🧠🤝🐘 Jonathan Haidt
🤖 AI Summary
👨🏫 Jonathan Haidt is a prominent American social psychologist and author. He is currently the 🎓 Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. 🧠 His work primarily focuses on the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
🌟 Some of his key contributions and ideas include:
- ❤️🩹⚖️🤝👑😇🗽 Moral Foundations Theory: 🧠 This theory, which he co-developed, proposes that human moral reasoning is not based solely on logic, but is rooted in a set of innate, intuitive foundations. These foundations include care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. ⚖️ A sixth foundation, liberty/oppression, has also been added. 🌍 He uses this framework to explain why people with different political ideologies often have different moral priorities.
- 🐶 The Social Intuitionist Model: This model argues that moral judgments are primarily driven by fast, automatic moral intuitions, and that moral reasoning is often used after the fact to justify those initial intuitions. 🐕🦺 He describes this using the metaphor of an “emotional dog and its rational tail.”
✍️ Haidt is also known for his widely-read books that explore these concepts for a general audience:
- 😀📜 The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006): 🧘♂️ This book explores the intersection of ancient philosophical ideas and modern psychological research on happiness.
- 😇🧠 😇🧠 The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012): 🕊️ This book delves into Moral Foundations Theory and applies it to the deep divisions in political and religious life.
- 🤕👶 The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), co-authored with Greg Lukianoff: 😟 This book examines the rise of “safetyism” and its impact on mental health and viewpoint diversity on college campuses.
- 📱😥 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024): 😢 This book argues that the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, particularly with the advent of smartphones and social media, has contributed to a sharp increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents.
🤝 Beyond his academic work and books, Haidt is also a co-founder of organizations like Heterodox Academy, which advocates for viewpoint diversity and open inquiry in higher education.
💬 Gemini (flash-2.5) Prompt
Jonathan Haidt