Jonathan Haidt

Education and career

Haidt was born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York, to a liberal Jewish family. He earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1985, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then studied cultural psychology at the University of Chicago as a post-doctoral fellow. His supervisors were Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske (at the University of Pennsylvania) and cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder (University of Chicago). During his post-doctoral appointment, Haidt won a Fulbright fellowship to fund three months of research on morality in Orissa, India. In 1995, Haidt was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he worked until 2011, winning four awards for teaching, including a statewide award conferred by the Governor of Virginia.

In 1999, Haidt became active in the new field of positive psychology, studying positive moral emotions. This work led to the publication of an edited volume, titled Flourishing, in 2003, and then to The Happiness Hypothesis in 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis introduced the widely cited metaphor that the mind is divided into parts, like a small rider (conscious reasoning) on a very large elephant (automatic and intuitive processes). In 2004, Haidt began to apply moral psychology to the study of politics, doing research on the psychological foundations of ideology. This work led to the publication in 2012 of The Righteous Mind. Haidt spent the 2007–2008 academic year at Princeton University as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching.

In 2011, Haidt moved to the New York University Stern School of Business. Haidt's current research applies moral psychology to business ethics. In 2013, he co-founded Ethical Systems, a non-profit collaboration dedicated to making academic research on ethics widely available to businesses. He is also engaged in efforts to foster greater political civility and to increase the ideological diversity of social psychology and other social sciences. Haidt is writing a book on capitalism that will be published in 2019.

Haidt is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy, and Ethical Systems as well as YourMorals.org, and CivilPolitics.org.

Research contributions

Haidt's research on morality has led to publications and theoretical advances in four primary areas:

Social intuitionism

Haidt's principal line of research since graduate school has been on the nature and mechanisms of moral judgment. In the 1990s, he developed the social intuitionist model, which posits that moral judgment is mostly based on automatic processes–moral intuitions–rather than on conscious reasoning. People engage in reasoning largely to find evidence to support their initial intuitions. Haidt's main paper on the social intuitionist model, "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail", has been cited over 6,000 times.

Moral disgust

Together with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley, Haidt developed the Disgust Scale, which has been widely used to measure individual differences in sensitivity to disgust. Haidt, Rozin, and McCauley have written extensively on the psychology of disgust as an emotion that began as a guardian of the mouth (against pathogens), but then expanded during biological and cultural evolution to become a guardian of the body more generally, and of the social and moral order.

Moral elevation

With Sara Algoe, Haidt demonstrated that exposure to stories about moral beauty (the opposite of moral disgust) cause a common set of responses, including warm, loving feelings, calmness, and a desire to become a better person. Haidt called the emotion "moral elevation", as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson, who had described the emotion in detail in a letter discussing the benefits of reading great literature. Feelings of moral elevation cause lactation in breast-feeding mothers, suggesting the involvement of the hormone oxytocin. There is now a large body of research on elevation and related emotions.

Moral foundations theory

In 2004, Haidt began to extend the social intuitionist model to specify the most important categories of moral intuition. The result was moral foundations theory, co-developed with Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, and based in part on the writings of Richard Shweder. The theory posits that there are (at least) six innate moral foundations, upon which cultures develop their various moralities, just as there are five innate taste receptors on the tongue, which cultures have used to create many different cuisines. The six are care/harm, fairness (equality)/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. The theory was developed to explain cross-cultural differences in morality, but Haidt and his collaborators at YourMorals.org have found that the theory works well to explain political differences as well. Liberals (leftists) tend to endorse primarily the care and equality foundations, whereas conservatives (rightists) tend to endorse all six foundations more equally.

Elephant and rider metaphor

The observations of social intuitionism–that intuitions come first and rationalization second–led to the elephant and rider metaphor. The rider represents the conscious controlled processes and the elephant represents all of the automatic processes. The metaphor corresponds to Systems 1 and 2 described in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. This metaphor is used extensively in both The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind.

Political centrism

In chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind, Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections. But in chapter 12 of The Righteous Mind Haidt argues that each of the major political groups – conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Since 2012 Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist. Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge the political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007 He founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility. He serves on the advisory boards of Represent.Us., a non-partisan anticorruption organization, the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty and Better-Angels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization. Three of his four TED talks are on the topic of understanding and reducing political divisions. His 2012 TED talk on “How common threats can make common ground” introduced a set of ideas on how to use moral psychology to foster collaboration among partisan opponents. This talk became the basis of a bipartisan working group of poverty researchers, which Haidt helped to convene, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. In 2015 the working group published a report titled: Opportunity, responsibility, and security: A consensus plan for reducing poverty and restoring the American dream.

Criticism

Neuroscientist Sam Harris criticized Haidt by arguing that Haidt's defense of religion ends up justifying human sacrifice and superstition. In chapter 9 of The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt extends a comprehensive inquiry on the role of religion in society, concluding, merely, that the scientific community should recognize the evolutionary origins of religiosity, and accept its potential cognitive implications (p. 211).

Social psychologist John Jost wrote that Haidt "mocks the liberal vision of a tolerant, pluralistic, civil society, but, ironically, this is precisely where he wants to end up."

Journalist Chris Hedges wrote a review of The Righteous Mind in which he accused Haidt of supporting "social Darwinism". In his response, Haidt disagreed with Hedges's reading of the book, most notably that Hedges took quotations from conservatives and inappropriately attributed them to Haidt.

Books

Selected publications