Jonathan Haidt Quotes

In an ideological, polarized political environment, people see the reality that they want to see.

Our pride is tied up in being right. We tend to favor data that confirm our beliefs, so we don't see alternatives. Too often, leaders practice defense routines that become self-reinforcing.

When you're surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that's reality.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

You don't change anybody's mind with political humor. You just reinforce what people already believe.

Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices.

It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it.

Even moderate confirmation bias can result in reality dysmorphia.

We are so ready to find evidence agaist our political opponents that it snuffs out our charity and possible doubt.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't.

Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.

I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.

If you go to certain cable news shows, you're generally going to hear the viewpoints that you already have reported back to you. I think there's no harm in that.

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' conducted on the teli. Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.