Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years.4 There's a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion.

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.

John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: "A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."44

Morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular being; in the same manner as the distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of each sense or organ. Moral perceptions therefore, ought not to be classed with the operations of the understanding, but with the tastes or sentiments.

although the controlled system does not conform to behaviorist principles, it also has relatively little power to cause behavior. The automatic system was shaped by natural selection to trigger quick and reliable action, and it includes parts of the brain that make us feel pleasure and pain (such as the orbitofrontal cortex) and that trigger survival-related motivations (such as the hypothalamus).

skilled arguers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views."50

each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons.

If evolution gave men and women different sets of desires and skills, for example, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions. If nativism could be used to justify existing power structures, then nativism must be wrong. (Again, this is a logical error, but this is the way righteous minds work.)

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.

surprisingly sharp discontinuity that begins around birth-year 1995. She calls those born in and after 1995 "iGen," short for "internet Generation." (Others use the term "Generation Z.") Twenge shows that iGen suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age—and higher rates of suicide.

We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.

Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all.

Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a "sociometer" that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner.

And human babies, whose brains are so enormous that a child must be pushed out through the birth canal a year before he or she can walk are bets so huge that a woman can't even put her chips on the table by herself.

Los estudiantes universitarios de hoy han vivido unos tiempos extraordinarios y, en consecuencia, muchos de ellos han desarrollado una extraordinaria pasión por la justicia social.

people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance. This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world.

Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages

moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

Marcel Proust wrote that "the only true voyage . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes."41

One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel—sometimes in horror—at your inability to control your own actions.

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to "do" morality, just as it's designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.35 As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.