Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

You know, there's a tremendous amount of genetic propensity not necessarily for what TV shows you like but for literally how you view the world, how you react to things, how things touch you and how things move you.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events?

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Genes are not destiny!

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

There is more and more data indicating that there is a biological basis to your political views.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

I am obsessed with why people turn out the way they are.

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

I don't know if acting is genetic. Maybe it's environmental.

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.