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person1963–

Jonathan Haidt

Disciplines:
psychology
writing
psychology/moral psychology
nyu stern

Summary

American social psychologist — NYU Stern School of Business — author of The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, and The Anxious Generation — founder of Heterodox Academy — the most publicly prominent moral psychologist.

Core Contribution

Creates Moral Foundations Theory — Haidt's framework (that human moral psychology is built on 6 foundations — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty — and that liberals use primarily care/fairness while conservatives use all 6) is the most empirically grounded explanation of why liberals and conservatives literally cannot understand each other morally.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • His rider-elephant metaphor (reason is the rider, emotion is the elephant — the rider cannot force the elephant anywhere it doesn't want to go) is the most widely used metaphor for the relationship between rational and emotional cognition in popular psychology; it originated in The Happiness Hypothesis and now appears in almost every popular treatment of behavioral science
  • Founded Heterodox Academy after noticing that his field (social psychology) had become ideologically homogeneous — surveys showed social psychologists were 85%+ liberal; he argued this was corrupting the science; the subsequent replication crisis (which affected precisely the areas of social psychology that were most ideologically charged) partially validated his concern

Notable Works & Achievements

The Happiness Hypothesis

The Righteous Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Anxious Generation

Historical Influences

David Hume E.O. Wilson Richard Shweder

Intellectual Lineage

New York Yale Pennsylvania VirginiaNYU Stern

Contemporaries & Peers

Greg Lukianoff Jonathan Rauch Steven Pinker

Minds Influenced

Moral psychology Political psychology

Intellectual Posterity

Moral Foundations Theory The Righteous Mind Heterodox Academy The Coddling The Anxious Generation

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