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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

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
Arbitrariness
Blinds
Sacredness
Binds
Practice
Together
People

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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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By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.
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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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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.
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Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
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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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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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It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
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While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
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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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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
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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.
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The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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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 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.
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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
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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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science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
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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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