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Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

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
Many
Vale
Much
Reciprocate
People
Reciprocal
Gossip
Partners
Relationships
Species
Humans

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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 very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
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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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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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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Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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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It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
Jonathan Haidt
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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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Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
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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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