Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

you don't usually help the bees by destroying the hive. Finally

Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors.

Morality is like taste in many ways—an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius.

After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43

he simply picked the cages that produced the most eggs in each generation. Then he bred all of the hens in those cages to produce the next generation. Within just three generations, aggression levels plummeted. By the sixth generation, the death rate fell from the horrific baseline of 67 percent to a mere 8 percent. Total eggs produced per hen jumped from 91 to 237, mostly because the hens started living longer, but also because they laid more eggs

the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.60

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50

people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures, including measures of moral psychology

Como los chimpancés, la gente rastrea y recuerda quién está por encima de quién. Cuando las personas dentro de un orden jerárquico actúan de maneras que niegan o subvierten ese orden, lo podemos sentir instantáneamente, aunque nosotros mismos no hayamos sido directamente perjudicados.

first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

had found evidence for Hume's claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation.

you don't really have to be good at everything. Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, ond often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.

The difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning.

This is how the press secretary works on trivial issues where there is no motivation to support one side or the other. If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion

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.

genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. The rate at which genes changed in response to selection pressures began rising around 40,000 years ago, and the curve got steeper and steeper after 20,000 years ago.

The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?

WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST

If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?