Foreign thinker
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan HaidtMoral and Social PsychologyAmerican
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle, and it blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
Life and Thought
Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is renowned for his research on the intuitive foundations of morality, Moral Foundations Theory, and how political and cultural disagreements take shape. Haidt is the author of bestselling books such as "The Righteous Mind" and "The Anxious Generation," and has delivered several influential TED talks.
Jonathan David Haidt was born on October 19, 1963, in New York and raised in a secular Jewish family in Scarsdale, New York. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University in 1985 and then received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. After research fellowships at the University of Chicago and in India, he taught in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia from 1995 to 2011, before joining New York University's Stern School of Business, where he currently holds the Thomas Cooley Chair in Ethical Leadership.
Haidt began his research by studying negative moral emotions such as disgust, later turning to positive emotions like admiration and moral elevation. His most significant contribution is Moral Foundations Theory, which demonstrates that human moral judgments are based more on intuitive and emotional foundations than on rational reasoning, and that these foundations are weighted differently across cultures and political orientations (progressive, conservative, and libertarian). This perspective is elaborated in detail in the bestselling book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" (2012).
Among his other important works are "The Happiness Hypothesis" (2006), which connects ancient wisdom with modern psychological findings, and "The Coddling of the American Mind" (2018, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), which critiques the culture of extreme safetyism on university campuses. In his book "The Anxious Generation" (2024), he examines the impact of social media and the changing pattern of childhood on the rise of anxiety and depression in Generation Z. Haidt has delivered four TED talks and is recognized as one of the world's most influential thinkers.
