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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

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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
Making
Useful
Nature
Questions
Right
Terrible
Work
Progress
Think
Philosophy
Booming
Thinking
Moral
Framing
Understanding
Answering
Actually
Psychology

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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
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Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
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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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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
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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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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.
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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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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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The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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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 are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.
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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.
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Morality binds and blinds.
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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.
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While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
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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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Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.
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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 grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
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