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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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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Moral
Whatever
Indirect
Political
Methods
Change
Near
Much
Method
Long
Focus
Believe
Issues
People
Pretty

More quotes by 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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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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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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Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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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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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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt