Jonathan Haidt facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jonathan Haidt
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Haidt in 2012
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| Born | October 19, 1963 New York City, U.S.
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| Education | Yale University (BA) University of Pennsylvania (MA, PhD) |
| Known for |
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Notable work
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The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) The Righteous Mind (2012) The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) The Anxious Generation (2024) |
| Awards | Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology (2001) American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Social psychology Moral psychology |
| Institutions | University of Chicago University of Virginia New York University |
| Thesis | Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog? (1992) |
| Doctoral advisor | Jonathan Baron Alan Fiske |
Jonathan David Haidt (/haɪt/; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He teaches about ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. Haidt mainly studies the psychology of morality and moral emotions. This means he looks at how people decide what is right or wrong, and how their feelings play a part.
One of Haidt's biggest ideas is the moral foundations theory. This theory tries to explain where our ideas about right and wrong come from. It suggests that our moral judgments are based on natural, gut feelings, not just on logic. He believes these feelings developed over time. This theory also helps explain why people with different political views often have different ideas about what is morally important.
Haidt has written several books for everyone, not just scientists. These include The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), which connects old philosophies with modern science. The Righteous Mind (2012) talks about how our morals affect politics. The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) looks at why people are becoming more divided and how it affects mental health and college life. In 2024, he wrote The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones and very protective parenting are changing childhood and causing more mental health problems.
Contents
About Jonathan Haidt
Early Life and Education
Jonathan Haidt grew up in Scarsdale, New York. His family was Jewish, but they were not very religious. His grandparents came to the United States from Russia and Poland. Haidt said he identified as an atheist by the time he was 15. His father was a lawyer, and his family generally supported liberal political ideas.
When he was 17, Haidt read a play called Waiting for Godot. This made him think deeply about life's meaning. He went to Yale University and studied philosophy, graduating in 1985. After a short time as a computer programmer, he went to the University of Pennsylvania. There, he earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in psychology. His Ph.D. paper was about moral judgment and culture. He explored if it was wrong to eat your dog, even if it caused no harm.
After getting his Ph.D., Haidt studied cultural psychology at the University of Chicago. He also spent time at the National Institute of Mental Health. He researched moral ideas in India, where he saw a society with different traditions.
Academic Career and Contributions
In 1995, Haidt became a professor at the University of Virginia. He taught there until 2011 and won several teaching awards. He became known for challenging common ideas in moral psychology. His research focused on how emotions, like disgust and a feeling called elevation, shape our morals. This work led to his book The Happiness Hypothesis in 2006.
Around 1999, Haidt started working in a new field called positive psychology. This area studies positive emotions and strengths. In 2004, he began to connect moral psychology to politics. This research helped him write The Righteous Mind, which came out in 2012.
In 2011, Haidt moved to New York University's Stern School of Business. He became a professor there, focusing on ethical leadership. In 2013, he helped start Ethical Systems, a group that shares research on ethics with businesses. In 2015, he co-founded Heterodox Academy. This group works to encourage different viewpoints and respectful disagreement.
Key Ideas and Research
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Jonathan Haidt's research has led to important ideas in four main areas of morality.
Moral Disgust
Haidt and his colleagues studied the emotion of disgust. They created a scale to measure how sensitive people are to disgust. They found that disgust started as a way to protect us from bad food. But over time, it grew to protect us from things that threaten our bodies, our society, and our moral rules.
Moral Elevation
Haidt also studied an emotion he called moral elevation. This feeling is the opposite of disgust. When people hear stories about kindness or moral beauty, they often feel warm, loving, and calm. They also want to become better people themselves. Haidt named this emotion after Thomas Jefferson, who described similar feelings when reading great books. Studies even show that this feeling can increase milk production in breastfeeding mothers, possibly due to a hormone called oxytocin.
Social Intuitionism
Haidt's main research idea is the social intuitionist model. He believes that our moral judgments are mostly based on quick, automatic feelings, which he calls moral intuitions. We don't usually use careful reasoning first. Instead, we often use our reasoning to find reasons to support the gut feelings we already have. His important paper on this idea, "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail," has been widely read.
Moral Foundations Theory
In 2004, Haidt expanded his social intuitionist model to explain different types of moral intuitions. With his co-workers, he developed the moral foundations theory. This theory tries to explain why moral ideas differ across cultures. It suggests there are at least five basic moral "tastes" that all humans have. Just like we have taste buds for sweet or sour, we have these moral foundations. Cultures then build their different moral systems on these foundations. The five main values are:
- Care/harm: Protecting others from harm.
- Fairness/cheating: Treating people justly.
- Loyalty/betrayal: Sticking with your group.
- Authority/subversion: Respecting leaders and traditions.
- Sanctity/degradation: Keeping things pure and avoiding disrespect.
Haidt and his team also believe this theory helps explain political differences. For example, he suggests that liberals tend to focus more on care and fairness. On the other hand, conservatives tend to value all five foundations more equally. Later, in his book The Righteous Mind, he added a sixth foundation: Liberty/oppression (freedom versus being controlled).
The Elephant and the Rider
One famous idea Haidt uses in his books is the metaphor of "the elephant and the rider." This helps explain his idea that our intuitions come first, and our reasoning comes second. The rider represents our conscious, controlled thinking. The elephant represents our automatic, gut feelings. The rider tries to guide the elephant, but the elephant is much bigger and stronger. This means our feelings often lead the way, and our logical thoughts follow to explain why we feel that way.
Views on Politics
Haidt has shared that he started studying political psychology to understand why people vote the way they do. He believes that different political groups—like conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—all have important ideas. He thinks that the best solutions come from different ideas being discussed. Since 2012, Haidt has described himself as a political centrist, meaning he holds views that are in the middle of the political spectrum.
Haidt has worked to reduce political division in the United States. In 2007, he created a website called CivilPolitics.org. This site shares research on how to make political discussions more respectful. He also advises groups like RepresentUs, which fights corruption, and Braver Angels, which works to bring people from different political sides together.
In a 2011 TED Talk, Haidt explained that liberals and conservatives have different values. He also suggested that fields like psychology might sometimes have biases against conservative viewpoints. In 2019, Haidt expressed concern that American democracy could face serious challenges in the future.
Books by Jonathan Haidt
The Happiness Hypothesis
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006) explores old philosophical ideas and compares them with modern scientific research. The book looks at "ten Great Ideas" about happiness from thinkers like Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and Buddha. Then, it examines what modern science says about these ideas and how they can apply to our daily lives.
The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) builds on Haidt's earlier research on moral foundations theory. It argues that our moral judgments come from gut feelings, not just from logic. The book suggests that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have different ideas about right and wrong because they value different things.
The Coddling of the American Mind
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) was co-written with Greg Lukianoff. This book looks at the increasing political division and changes in college culture. It also explores how these changes affect mental health. The book discusses how parenting has become more fearful, how kids play outside less, and the effects of social media.
The Anxious Generation
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) looks at how modern technology and parenting styles affect children's mental health. Haidt suggests that two main things have changed childhood experiences and led to more mental health problems in young people. These are the widespread use of smartphones and the rise of overprotective parenting. He argues that these factors have changed how children grow up, which he calls a "rewiring" of childhood. He believes this transformation began in the late 2000s and has harmed children's well-being.
Some journalists have reviewed the evidence in The Anxious Generation. They suggest that some of the studies Haidt mentions might not fully support all his claims.
Images for kids
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Haidt in 2012
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Haidt speaking at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville (March 19, 2012).
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A simple graphic showing survey data from the United States that supports moral foundations theory.
See also
In Spanish: Jonathan Haidt para niños
