Quote

Reciprocity is a deep instinct it is the basic currency of social life.

Jonathan Haidt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Currency
Basic
Instinct
Deep
Social
Life
Reciprocity

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
Morality binds and blinds.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
Jonathan Haidt
Image
It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
Jonathan Haidt