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Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

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
Mostly
Social
Nature
Like
Primates

More quotes by 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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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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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
Jonathan Haidt
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Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
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 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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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
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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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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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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People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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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It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
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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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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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Jonathan Haidt
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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