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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.

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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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
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The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.
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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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The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.
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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Morality binds and blinds.
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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.
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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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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.
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When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, thats fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.
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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.
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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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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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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
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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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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
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