Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary

You can learn more about cultivating the intellectual virtues and about how to incorporate them in schools at intellectualvirtues.org and in the writings of Jason Baehr, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and one of the founders of the Intellectual Virtues Academy.32

Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it's your belief, then it's your possession—your child, almost—and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.19

Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60

The International Debate Education Association has suggestions for how to create a debate club.33 Students (and their parents and teachers) can also watch Intelligence Squared debates to see skilled debaters in action.34

Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-zum games.

but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its "telos"—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife.

The Weirdest People in the World?"2 The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.

Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."61

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? … You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye. (MATTHEW 7:3–5)

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.

acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.

first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

my approach starts with Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistenly than to equivalent good things. We can't just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.

A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long

sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.66

Our brains, like rat brains, are wired so that food and sex give us little bursts of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is the brains's way of making un enjoy the activities that are good for the survival of our genes.