Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Kids get influenced by other kids.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I dressed like the guys who I grew up with. I looked like the guys I grew up with.

I think that like most girls in high school, I just mirrored what was around me.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

I think that you form the way that you act from others around you; it's a kind of an environmental thing.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'

When you're in a friend circle, you all kind of talk the same way. And it's hard to do on-the-fly radio edits of yourself.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Men take on the nature and the habits and the power of thought of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony.

We are creatures of imitation. We find it hard to resist the temptation to do that which we see others doing.

Most people's lives are a direct reflection of their peer groups.

I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.