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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.

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
Utterly
People
Argument
Dog
Refuting
Minds
Wagging
Happy
Forcibly
Tail
Change
Tails
Mind
Arguments
Make

More quotes by 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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Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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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If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
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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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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
Jonathan Haidt
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Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
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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If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.
Jonathan Haidt
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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt
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If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.
Jonathan Haidt
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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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