Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan David Haidtis a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. His academic specialization is the psychology of morality and the moral emotions. Haidt is the author of two books: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdomand The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, which became a New York Times bestseller. He was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth19 October 1963
CountryUnited States of America
We can call this "the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."
Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.
If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.
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.
The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.
Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.
On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us.
There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group.
When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.
The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.
Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children.
My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness.