Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.”

— Jonathan Haidt

202. “Hiving comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding – the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups.”

— Jonathan Haidt

203. “You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.11 Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

204. “European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust.”

— Jonathan Haidt

205. “Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.14.”

— Jonathan Haidt

206. “If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

207. “Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

208. “The results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

209. “There’s the unusual stuff that psychopaths do – impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood – and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals.”

— Jonathan Haidt

210. “This is what we mean when we talk about safetyism. Safety is good, of course, and keeping others safe from harm is virtuous.”

— Jonathan Haidt

211. “The Aztec word for the psilocybin mushroom was teonanacatl, which means literally “god’s flesh”; when it was eaten in religious ceremonies, it gave many the experience of a direct encounter with God.”

— Jonathan Haidt

212. “Passionate love does not turn into companionate love. Passionate love and companionate love are two separate processes, and they have different time courses.”

— Jonathan Haidt

213. “By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress.”

— Jonathan Haidt

214. “But from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, rural and working-class voters were in fact voting for their moral interests. They don’t want to eat at The True Taste restaurant, and they don’t want their nation to devote itself primarily to the care of victims and the pursuit of social justice.”

— Jonathan Haidt

215. “Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience.”

— Jonathan Haidt

216. “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

217. “Having once reviewed the literature on the catharsis hypothesis, I knew that there was no evidence for it.31 Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.”

— Jonathan Haidt

218. “When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression.”

— Jonathan Haidt

219. “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

220. “So the next time a salesman gives you a free gift or consultation, or makes a concession of any sort, duck. Don’t let him press your reciprocity button. The best way out, Cialdini advises, is to fight reciprocity with reciprocity. If you can reappraise the salesman’s move for what it is – an effort to exploit you – you’ll feel entitled to exploit him right back. Accept the gift or concession with a feeling of victory – you are exploiting an exploiter – not mindless obligation.”

— Jonathan Haidt

221. “The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

222. “With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as what you’re visiting.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

224. “We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others – that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can’t go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.”

— Jonathan Haidt

225. “There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

226. “I believe it is dangerous for the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. However, I also believe that life in a society that entirely ignored the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying.”

— Jonathan Haidt

227. “It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.”

— Jonathan Haidt

228. “We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.”

— Jonathan Haidt

229. “But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.”

— Jonathan Haidt

230. “Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the “harm principle,” which John Stuart Mill had put forth in 1859: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

— Jonathan Haidt

231. “Or might that framework itself alter a student’s reactions to ancient texts, creating a feeling of threat and a stress response to what otherwise would have been experienced merely as discomfort or dislike?”

— Jonathan Haidt

232. “Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they are pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate.”

— Jonathan Haidt

233. “Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition31 that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.32 The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice. The rider is perfectly normal – he does strategic reasoning quite well. But the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.”

— Jonathan Haidt

234. “Millennials are getting a bad rap these days, as many people erroneously attribute recent campus trends to them. This is a book about the very different attitudes toward speech and safety that spread across universities as the Millennials were leaving. We are not blaming iGen. Rather, we are proposing that today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility.”

— Jonathan Haidt

235. “But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, 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.”

— Jonathan Haidt

236. “Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.”

— Jonathan Haidt

237. “Self-interested employees are Glauconians, far more interested in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company.43 In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely.”

— Jonathan Haidt

238. “Conservatives, in contrast, hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about.56 For example, small business owners overwhelmingly support the Republican Party57 in part because they resent the government telling them how to run their businesses under its banner of protecting workers, minorities, consumers, and the environment.”

— Jonathan Haidt

239. “Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon... none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.”

— Jonathan Haidt

240. “Millon et al. 1998. Psychopaths often care what others think, but only as part of a plan to manipulate or exploit others. They don’t have emotions such as shame and guilt that make it painful for them when others see through their lies and come to hate them. They don’t have an automatic unconscious sociometer.”

— Jonathan Haidt

241. “Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.”

— Jonathan Haidt

242. “Whether it is called nobility, virtue, or divinity, and whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive sacredness, holiness, or some ineffable goodness in others, and in nature.”

— Jonathan Haidt

243. “Love is a kind of insanity, and many people have, while crazed with passion, ruined their lives and those of others.”

— Jonathan Haidt

244. “Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.”

— Jonathan Haidt

245. “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.”

— Jonathan Haidt

246. “I believe that an evolutionary approach specifying the foundation of our moral sense can allow us to appreciate Hindu and Muslim cultures where women are veiled and seem to us to lead restricted lives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

247. “Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life.”

— Jonathan Haidt

248. “Dividing into teams doesn’t necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.”

— Jonathan Haidt

249. “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

250. “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?”

— Jonathan Haidt