Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan David Haidt (/haɪt/; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business.[1] His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
Jonathan Haidt
Jayne Riew
2
Haidt's main scientific contributions come from the psychological field of moral foundations theory,[2] which attempts to explain the evolutionary origins of human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, gut feelings rather than logic and reason.[3] The theory was later extended to explain the different moral reasoning and how they relate to political ideology, with different political orientations prioritizing different sets of morals.[4] The research served as a foundation for future books on various topics.
Haidt has written four books for general audiences: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006) explores the relationship between ancient philosophies and modern science;[5] The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) examines how morality is shaped by emotion and intuition more than by reasoning, and why differing political groups have different notions of right and wrong;[6] The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), co-written with Greg Lukianoff, explores the rising political polarization and changing culture on college campuses, and its effects on mental health; and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) makes the case that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness.
Biography[edit]
Haidt was born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York.[7][8][9] He is of Jewish descent (although an atheist[10]), and his grandparents were immigrants from Russia and Poland.[11] Haidt received a BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1985, and an MA in psychology in 1988 and a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then studied cultural psychology at the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow, supervised by Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske (at the University of Pennsylvania), and cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder (University of Chicago). At Shweder's suggestion, he visited Orissa, India, to continue his research.[12] In 1995, Haidt was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he worked until 2011, winning four awards for teaching, including a statewide award conferred by the Governor of Virginia.[13]
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. 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 Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching.[14]
In 2011, Haidt moved to New York University's Stern School of Business as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, relocating to New York City with his wife, Jayne, and two children.[8][1] In 2013, he co-founded Ethical Systems, a non-profit collaboration dedicated to making academic research on ethics widely available to businesses.[15] In 2015, Haidt co-founded Heterodox Academy, a non-profit organization that works to increase viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and productive disagreement.[16] In 2018, Haidt and Richard Reeves co-edited an illustrated edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, titled All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated (illustrated by Dave Cicirelli). Haidt's current research applies moral psychology to business ethics.[1]
Political views[edit]
Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections, and 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.[34] Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist.[35][36][37]
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.[6] He serves on the advisory boards of RepresentUs, a non-partisan anti-corruption organization; the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and braverangels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization.
In a 2011 Ted talk, Haidt argued that liberals and conservatives differ in their value systems and that disciplines like psychology have biases against conservative viewpoints.[38]
In 2019, Haidt argued that there is a "very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy".[39]
Reception[edit]
Haidt was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine in 2012, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine in 2013.[40][41]
While himself an atheist,[10] Haidt has argued that religion contains psychological wisdom that can promote human flourishing, and that the New Atheists have themselves succumbed to moralistic dogma.[10] These contentions elicited a variety of responses in a 2007 online debate sponsored by the website Edge. PZ Myers praised the first part of Haidt's essay while disagreeing with his criticism of the New Atheists; Sam Harris criticized Haidt for his perceived obfuscation of harms caused by religion; Michael Shermer praised Haidt; and biologist David Sloan Wilson joined Haidt in criticizing the New Atheists for dismissing the notion that religion is an evolutionary adaptation.[10]
David Mikics of Tablet magazine profiled Haidt as "the high priest of heterodoxy" and praised his work to increase intellectual diversity at universities through Heterodox Academy.[42]
In 2020, Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic, "Over the past decade, no one has added more to my understanding of how we think about, discuss, and debate politics and religion than Jonathan Haidt." He added that, "In his own field, in his own way, Jonathan Haidt is trying to heal our divisions and temper some of the hate, to increase our wisdom and understanding, and to urge us to show a bit more compassion toward one another."[43]
