Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Look, not everybody plays well with each other on the playground. I get that, that's politics.

It's weird... people say they're not like apes. Now how do you explain football then?

Without game, men prey on each other.

It's good to have a leader, otherwise we argue too much.

If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.

I've always been a good ensemble player.

It's funny, we all really, really got along. I don't know how it was in years past but this year, I was really with a good group of people. No one tried to sabotage each other or steal the other ones moments.

Pretty much, you point to a problem and good reasoning about why people are doing what they are doing and what constraints they face in terms of how others will behave, and you're looking at a problem that could be improved upon by game-theoretic reasoning.

In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

You can have the best people in the business, but if they're not collaborating - and they're butting heads - then it's all going to go south.

I hate competition.

The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

When you're on tour you definitely don't want lots of arguments. It's very important that everybody gets on because you're in close proximity a great deal of the time.

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

It's hard to find good teamwork in practice, and I have never thought that we, as a party, were any better at working as a team than the Tories, despite our core values.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Man is a competitive creature, and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude.

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.

It's difficult working with someone who is not a team player.

The hardest job is getting personalities to mesh.

It's hard for people to understand that when five or six guys are together working intensely, they can really get into some duels.

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

Good teams have more fun. Bad teams have more characters.

It's all realistic, if you get a group of ladies and you stick them together almost every day for three, four months you're going to have some catfights.