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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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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Look
Psychological
Self
Mirrors
Distorted
Looks
Findings
Perceptions
Finding
Colored
Perception
Fairly
Rose
Accurate
Research
Consistent
Others
Mirror

More quotes by 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.
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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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It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
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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.
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The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
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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.
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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.
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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
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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.
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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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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.
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Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
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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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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
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To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.
Jonathan Haidt
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Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Jonathan Haidt
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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
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Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
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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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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