If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back. Jonathan Haidt More Quotes by Jonathan Haidt More Quotes From Jonathan Haidt Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives. Jonathan Haidt motivationsportssex It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals. Jonathan Haidt mammalsdifferencestwenties Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice. Jonathan Haidt practicetogetherpeople 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. Jonathan Haidt passionphilosophybelieve The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Jonathan Haidt organizationdoebrain Psychotherapy can help some people, especially people who are neurotic, who are always making problems for themselves. We are like a rider on an elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll go where he wants. They need to get a better relationship between the rider and the elephant. In part, you get it just from watching yourself stumble around in life, make mistakes, then read a little psychology and stop blaming yourself. Realize that I am flawed. I am complicated. I am divided, and I'm doing the best I can. Jonathan Haidt psychologymistakepeople 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. Jonathan Haidt politicaldogpeople In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator? Jonathan Haidt reallifeart 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 oppressionethicsgrowing-up 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 opponentspoliticsevil Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. Jonathan Haidt moralityteamreality We scientists have way too much a tendency to simplify problems. I guess it actually comes to us naturally. Take the simplest unit, separate out all the confusing, external factors. Study it. Make sure you understand it. And in psychology that means the person studying the individual. But if you want to study our social nature, if you want to study processes that will lead to war and peace, you don't learn all that much by looking at the single individual. A lot of the important things are emergent facts about us, things that you can only see when you get a lot of us interacting. Jonathan Haidt psychologywarmean I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology. Jonathan Haidt psychologywritingthinking There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed. Jonathan Haidt zerocouplethinking Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded. Jonathan Haidt diversityvirtuejustice 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 psychologyjobsideas I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and '60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we're making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren't yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we're on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things. Jonathan Haidt kidsschoolthinking We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs. Jonathan Haidt aestheticdiversitymoral-beliefs Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams. Jonathan Haidt teamtogetherorder Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything. Jonathan Haidt slippery-slopestepsfirsts
