Jonathan Haidt

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

And it's not just that 'we all need somebody to lean on'; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help.?.?.?.?We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

The world doesn\'t usually affect us directly. It\'s what we do with it. It\'s the filters that we put on it. That\'s the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.

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.

I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we\'re forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It\'s one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren\'t designed to think about these emergent entities. We\'re not good at it.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we\'re making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it\'s at.

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?

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.

I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and \'60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we\'re making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren\'t yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we\'re on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things.

To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there\'s a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you\'re in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.

Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.... Conflicts in relationships--having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse--is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don\'t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we\'re not aware of that. We feel like there\'s a circle of light. We\'re like the drunk who lost his keys and is looking under the streetlight, and the cop says, \"Where\'d you lose your keys?\" You say, \"Back in the alley, but the light\'s so much better over here.\" The divided self refers to the fact that we are basically animals with animal brains. These animal brains run our lives. They\'re very good at it.

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.

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.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams ... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

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.

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).

I think that we are passionate creatures who really live our fullest life when we are deeply engaged, when we feel successes, and exult in them, when we feel losses and tragedies and are hurt by them. So I came to the conclusion that Eastern ideas of withdrawal may not be right for modern Westerners. If you read the ancient texts, they\'re pretty severe. I mean, they really are not the sort of thing that you would think compatible with really throwing yourself into life and being a part of it.

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.

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 final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.

I think the greatest truths, the ones that you find in every culture that has any sort of history of reflection of writing, the greatest truth is that there\'s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That\'s the way Shakespeare put it. But you get basically the same idea from Buddha, from the Bhagavad Gita in India, and from the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I\'ve found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don\'t need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And the best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip, they are a stable of talk radio, and they offer a ready way for people to show that they share a common moral orientation.

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.

We are like a rider on top of a gigantic 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 often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it\'s terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don\'t have working brains yet.