Jonathan Haidt Quotes

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

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

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

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.

If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.

The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and it is true as well for pleasures that seem simpler and more animalistic, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust.

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

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

Maybe you just saw what you wanted to see. Or maybe you justfelt what you wanted to feel.

Human beings are not creatures of logic; we are creatures of emotion. And we do not care what's true. We care how it feels.

The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion

We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don

You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.

The reason facts don’t change most people’s opinions is because most people don’t use facts to form their opinions. They use their opinions to form their “facts.”

Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

Fear exists in the process of accumulation and belief in something is part of the accumulative process.

Indeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.

As our inclinations, so our opinions.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.