Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

If you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are, understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we’re right.

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

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.

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.

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

If you have high IQ, you’re really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

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.

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.