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

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
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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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 have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
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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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
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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Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.
Jonathan Haidt
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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt