Quote

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.

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
Evidence
Rebut
Understand
Tilt
Feelings
Charges
Littles
Circulation
Little
Arguments
Long
Useful
People
Impact

More quotes by 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.
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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
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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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Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
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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.
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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.
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In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.
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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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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.
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Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
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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.
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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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