Quotes by Jonathan Haidt

“It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.”

“The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.”

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”

“Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.”

“But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shar...”

“...civility doesn't require consensus or the suspension of criticism. It is simply the ability to disagree productively with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.”

“Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal languagea pointless and isolating task if there is no commu...”

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”

“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might reall...”

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”

“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 f...”

“The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the righ...”

“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 hi...”

“Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)”

“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation a force for construction and destruction.”

“Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not...”

“Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimps...”

“Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass”