Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

Avoiding triggers

broke now, just wait until the baby boom generation is fully retired. 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.

Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups.

Many students cringe at robust debate; maintaining their ideas of good and evil requires no less than the silencing of disagreeable speakers.

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

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lenghts to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of morality.

Cuando nadie responde ante nadie, cuando los vagos y los tramposos quedan impunes, todo se derrumba.

soldiers don't risk their lives for their country or for the army; they do so for their buddies in the same squad or platoon.

la verdad es que nos preocupamos mucho por lo que otros piensan de nosotros. Las únicas personas que se sabe que no tienen un sociómetro son los psicópatas.

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper.

findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean.

sesgo de confirmación-, la tendencia a buscar e interpretar nuevas pruebas de formas que confirmen lo que uno piensa. A las personas se les da muy bien cuestionar las afirmaciones hechas por otros, pero cuando se trata de su creencia, entonces es su posesión, casi como una hija, y en ese caso lo que quieren es protegerla, no cuestionarla y arriesgarse a perderla.

Whatever its origins, it's a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson's account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

In other words, under normal circumstances the rider takes its cue from the elephant, just as a lawyer takes instructions from a client. But if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources. Intuitions come first, and under normal circumstances they cause us to engage in socially strategic reasoning, but there are ways to make the relationship more of a two-way street.

The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune."6

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

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

El partidismo extremo puede ser literalmente adictivo.

La habilidad para razonar de manera normal combinada con la ausencia de emociones morales es una combinación peligrosa.

the lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: "Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that "people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.