Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

If you know what your mind is up to, and why you so easily see the world through a distorting lens of good and evil, you can take steps to reduce your self-righteousness. You can thereby reduce the frequency of conflicts with others who are equally convinced of their righteousness.

Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don't infer that God caused those feelings.

Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not.

los grupos crean seres sobrenaturales no para explicar el universo, sino para poner orden en sus sociedades.

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It's almost as though there's a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.

we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.

we face the paradox of abundance: Quantity undermines the quality of our engagement. With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.

To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism.

Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising.

I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.

Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

Even though the effects of any single gene are tiny, these findings are important because they illustrate one sort of pathway from genes to politics: the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences.19 These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals and conservatives.

Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict. Argue as if you're right, but listen as if you're wrong (and be willing to change your mind). Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person's perspective. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you've learned from them.

When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them. NELSON MANDELA1

Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn't go the way they wanted.27

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.

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask "Can I believe it?" when we want to believe something, but "Must I believe it?" when we don't want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

naive realism": Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.

And if the love of political equality rests on the Liberty/oppression and Care/harm foundations rather than the Fairness/cheating foundation, then the Fairness foundation no longer has a split personality; it's no longer about equality and proportionality. It is primarily about proportionality.

When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.

All things come into being by conflict of opposites. —HERACLITUS,1 C. 500 BCE   Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. —WILLIAM BLAKE,2 C. 1790