Jonathan Haidt Mind Quotations

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.