Speaker

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt

American social psychologist and professor at NYU Stern School of Business, best known for moral foundations theory and two widely read books: The Righteous Mind (2012), which argues that moral judgment is driven by intuition rather than reason, and The Anxious Generation (2024), on the effects of smartphone culture on adolescent mental health.

Haidt trained in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where his early empirical work focused on disgust as a moral emotion — how the feeling that something is ‘impure’ shapes ethical judgment even when no harm is identifiable. That research led him to moral foundations theory, developed with collaborators including Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham: the claim that human morality rests on six evolved psychological foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty), that all cultures build on all of them, but that different political traditions weight them very differently. Progressives, he argues, draw primarily on care and fairness; conservatives activate the full set, including the tribal and hierarchical foundations that secular liberals find alien.

Core positions

Moral psychology is not moral philosophy. Haidt holds that the dominant academic approach — treating morality as the application of principles about harm and rights — describes what moral philosophers do, not what most humans do. Real moral judgment, he argues, is post-hoc rationalisation of gut feeling: the rider (reason) narrates a story to justify where the elephant (intuition) has already gone. This does not make moral progress impossible, but it means that cross-partisan persuasion almost never works through argument alone.

On campus politics, Haidt is one of the most prominent critics of what he calls the shift from a ‘truth university’ to a ‘social justice university’. He argues that the near-disappearance of conservative and libertarian voices from the humanities and social sciences (ratios of 10:1 to 20:1 by his estimate) has produced a monoculture that defeats the university’s core function — the clash of ideas — and that ‘victimhood culture’, enabled by bureaucratic enforcement, makes things worse rather than better as campuses become more egalitarian.

He describes his own political trajectory as starting on the left and shifting toward a kind of pluralist position, partly through researching conservatism: the moral case for family stability, the dangers of turning secular causes into religions, and the value of the authority and sanctity foundations that he once dismissed.

In the wiki