Jonathan Haidt
Biographic Data
| ID | 223017 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Haidt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Haidt |
| SIGNATURE | HAIDT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4598-8775 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2813 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
The online educational program ‘Perspectives’ improves affective polarization, intellectual humility, and conflict management
Solving the most pressing problems of our time requires broad collaboration across political party lines. Yet, the United States is experiencing record levels of affective polarization (distrust of the opposing political party). In response to these trends, we developed and tested an asynchronous online educational program rooted in psychological principles called Perspectives. In Study 1, using a large longitudinal dataset (total N = 35,209), we…
Supplemental Material for Morality Beyond the Weird: How the Nomological Network of Morality Varies Across Cultures
Morality beyond the Weird: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in …
Specification curve analysis shows that social media use is linked to poor mental health, especially among girls
An important 2019 paper applied a novel analytic technique called Specification Curve Analysis (SCA) to data from three large-scale community samples to investigate the association between adolescent technology use and mental health/well-being. The paper concluded that an association exists but is tiny, with median betas between -0.01 and -0.04. This association was reported to be smaller than links between mental health and various innocuous var…
Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness
INTRODUCTION: Several studies have documented increases in adolescent loneliness and depression in the U.S., UK, and Canada after 2012, but it is unknown whether these trends appear worldwide or whether they are linked to factors such as economic conditions, technology use, or changes in family size. METHODS: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey of 15- and 16-year-old students around the world included a 6-item measure…
Notes from the Editors: Apsr
veryone knows that social media can be an "outrage machine": a dark hole of blistering criticism and rejection that fosters "compare and despair" syndrome by inviting us to judge our inner selves against others' Instagram pics (Haidt and Twenge 2021). However, it also has the potential to connect people in new and dynamic ways, helping to build community across distance and difference
Underestimating digital media harm
Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle
Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism). Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist …
The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience
Various forms of self-loss have been described as aspects of mental illness (e.g., depersonalization disorder), but might self-loss also be related to mental health? In this integrative review and proposed organizational framework, we focus on self-transcendent experiences (STEs)-transient mental states marked by decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness. We first identify common psychological constructs that contain a self-…
Make business ethics a cumulative science
Why Concepts Creep to the Left
Last year I cowrote an essay with Greg Lukianoff titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Lukianoff and I analyzed several new concepts that have been spreading rapidly
Psychology and Business Ethics
We review the contribution of psychological science to the field of business ethics by discussing three major shifts that have occurred in scholarly work in the area. The first shift occurred from the cognitive‐developmental perspective, at a time when moral reasoning was thought to be a rational mental process. The second shift advanced the role of emotional, intuitive, and largely automatic processes in moral decision making. And the third, com…
Liberals Think More Analytically (More “Weird”) Than Conservatives
Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan summarized cultural differences in psychology and argued that people from one particular culture are outliers: people from societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD). This study shows that liberals think WEIRDer than conservatives. In five studies with more than 5,000 participants, we found that liberals think more analytically (an element of WEIRD thought) than moderates and …
Political diversity will improve social psychological science
Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has…
Liberals Condemn Sacrilege Too: The Harmless Desecration of Cerro Torre
Are social conservatives the only ones who use concerns about sacred objects or practices when making moral judgments, such as when they defend the “sanctity of marriage”? Or do liberals condemn sacrilege too? A third possibility is that all talk about sanctity and sacrilege is merely post hoc justification of moral judgments based solely on the perception of harm to sentient or anthropomorphized beings. We present evidence that liberals, like co…
Moral Foundations Theory
The righteous mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
A groundbreaking investigation into the origins of morality, which turns out to be the basis for religion and politics. The book explains the American culture wars and refutes the "New Atheists
The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum
We investigated the moral stereotypes political liberals and conservatives have of themselves and each other. In reality, liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do. 2,212 U.S. participants filled out the Moral F…
Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians
Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this …
Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting
In two large samples (combined N = 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the “Big Five” personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated the disgust sensitivity–conservatism relationship in an i…
Individual differences in the physical embodiment of care: Prosocially oriented women respond to cuteness by becoming more physically careful
Prosocially oriented individuals tend to respond to care-relevant stimuli in a highly embodied manner. Research on facets of prosocial orientation-such as empathy-and embodiment has focused on processes triggered by the perception of others' distress or pain. We suspect that the predisposition among prosocially oriented individuals toward having embodied responses to care-relevant stimuli might be more extensive. We tested the specific hypothesis…
Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes
Cuteness and Disgust: The Humanizing and Dehumanizing Effects of Emotion
Moral emotions are evolved mechanisms that function in part to optimize social relationships. We discuss two moral emotions— disgust and the “cuteness response”—which modulate social-engagement motives in opposite directions, changing the degree to which the eliciting entity is imbued with mental states (i.e., mentalized). Disgust-inducing entities are hypo-mentalized (i.e., dehumanized); cute entities are hyper-mentalized (i.e., “humanized”). Th…
Mapping the moral domain
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral int…
Morality
22.1 What is Morality About? 22.2 The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology 22.3 Intuitive Primacy (But Not Dictatorship) 22.4 Moral Thinking is for Social Doing 22.5 Morality Binds and Builds 22.6 The Many Foundations of a Broader Morality 22.7 Conclusion and Future Directions
Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/ca…
Mapping the moral domain
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral int…
Intuitive ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues
When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize
Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion
In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this persp…
Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog
Beyond Beliefs: Religions Bind Individuals Into Moral Communities
Social psychologists have often followed other scientists in treating religiosity primarily as a set of beliefs held by individuals. But, beliefs are only one facet of this complex and multidimensional construct. The authors argue that social psychology can best contribute to scholarship on religion by being relentlessly social. They begin with a social-functionalist approach in which beliefs, rituals, and other aspects of religious practice are …
The CAD triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity)
What (and Why) is Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. In this brief introduction, the authors give examples of current work in positive psychology and try to explain why the positive psychology movement has grown so quickly in just 5 years. They suggest that it filled a need: It guided researchers to understudied phenomena. The authors close …
Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes
Morality
Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay, I show how both of these l…
Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe
Highly hypnotizable participants were given a posthypnotic suggestion to feel a flash of disgust whenever they read an arbitrary word. They were then asked to rate moral transgressions described in vignettes that either did or did not include the disgust-inducing word. Two studies show that moral judgments can be made more severe by the presence of a flash of disgust. These findings suggest that moral judgments may be grounded in affectively lade…
Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship between Disgust and Morality
Core disgust" is a food related emotion that is rooted in evolution but is also a cultural product. Seven categories of disgust elicitors have been observed in an American sample. These include food, animals, body products, sexual de viance, body-envelope violations, poor hygiene, and contact with death. In addition, social concerns such as interpersonal contamination and socio- moral violations are also associated with disgust. Cross-cultural an…
Sexual Morality: The Cultures and Emotions of Conservatives and Liberals1
Political conservatives and liberals were interviewed about 3 kinds of sexual acts: homosexual sex, unusual forms of masturbation, and consensual incest between an adult brother and sister. Conservatives were more likely to moralize and to condemn these acts, but the differences were concentrated in the homosexual scenarios and were minimal in the incest scenarios. Content analyses reveal that liberals had a narrow moral domain, largely limited t…
The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience
Various forms of self-loss have been described as aspects of mental illness (e.g., depersonalization disorder), but might self-loss also be related to mental health? In this integrative review and proposed organizational framework, we focus on self-transcendent experiences (STEs)-transient mental states marked by decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness. We first identify common psychological constructs that contain a self-…
Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity: Comparisons and Evaluations of Paper-and-Pencil versus Behavioral Measures
When Getting Something Good is Bad: Even Three‐year‐olds React to Inequality
Fairness is central to morality. Previous research has shown that children begin to understand fairness between the ages of four and six, depending on the context and method used. Within distributive contexts, there is little clear evidence that children have a concept of fairness before the age of five. This research, however, has mostly examined children's explicit verbal responses to questions about unequal distributions—a method that often un…
Morality beyond the Weird: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in …
Core, animal reminder, and contamination disgust: Three kinds of disgust with distinct personality, behavioral, physiological, and clinical correlates
Underestimating digital media harm
Why Concepts Creep to the Left
Last year I cowrote an essay with Greg Lukianoff titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Lukianoff and I analyzed several new concepts that have been spreading rapidly
Confirming the Three-Factor Structure of the Disgust Scale-Revised in Eight Countries
The current study evaluates the factor structure of the Disgust Scale-Revised (DS-R) in eight countries: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States ( N = 2,606). Confirmatory factor analysis is used to compare two different models of the DS-R and to investigate the invariance of the factor structure of the DS-R across countries and gender. A three-factor solution consisting of three different but inte…
The online educational program ‘Perspectives’ improves affective polarization, intellectual humility, and conflict management
Solving the most pressing problems of our time requires broad collaboration across political party lines. Yet, the United States is experiencing record levels of affective polarization (distrust of the opposing political party). In response to these trends, we developed and tested an asynchronous online educational program rooted in psychological principles called Perspectives. In Study 1, using a large longitudinal dataset (total N = 35,209), we…
Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog
Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors
Social roles and the moral judgement of acts and omissions
Three experiments investigated how moral judgements of harmful acts and omissions are affected by information about social roles. Subjects were given vignettes in which the relationship between an actor and victim was varied along the dimensions of solidarity (e.g. friends versus strangers) and hierachy (e.g. superior versus equal; the terms are from Hamilton & Sanders, 1981). Subjects were asked to judge the morality of the actor in each case, b…
Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship between Disgust and Morality
Core disgust" is a food related emotion that is rooted in evolution but is also a cultural product. Seven categories of disgust elicitors have been observed in an American sample. These include food, animals, body products, sexual de viance, body-envelope violations, poor hygiene, and contact with death. In addition, social concerns such as interpersonal contamination and socio- moral violations are also associated with disgust. Cross-cultural an…
Social Functions of Emotions at Four Levels of Analysis
In this paper we integrate claims and findings concerning the social functions of emotions at the individual, dyadic, group, and cultural levels of analysis. Across levels of analysis theorists assume that emotions solve problems important to social relationships in the context of ongoing interactions. Theorists diverge, however, in their assumptions about the origins, defining characteristics, and consequences of emotions, and in their preferred…
Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity: Comparisons and Evaluations of Paper-and-Pencil versus Behavioral Measures
The CAD triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity)
The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a…
Sexual Morality: The Cultures and Emotions of Conservatives and Liberals1
Political conservatives and liberals were interviewed about 3 kinds of sexual acts: homosexual sex, unusual forms of masturbation, and consensual incest between an adult brother and sister. Conservatives were more likely to moralize and to condemn these acts, but the differences were concentrated in the homosexual scenarios and were minimal in the incest scenarios. Content analyses reveal that liberals had a narrow moral domain, largely limited t…
How (and where) does moral judgment work?
The Moral Emotions
Morality dignifies and elevates. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God said “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). In many of the world’s religious traditions, the good go up, to heaven or a higher rebirth, and the bad go down, to hell or a lower rebirth. Even among secular people, moral motives are spoken of as the “highest” and “noblest” motives, whereas greed and lust are regarded as “baser” or “l…
Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived.
Flourishing Under Fire: Resilience as a Prototype of Challenged Thriving-Carol Ryff and Burton Singer Turning Points as Opportunities for Personal Growth-Elaine Wethington Optimism and Flourishing-Chris Peterson and Edward Chang The Constructing of Meaning through Vital Engagement-Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Personal Goals, Life Meaning, and Virtue: Wellsprings of a Positive Life-Robert Emmons Toward a Positive Psychology of Relat…
Elevation and the positive psychology of morality.
Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion
In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this persp…
Intuitive ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues
Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe
Highly hypnotizable participants were given a posthypnotic suggestion to feel a flash of disgust whenever they read an arbitrary word. They were then asked to rate moral transgressions described in vignettes that either did or did not include the disgust-inducing word. Two studies show that moral judgments can be made more severe by the presence of a flash of disgust. These findings suggest that moral judgments may be grounded in affectively lade…
What (and Why) is Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. In this brief introduction, the authors give examples of current work in positive psychology and try to explain why the positive psychology movement has grown so quickly in just 5 years. They suggest that it filled a need: It guided researchers to understudied phenomena. The authors close …
The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology
People are selfish, yet morally motivated. Morality is universal, yet culturally variable. Such apparent contradictions are dissolving as research from many disciplines converges on a few shared principles, including the importance of moral intuitions, the socially functional (rather than truth-seeking) nature of moral thinking, and the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions that create diverse moral communities. I pr…
De l'unité des intuitions morales à la diversité des vertus
Assurément, la morale fait partie de la nature humaine tout en étant une construction culturelle. Cet article propose de réconcilier les approches biologistes et culturalistes en avançant qu'il existe (au moins) quatre modules psychologiques innés qui constituent la base sur laquelle toutes les cultures construisent des vertus spécifiques. Ces quatre modules sont constitués par les couples souffrance / compassion, réciprocité / équité, hiérarchie…
When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize
Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment
How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each case, the results showed that disgust can increase the…
The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture‐Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules
This chapter discusses how morality might be partially innate, meaning organized, to some extent, in advance of experience. It begins by arguing for a broader conception of morality and suggests that most of the discussion of innateness to date has not been about morality per se; it has been about whether the psychology of harm and fairness is innate. Five hypotheses about the origins of moral knowledge and value are considered, and one of them (…
Ideology and Intuition in Moral Education
We propose that social psychological findings on the intuitive bases of moral judgment have broad implications for moral education. The “five foundations theory of intuitive ethics” is applied to explain a longstanding rift in moral education as an i
Moral elevation can induce nursing
There is little extant research on the psychological or physiological response to witnessing good deeds. The authors call the emotional reaction to virtue "moral elevation" and the authors examined its effects on mother-infant dyads. Breastfeeding women who watched a morally elevating video were more likely to nurse their infants and were marginally more likely to hug them, compared to women who watched an equally enjoyable comedy video. Both of …
Beyond reciprocity: Gratitude and relationships in everyday life
The emotion of gratitude is thought to have social effects, but empirical studies of such effects have focused largely on the repaying of kind gestures. The current research focused on the relational antecedents of gratitude and its implications for relationship formation. The authors examined the role of naturally occurring gratitude in college sororities during a week of gift-giving from older members to new members. New members recorded reacti…
Psychology (43 works) · Social Psychology (37 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (36 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (24 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (20 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (14 works)