Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan David Haidt ( ; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He is a Professor of Business and Society and the Thomas Cooley Chair of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. Haidt's main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.

Haidt's main contributions to the field of psychology come from his theory of moral foundations, which attempts to explain the origins of human moral reasoning on the basis of innate "modules", resulting from biological and cultural evolution. The theory was later further developed to explain varitation in moral reasoning as it relates to political ideology, positing that people arrive at different political orientations due to prioritizing different sets of morals. Haidt's current research applies moral psychology to business ethics. The Righteous Mind (2012) on moral politics, and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) on rising political polarization, mental health, and college culture. In 2024, he published The Anxious Generation, arguing that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting has led to a "rewiring" of childhood and increased mental illness. Many of his conclusions and methodologies are controversial.

Biography

Early life and education Haidt was born to a secular Jewish family and was raised in Scarsdale, New York. His grandparents were Russian and Polish natives who immigrated as teenagers to the U.S., where they became garment workers. Haidt described his upbringing as "very assimilated", identifying as an atheist by age 15. His father, an Ashkenazi Jew, was a corporate lawyer. His family were generally New Deal liberals. where he received a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in the field in 1988 and 1992, respectively, on a graduate fellowship awarded by the National Science Foundation. His dissertation, titled "Moral judgment, affect, and culture, or, is it wrong to eat your dog?", was supervised by psychologists Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske. Inspired by anthropologist Paul Rozin, Haidt wrote his thesis on the morality of "harmless" but disgusting acts.

From July 1992 to June 1994, Haidt was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, where he studied cultural psychology under the supervision of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. where he conducted field studies and "encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal". Haidt also earned a reputation for challenging the general assumptions in moral psychology.

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, 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. In July 2010, he delivered a talk at the Edge Foundation on the new advances in moral psychology.

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. In 2013, he co-founded Ethical Systems, a non-profit organization which makes academic research on ethics more easily available to businesses. In 2015, Haidt co-founded Heterodox Academy, a non-profit organization that works to increase "viewpoint diversity" on college campuses, based on the belief that there is discrimination against conservatives at acedemic institutions. 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. which has been widely used to measure individual differences in sensitivity to disgust.

Moral elevation

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. Haidt called the emotion "moral elevation", Feelings of moral elevation cause increases in milk produced during lactation in breastfeeding mothers, suggesting the involvement of the hormone oxytocin.

Social intuitionism

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. 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.

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. 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: Later, in The Righteous Mind, a sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, was presented. More recently, Haidt and colleagues split the fairness foundation into equality (which liberals tend to endorse strongly) and proportionality (which conservatives tend to endorse strongly). In this work, they also developed the new revised Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 which has 36 items, measuring Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. He has also made the case for Ownership to be an additional foundation.

"The elephant and the rider" 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. 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. This metaphor is used extensively in both The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind.

Political views Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist, and expressed a desire to reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility.

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" citing political polarization and the "culture war".

In 2022 Haidt resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology after refusing to write an equity, inclusion, and anti-racism statement, which the Society requires presenters at its annual research conference to submit.

Haidt has received criticism for making homophobic comments, and for promoting pseudoscientific "social contagion" theories about transgender identities in his writing.

He has suggested that the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields is due to an innate difference in interests between men and women, and that the disparity is not necessarily an indication of discrimination. Haidt believes that "trigger warnings, affirmative action and accusations of sexist disparities weaken students through 'special treatment'".

Reception

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.

Although describing himself in 2007 as an atheist, Haidt argued at that time that religion contains psychological wisdom that can promote human flourishing, and that the New Atheists have themselves succumbed to moralistic dogma.

Students also noted the hypocrisy of inviting Haidt, who is known for his advocacy for freedom of speech and diversity of thought on college campuses, as NYU had banned live student speeches at the event, following complaints the year prior about a student speaker who criticized Israel.

On May 14, Haidt's speech went ahead at Yankee Stadium, where he was booed by the crowd.

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.

An expansion of an essay Haidt and Lukianoff wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, the book discusses political polarization and changing culture on college campuses and the effect on mental health of the changes.

A discussion of the effect of modern technology and parenting trends on children's mental health. Journalists Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri have described many of its cited studies as methodologically weak, and say they do not support the claims Haidt makes in the book.

Articles

Footnotes