Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason.

— Jonathan Haidt

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

— Jonathan Haidt

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 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 & ideological diversity.

— Jonathan Haidt

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.

— Jonathan Haidt

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster than genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

— Jonathan Haidt

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

Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

— Jonathan Haidt

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

— Jonathan Haidt