Jonathan Haidt Quotes - Page 3

Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that's not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us.

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.

We scientists have way too much a tendency to simplify problems. I guess it actually comes to us naturally. Take the simplest unit, separate out all the confusing, external factors. Study it. Make sure you understand it. And in psychology that means the person studying the individual. But if you want to study our social nature, if you want to study processes that will lead to war and peace, you don't learn all that much by looking at the single individual. A lot of the important things are emergent facts about us, things that you can only see when you get a lot of us interacting.

Religion and science, for example, are often though to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, physics, but many were good psychologists.

If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

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.

Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.

We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.

science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk.

Psychotherapy can help some people, especially people who are neurotic, who are always making problems for themselves. We are like a rider on an elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll go where he wants. They need to get a better relationship between the rider and the elephant. In part, you get it just from watching yourself stumble around in life, make mistakes, then read a little psychology and stop blaming yourself. Realize that I am flawed. I am complicated. I am divided, and I'm doing the best I can.