Jonathan Haidt · 419 pages
Rating: (18.1K votes)
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. 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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“...human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“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?”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?”28 Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“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.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt
Born place: in Scarsdale, New York, The United States
Born date October 19, 1963
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“The front door slammed and Dad said, “Aurora, sure you aren’t expecting a package?”
I leaned back to find him army-crawling under the window in the living room. Like all dads do. “Already told you no, Rambo.”
“The new mailman is back.” Dad reached up and pulled the curtains closed before standing up and peeking out. “Won’t come to the door.”
“M shot a tranquillizer dart at the last guy.” Mom gave a tired look at M who shrugged unapologetically. “The fact that there’s a new one willing to be on our sidewalk is a miracle. Don’t scare him off, Clyde.”
Dad tried to block me when I went for the curtains. “He won’t let me sign for your package. Demanded you come out in person.”
“I’ll get my tranq gun!” M made for her room.
“Don’t you dare!” Mom chased her.
I swished back the curtains to get a look at the petrifying postman.
“I find his interest in my teenage daughter creepy,” Dad grumbled.
Oh, he had no idea.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Drop Dead Demons
“A crucible's craving is her mechanic's mandate.”
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“Epic is a state of mind.”
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