Jonathan Haidt Quotes

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.

In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

You are 100% emotional in everything you think, feel and decide. You decide emotionally and justify logically.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.

Sometimes, I work a little more from emotion than I do from rational thought.

At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

People vote with their hearts, not their heads.

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

Emotion is the foundation of reason.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.