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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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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Politics
Tribalism
War
Binds
Also
Altruism
Giving
Genocide
People
Heroism
Morality
Groups
Gives
Sainthood

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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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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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Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.
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It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
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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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Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
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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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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.
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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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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
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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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Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
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We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
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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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It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
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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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People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
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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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Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.
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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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