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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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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.
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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The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
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 rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Morality binds and blinds.
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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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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I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.
Jonathan Haidt
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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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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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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
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