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Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Psychologist

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Famous Jonathan Haidt Quotes

“But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years or research on morality is that nearly all people are morally motivated. Selfishness is a powerful force, particularly in the decisions of individuals, but whenever groups of people come together to make a sustained effort to change the world, you can bet that they are pursuing a vision of virtue, justice, or sacredness.”

PeopleWorldYearsImportantTogetherIndividualForceJusticeDecisionPowerfulEffortVisionVirtueGroupsMoralityLessonsResearchTwentiesSelfishSelfishnessChanging The WorldMotivatedI Have LearnedSacrednessImportant Lessons
Book:The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
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“The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.”

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Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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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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Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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“Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”

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Author:Jonathan Haidt
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“You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.”

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Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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“Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?”

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Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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“And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. . . . We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.”

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Author:Jonathan Haidt
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“It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.”

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Author:Jonathan Haidt
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