Jonathan Haidt

Haidt received 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 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.[16] 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.[17]

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.[18]

In 2011, Haidt moved to New York University Stern School of Business as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership.[19] In 2013, he co-founded Ethical Systems, a non-profit collaboration dedicated to making academic research on ethics widely available to businesses.[20] In 2015, Haidt co-founded Heterodox Academy, a non-profit organization that works to increase viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and productive disagreement. 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.

Together with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley, Haidt developed the Disgust Scale,[22] which has been widely used to measure individual differences in sensitivity to disgust. Haidt, Rozin, and McCauley have written 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.[23]

With Sara Algoe, Haidt argued 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.[24] Haidt called the emotion moral elevation,[25] as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson, who had described the emotion in detail in a letter discussing the benefits of reading great literature.[26] Feelings of moral elevation cause lactation in breastfeeding mothers,[27] suggesting the involvement of the hormone oxytocin. There is now a large body of research on elevation and related emotions.

Haidt's principal line of research 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.[28] 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 7,800 times.[29]

A simple graphic depicting survey data from the United States intended to support moral foundations theory.

In 2004, Haidt began to extend the social intuitionist model to identify what he considered to be the most important categories of moral intuition.[30] The resulting moral foundations theory, co-developed with Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, and based in part on the writings of Richard Shweder, was intended to explain cross-cultural differences in morality. The theory posited that there are at least five 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 five values are:[31]

1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation.

Haidt and his collaborators asserted that the theory also works well to explain political differences. According to Haidt, liberals tend to endorse primarily the care and fairness foundations, whereas conservatives tend to endorse all foundations more equally.[31] Later, in The Righteous Mind, a sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, was presented.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006) draws on ancient philosophical ideas in light of contemporary scientific research to extract potential lessons and how they may apply to everyday life.[32] The book poses "ten Great Ideas" on happiness espoused by philosophers and thinkers of the past—Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Jesus and others—and considers what modern scientific research has to say regarding these ideas.[33]

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) draws on Haidt's previous research on moral foundations theory. It argues that moral judgments arise not from logical reason, but from gut feelings, asserting that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have different intuitions about right and wrong because they prioritize different values

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, expands on an essay the authors wrote for The Atlantic in 2015.[34] The book explores the rising political polarization and changing culture on college campuses and its effects on mental health. It also explore changes in childhood, including the rise of "fearful parenting," the decline of unsupervised play, and the effects of social media in the last decade.[35]

One widely-cited metaphor throughout Haidt's books is that of the elephant and the rider. His observations of social intuitionism—the notion that intuitions come first and rationalization second—led to the metaphor described in his work.[36] The rider represents consciously controlled processes, and the elephant represents automatic processes. The metaphor corresponds to Systems 1 and 2 described in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.[37] This metaphor is used extensively in both The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind.

• 2002. Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well Lived, co-edited with Corey L. M. Keyes. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. ISBN 978-1-55798-930-7.
• 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02802-3.
• 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6.
• 2018. All Minus One: John Stuart Mill’s Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated, co-edited with Richard V. Reeves. New York: Heterodox Academy. ISBN 978-0-69206831-1. OCLC 1038535520.
• 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. New York City: Penguin Press. ISBN 978-0-73522489-6. OCLC 1007552624.[47]

• 1993. "Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?" with S. Koller, and M. Dias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:613–28.
• 2001. "The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment." Psychological Review 108:814–34.
• 2005. "Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe," with T. Wheatley. Psychological Science 16:780–84.
• 2007. "The new synthesis in moral psychology." Science 316:998–1002.
• 2008. "Disgust," with P. Rozin and C. R. McCauley. Pp. 757–76 in Handbook of Emotions (3rd ed.), edited by M. Lewis, J. Haviland, and L. F. Barrett. New York: Guilford Press.
• 2009. "Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations," with J. Graham and B. Nosek. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96:1029–46.
• 2010. "Morality," with S. Kesebir. Pp. 797–832 in Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.), edited by S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• 2012. "Understanding Libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians," with Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, and Peter Ditto. PLoS ONE 7(8):e42366. [48]
• 2015. "Ideological diversity will improve psychological science," with José L. Duarte, Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38:e130.[49]
• 2017. "Make business ethics a cumulative science," with L. Trevino. Nature Human Behavior 1. doi:10.1038/s41562-016-0027