Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

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.

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense.

conflicts in relationships—having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

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. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clapping by studying only the left hand.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

There's an old saying: "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

So now you know where to shop. Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and "consume" more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.

it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. 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.

Leo Tolstoy wrote: "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."19

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.

Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

let's imagine that 95 percent of the food on Earth magically disappears tonight, guaranteeing that almost all of us will starve to death within two months. Law and order collapse. Chaos and mayhem ensue. Who among us will still be alive a year from now? Will it be the biggest, strongest, and most violent individuals in each town? Or will it be the people who manage to work together in groups to monopolize, hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves?

If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants.

The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, "Joy's soul lies in the doing.

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.