds.
Jonathan Haidt
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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
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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
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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
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Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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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The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt
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science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt