361 Quotes by Jonathan Haidt

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as “a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact.”45 As an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion.

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates – we’re mostly out for ourselves.

Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.

Millon et al. 1998. Psychopaths often care what others think, but only as part of a plan to manipulate or exploit others. They don’t have emotions such as shame and guilt that make it painful for them when others see through their lies and come to hate them. They don’t have an automatic unconscious sociometer.

And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.

After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.15 Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear.

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.

Anytime we’re interacting with someone, we’re judging them, we’re sharing expectations, we think they didn’t live up to those expectations.