Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism—we think that minds and bodies are different but equally real sorts of things—and so we readily believe that we have immortal souls housed in our temporary bodies.

This principle, called "negativity bias,"13 shows up all over psychology. In marital interactions, it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or

two different kinds of social capital: bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups.

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of "higher" and "lower." It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74

There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.

Todos descendemos de personas que pertenecieron a grupos que fueron constantemente mejores para ganar esa competición. El tribalismo es nuestra herencia evolutiva para agruparnos y prepararnos para el conflicto intergrupal.

On issue after issue, it's as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such "reforms" may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

When you refute a person's argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

Manichaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin.

Damasio's patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making.

The third-century Persian prophet Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil).

No man, woman or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.

Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it's difficult-perhaps impossible-to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix.

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).

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

Human rationality depends on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.

who is nice to them. Puppies can do that too. But these 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.

You may not agree, but you'll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.

There's The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options.

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).

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles