Jonathan Haidt Quotes

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for.

All my life... I believed in Malaysian merger and unity of the two territories. You know that we, as a people, are connected by geography, economics, by ties of kinship.

I'm really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult to work collaboratively together with other people in societies.

Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can't do individually.

Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Politics is the art of providing for the general welfare. It's the great human cooperative institution. It, in principle, is not competitive. It's an attempt of a community of people to get together in order to solve their problems …

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

Strange are the ways of human behavior.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us.

As human beings, we are only able to survive in dependence upon the co-operation, help and kindness of other fellow humans.

Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation.

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.

Mankind — the race would perish did they cease to aid each other.