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

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
Jonathan Haidt
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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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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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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Morality binds and blinds.
Jonathan Haidt
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The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.
Jonathan Haidt
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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
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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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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
Jonathan Haidt
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In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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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The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt
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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.
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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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
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.
Jonathan Haidt