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72-512: In the first section, Haidt demonstrates that people's beliefs are driven primarily by intuition, with reason operating mostly to justify beliefs that are intuitively obvious. In the second section, he lays out his theory that the human brain is organized to respond to several distinct types of moral violations, much like a tongue is organized to respond to different sorts of foods. In the last section, Haidt proposes that humans have an innate capacity to sometimes be "groupish" rather than "selfish". In

144-461: A 2007 online debate sponsored by the website Edge . PZ Myers praised the first part of Haidt's essay while disagreeing with his criticism of the New Atheists; Sam Harris criticized Haidt for his perceived obfuscation of harms caused by religion; Michael Shermer praised Haidt; and biologist David Sloan Wilson joined Haidt in criticizing the New Atheists for dismissing the notion that religion

216-420: A bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization. In a 2011 Ted talk, Haidt argued that liberals and conservatives differ in their value systems and that disciplines like psychology have biases against conservative viewpoints. In 2019, Haidt argued that there is a "very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy". Haidt

288-413: A common set of responses, including warm, loving feelings, calmness, and a desire to become a better person. Haidt called the emotion moral elevation , as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson , who had described the emotion in detail in a letter discussing the benefits of reading great literature. Feelings of moral elevation cause increases in milk produced during lactation in breastfeeding mothers, suggesting

360-435: A degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally driven words or behavior as having another basis – at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another. Haidt and Graham suggest a compromise can be found to allow liberals and conservatives to see eye-to-eye. They suggest that the five foundations can be used as "doorway" to allow liberals to step to

432-519: A diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind . The theory proposes that morality is "more than one thing", first arguing for five foundations, and later expanding for six foundations (adding Liberty/Oppression): Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations. Although the initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences, subsequent work with

504-636: A liberal all his life, he is now more open to other points of view. In the third part of the book, Haidt describes a hypothetical "hive switch", which turns a selfish human "chimp" into a "groupish" human "bee". He describes how cultures and organizations have techniques for getting people to identify with their groups, such as dancing, moving, and singing in unison. The book was #6 on The New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction in April 2012. William Saletan wrote in The New York Times in 2012 that

576-653: A lot more than that" and "[religion and politics are] ... expressions of our tribal, groupish, righteous nature." In his book, he compares the six aspects that people use to establish morality and take into consideration when making judgment to six taste receptors in the mouth. These aspects of morality are defined as care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. He goes on to establish that Republicans and Democrats tend to focus on different morality receptors and this leads to worse political tactics and decision making. Haidt himself acknowledges that while he has been

648-446: A more universalist morality. The usefulness of moral foundations theory as an explanation for political ideology has been contested on the grounds that moral foundations are less heritable than political ideology, and longitudinal data suggest that political ideology predicts subsequent endorsement of moral foundations, but moral foundations endorsement does not predict subsequent political ideology. The latter finding suggests that

720-582: A non-profit organization that works to increase viewpoint diversity , mutual understanding, and productive disagreement. In 2018, Haidt and Richard Reeves co-edited an illustrated edition of John Stuart Mill 's On Liberty , titled All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated (illustrated by Dave Cicirelli). Haidt's current research applies moral psychology to business ethics . Haidt's research on morality has led to publications and theoretical advances in four key areas. Together with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley , Haidt developed

792-465: A statewide award conferred by Governor Mark Warner . Haidt also earned a reputation for challenging the general assumptions in moral psychology. His research, centered on the emotional origins of morality with particular focus on the emotions of disgust and elevation , led to the publication of The Happiness Hypothesis in 2006. In 1999, Haidt became active in the new field of positive psychology , studying positive moral emotions. This work led to

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864-589: A talk at the Edge Foundation on the new advances in moral psychology. In 2011, Haidt moved to New York University's Stern School of Business as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, relocating to New York City with his wife, Jayne, and two children. In 2013, he co-founded Ethical Systems, a non-profit collaboration dedicated to making academic research on ethics widely available to businesses. In 2015, Haidt co-founded Heterodox Academy ,

936-407: A way to maintain intensive kinship structures which can in turn function to keep resources in the group. These authors also developed and validated the 24-item Qeirat Values Scale (QVS). Several other candidate foundations have also been discussed: Efficiency/waste, Ownership/theft, and Honesty/deception. A large amount of research on moral foundations theory uses self-report instruments such as

1008-548: Is an evolutionary adaptation. David Mikics of Tablet magazine profiled Haidt as "the high priest of heterodoxy " and praised his work to increase intellectual diversity at universities through Heterodox Academy . In 2020, Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic , "Over the past decade, no one has added more to my understanding of how we think about, discuss, and debate politics and religion than Jonathan Haidt." He added that, "In his own field, in his own way, Jonathan Haidt

1080-418: Is caused by quick moral intuitions" while moral reasoning simply serves largely as a post-hoc rationalization of already formed judgments. Haidt's work and his focus on quick, intuitive, emotional judgments quickly became very influential, attracting sustained attention from an array of researchers. As Haidt and his collaborators worked within the social intuitionist approach, they began to devote attention to

1152-525: Is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business . His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions . Haidt's main scientific contributions come from the psychological field of moral foundations theory , which attempts to explain the evolutionary origins of human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, gut feelings rather than logic and reason. The theory

1224-542: Is trying to heal our divisions and temper some of the hate, to increase our wisdom and understanding, and to urge us to show a bit more compassion toward one another." The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006) draws on ancient philosophical ideas in light of contemporary scientific research to extract potential lessons and how they may apply to everyday life. The book poses "ten Great Ideas" on happiness espoused by philosophers and thinkers of

1296-540: The National Institute of Mental Health under the supervision of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder from July 1992 to June 1994. Haidt called Shweder "the teacher that most affected me". At Shweder's suggestion, Haidt researched moral complexity in Bhubaneswar , India, where he conducted field studies and "encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal". From July 1994 to August 1995, he

1368-499: The World Values Survey (WVS) community since WVS started adopting MFQ-2. MFT can be of significant assistance to researchers in their quest to understand worldwide psychological diversity and to those aiming to foster democracy globally, by focusing on at least four key areas. These areas include: (a) variation across populations; (b) variations in political views and the extent of polarization in different political systems around

1440-442: The ancestral hunter-gatherer environment , in particular intertribal and intra-tribal conflict. The three foundations emphasized more by conservatives (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) bind groups together for greater strength in intertribal competition while the other two foundations balance those tendencies with concern for individuals within the group. With reduced sensitivity to the group moral foundations, progressives tend to promote

1512-407: The right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by Bob Altemeyer , the theory of morality as cooperation, the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition , and impartial approaches to ethical questions, such as justice as fairness by John Rawls and the categorical imperative by Immanuel Kant . The Purity foundation in particular has been the subject of criticism due to

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1584-627: The American Mind (2018) on rising political polarization, mental health, and college culture. In 2024, he published The Anxious Generation , arguing that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Haidt was born in New York City to a secular Jewish family and was raised in Scarsdale, New York . His grandparents were Russian and Polish natives who immigrated as teenagers to

1656-490: The American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), co-written with Greg Lukianoff , expands on an essay the authors wrote for The Atlantic in 2015. The book explores the rising political polarization and changing culture on college campuses and its effects on mental health. It also explores changes in childhood, including the rise of "fearful parenting",

1728-498: The Democratic Party win more elections, and argues that each of the major political groups—conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Haidt's first essay in this area was titled "What Makes People Vote Republican?" Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist . Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge

1800-565: The Disgust Scale, which has been widely used to measure individual differences in sensitivity to disgust . Haidt, McCauley and Rozin have written on the psychology of disgust as an emotion that began as a guardian of the mouth (against pathogens), but then expanded during biological and cultural evolution to become a guardian of the body more generally, and of the social and moral order. With Sara Algoe, Haidt argued that exposure to stories about moral beauty (the opposite of moral disgust) cause

1872-598: The Moral Foundations Questionnaire, formally published in 2011 (though earlier versions of the questionnaire had already been published ). Subsequent investigations using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in other cultures have found broadly similar correlations between morality and political identification to those of the US, with studies taking place in Korea, Sweden and New Zealand. However, other studies suggest that

1944-591: The Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale, Moral Foundations Vignettes, the Socio-Moral Image Database, and Character Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Research on moral language use have also relied on variants of a Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD). Moral Foundations Dictionary 2 (MFD2) has been shown to outperform MFD, hence may be a better option for language-based assessment of moral foundations. Researchers have also examined

2016-506: The Royal Society B , also examined country-level sex differences in moral foundations in relation to cultural, socioeconomic, and gender-related indicators revealing that global sex differences in moral foundations are larger in individualistic, Western, and gender-equal cultures. Examining multivariate sex differences in the five moral foundations (i.e. Mahalanobis ' D as well as its disattenuated bias-corrected version) in moral judgements,

2088-494: The United States, where they became garment workers. Haidt described his upbringing as "very assimilated", identifying as an atheist by age 15. His father, an Ashkenazi Jew , was a corporate lawyer . The family generally were New Deal liberals . At age 17, Haidt recalled that he experienced an existential crisis upon reading Waiting for Godot and existential literature. After attending Scarsdale High School , he

2160-1158: The authors concluded that multivariate effects were substantially larger than previously estimated sex differences in moral judgements using non-MFT frameworks and, more generally, the median effect size in social and personality psychology research. Mahalanobis' D of the five moral foundations were significantly larger in individualist and gender-equal countries. MFT has been particularly helpful in quantifying moral concerns in natural language. Although people subjectively think that more than 20% of their daily conversations touch on morality, close examination of everyday language, using machine learning models, has shown that people do not actually talk much about morality (as measured by moral foundations) often. More specifically, only 4.7% of recorded conversations and 2.2% of social media posts (on Facebook) touched on morality, with Care and Fairness being more prevalent. Researchers in natural language processing have relied on MFT in numerous studies in order to capture morality in textual data. A number of researchers have offered critiques of, and alternative theories to, moral foundations theory. Critiques of

2232-537: The book is "a landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself". The book received two reviews in The Guardian : in 2012, Ian Birrell called the book a "compelling study of the morality of those on the left and right [that] reaches some surprising conclusions"; and in 2013 Nicholas Lezard wrote that he was "in the odd position of being wary of a book I am also recommending. It's entertaining, snappily written and thought-provoking. It might even help Labour win

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2304-477: The care and fairness foundations, whereas conservatives tend to endorse all foundations more equally. Later, in The Righteous Mind , a sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression , was presented. More recently, Haidt and colleagues split the fairness foundation into equality (which liberals tend to endorse strongly) and proportionality (which conservatives tend to endorse strongly). In this work, they also developed

2376-453: The community-related moral foundations. Adult members of so-called WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies are the most individualistic , and most likely to draw a distinction between harm-inflicting violations of morality and violations of convention. Recently, Jonathan Haidt and Mohammad Atari made the case that MFT, and especially MFQ-2, can be particularly useful for cross-cultural research, including

2448-461: The conservative side of the "wall" put up between these two political affiliations on major political issues (e.g. legalizing gay marriage). If liberals try to consider the latter three foundations in addition to the former two (therefore adopting all five foundations like conservatives for a brief amount of time) they could understand the conservatives' viewpoints. Researchers postulate that the moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in

2520-562: The decline of unsupervised play, and the effects of social media in the last decade. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) examines the impact of modern technology and parenting trends on children's mental health. Haidt posits that two major factors have contributed to a significant shift in childhood experiences and a subsequent increase in mental health issues among young people: The widespread adoption of smartphones and

2592-503: The direction of causality is the opposite of what moral foundations theorists assume: moral judgments are produced by motivated reasoning anchored in political beliefs, rather than political beliefs being produced by moral intuitions. A 2023 study also showed that liberals and conservatives have different neural activations when processing violations of moral foundations, particularly in areas related to semantic processing, attention, and emotion, "suggesting that political ideology moderates

2664-496: The first part of the book, Jonathan Haidt uses cross-sectional research to demonstrate social intuitionism , how people's beliefs come primarily from their intuitions, and rational thought often comes after to justify initial beliefs. He cites David Hume and E. O. Wilson as thinkers who gave reason a relatively low estimation, as opposed to more popular thinkers who give reason a central place in moral cognition, such as Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral reasoning . In

2736-553: The five/six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies . Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, Haidt and Graham found that libertarians are most sensitive to the proposed Liberty foundation, liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, while conservatives are equally sensitive to all five/six foundations. According to Haidt, the differences have significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to

2808-548: The globe; (c) shifts in cultural norms and values; and (d) the roles of institutions and the development of democratic processes. A recent large-scale ( u = 336,691) analysis of sex differences based on the five moral foundations suggested that women consistently score higher on care, fairness, and purity across 67 cultures. However, loyalty and authority were shown to have negligible sex differences, highly variable across cultures. This study, published in 2020 in Proceedings of

2880-434: The involvement of the hormone oxytocin . Haidt's principal line of research has been on the nature and mechanisms of moral judgment. In the 1990s, he developed the social intuitionist model, which posits that moral judgment is mostly based on automatic processes—moral intuitions—rather than on conscious reasoning. People engage in reasoning largely to find evidence to support their initial intuitions. Haidt's main paper on

2952-433: The key concept in moral reasoning, seen as a primarily cognitive activity, and became the dominant approach to moral psychology, heavily influencing subsequent work. Haidt writes that he found Kohlberg's theories unsatisfying from the time he first encountered them in graduate school because they "seemed too cerebral" and lacked a focus on issues of emotion . In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology at

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3024-464: The lack of substantial evidence supporting the alleged link between the emotion of disgust and supposed Purity-related transgressions. Rather, research conducted in both the US and India, suggest that violations of the sacred (i.e., Purity-related transgressions) elicit a range of negative emotions (e.g., anger) rather than the specific emotion of core disgust associated with pathogen-related events. The moral foundations were found to be correlated with

3096-477: The metaphor described in his work. The rider represents consciously controlled processes, and the elephant represents automatic processes. The metaphor corresponds to Systems 1 and 2 described in Daniel Kahneman 's Thinking, Fast and Slow . This metaphor is used extensively in both The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind . Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help

3168-528: The moral foundations observed with the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. A sixth foundation, Liberty (opposite of oppression) was theorized by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind , chapter eight, in response to economic conservatives complaining that the 5 foundation model did not caption their notion of fairness correctly, which focused on proportionality, not equality. This means people are treated fairly based on what they have earned, and are not treated equally unconditionally. This sixth foundation changes

3240-426: The new revised Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 which has 36 items, measuring Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. He has also made the case for Ownership to be an additional foundation. One widely cited metaphor throughout Haidt's books is that of the elephant and the rider. His observations of social intuitionism , the notion that intuitions come first and rationalization second, led to

3312-469: The next election. But it still doesn't explain the gang running the country at the moment [the UK Conservative Party ]." Journalist Chris Hedges wrote a review of The Righteous Mind in 2012 in which he accused Haidt of supporting social Darwinism . Jonathan Haidt Jonathan David Haidt ( / h aɪ t / ; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He

3384-701: The original conceptualization of MFT, a key element in Middle Eastern moral perspectives is "Qeirat". While this term lacks a direct translation in English, it closely aligns with the concept of 'honor' and encompasses the safeguarding and defense of female relatives, romantic partners, extended family members, and the nation. This research identified a strong correlation between Qeirat and Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, as well as adherence to Islamic religious beliefs, and behaviors associated with maintaining romantic relationships. These authors argued that Qeirat values operate in

3456-515: The originally proposed ethic of hierarchy into the separate moral foundations of ingroup and authority, and by proposing a tentative sixth foundation of liberty. According to moral foundations theory, differences in people's moral concerns can be described in terms of five moral foundations: an individualizing cluster of Care and Fairness, and the group-focused binding cluster of Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity. The empirical evidence favoring this grouping comes from patterns of associations between

3528-438: The origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt , Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder . More recently, Mohammad Atari, Jesse Graham, and Jonathan Haidt have revised some aspects of the theory and developed new measurement tools. The theory has been developed by

3600-557: The past – Plato , Marcus Aurelius , Buddha , Jesus , and others – and then considers what modern scientific research has to say regarding these ideas. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) draws on Haidt's previous research on moral foundations theory . It argues that moral judgments arise not from logical reason, but from gut feelings, asserting that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have different intuitions about right and wrong because they prioritize different values. The Coddling of

3672-476: The political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States . In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org , a clearinghouse for research on political civility. He serves on the advisory boards of RepresentUs , a non-partisan anti-corruption organization; the Acumen Fund , which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and braverangels.org ,

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3744-434: The process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. Invoking the notion of preparedness , Haidt and Joseph claimed that each of the ethics formed a cognitive module , whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in

3816-473: The publication of an edited volume, Flourishing , in 2003. In 2004, Haidt began to apply moral psychology to the study of politics, doing research on the psychological foundations of ideology . This work led to the publication in 2012 of The Righteous Mind . Haidt spent the 2007–2008 academic year at Princeton University as the Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching. In July 2010, he delivered

3888-414: The rise of overprotective parenting styles . He suggests that these factors have fundamentally altered how children grow up, leading to what he terms a "rewiring" of childhood. He argues that this transformation began in the late 2000s and has had detrimental effects on children's well-being. Moral foundations theory Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain

3960-549: The second portion of the book, he presents moral foundations theory , and applies it to the political beliefs of liberals , conservatives , and libertarians in the US. Haidt argues that people are too quick to denigrate other points of view without giving those views full consideration, and attempts to reach common ground between liberals and conservatives. He makes the case in the book for morality having multiple foundations (more than just harm and fairness), and said in an interview that morality "is at least six things, and probably

4032-405: The social intuitionist model, "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail", has been cited over 7,800 times. In 2004, Haidt began to extend the social intuitionist model to identify what he considered to be the most important categories of moral intuition. The resulting moral foundations theory , co-developed with Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, and based in part on the writings of Richard Shweder ,

4104-404: The social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently. Their Daedalus article became the first statement of moral foundations theory, which Haidt, Graham, Joseph, and others have since elaborated and refined, for example by splitting

4176-571: The social-affective experience of moral violations". Haidt's initial field work in Brazil and Philadelphia in 1989, and Odisha , India in 1993, showed that moralizing indeed varies among cultures, but less than by social class (e.g. education) and age. Working-class Brazilian children were more likely to consider both taboo violations and infliction of harm to be morally wrong, and universally so. Members of traditional, collectivist societies, like political conservatives, are more sensitive to violations of

4248-505: The sources of the intuitions that they believed underlay moral judgments. In a 2004 article published in the journal Daedalus , Haidt and Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality, including the work of Frans de Waal , Donald Brown and Shweder, as well as Alan Fiske 's relational models theory and Shalom Schwartz 's theory of basic human values . From their review of these earlier lines of research, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from

4320-654: The structure of the MFQ is inconsistent across demographic groups (e.g., comparing religious and non-religious and Black and White respondents ) and across cultures. A substantially updated version of the MFQ (the MFQ-2) was published in 2023. MFQ-2 is a 36-item measure of moral foundations which captures Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Each sub-scale has six items. MFQ-2 has been shown to have good psychometric properties across cultures. Other materials and methods used to study moral foundations theory include

4392-527: The theory has largely focused on political ideology. Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives ( liberals in the American sense), conservatives , and right-libertarians ( libertarians in the American sense), and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as same-sex marriage , abortion , and even vaccination . Moral foundations theory

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4464-407: The theory have included claims of biological implausibility and redundancy among the moral foundations, which have been argued to be reducible to concern about harm or to threat-reducing versus empathizing motivations. Both critiques have been disputed by the original authors. Alternative theories include the model of moral motives, the theory of dyadic morality, relationship regulation theory,

4536-502: The theory so that the fairness/cheating foundation no longer has a split personality; it's no longer about equality and proportionality. It primarily becomes about proportionality. In 2020, Mohammad Atari and Jesse Graham worked on potential moral foundation which is particularly important in Middle Eastern cultures, namely honor or "Qeirat" (a Farsi term, originally coming from Arabic). Interviews employing qualitative methods indicated that alongside moral considerations similar to those in

4608-662: The time, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns", which he labeled as the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Shweder's approach inspired Haidt to begin researching moral differences across cultures, including fieldwork in Brazil and Philadelphia. This work led Haidt to begin developing his social intuitionist approach to morality. This approach, which stood in sharp contrast to Kohlberg's rationalist work, suggested that mostly "moral judgment

4680-520: The topographical maps of somatosensory reactions associated with violations of different moral foundations. Specifically, in a study where participants were asked to describe key aspects of their subjective somatosensory experience in response to scenarios involving various moral violations, body patterns corresponding to violations of moral foundations were felt in different regions of the body depending on whether participants were liberal or conservative. Researchers have found that people's sensitivities to

4752-587: Was a postdoctoral associate with the MacArthur Foundation under psychologist Judith Rodin . In August 1995, Haidt became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he was eventually named an associate professor in August 2001, then a full professor of the university's psychology department in August 2009. He remained at Virginia until 2011, winning four awards for teaching, including

4824-502: Was educated at Yale University , graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, then briefly held a job as a computer programmer before pursuing graduate studies in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania , where he received a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in the field in 1988 and 1992, respectively, on a graduate fellowship awarded by the National Science Foundation . His dissertation

4896-401: Was first proposed in 2004 by Haidt and Joseph. The theory emerged as a reaction against the developmental rationalist theory of morality associated with Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget . Building on Piaget's work, Kohlberg argued that children's moral reasoning changed over time, and proposed an explanation through his six stages of moral development . Kohlberg's work emphasized justice as

4968-498: Was intended to explain cross-cultural differences in morality. The theory posited that there are at least five innate moral foundations, upon which cultures develop their various moralities, just as there are five innate taste receptors on the tongue, which cultures have used to create many different cuisines. The five values are: Haidt and his collaborators asserted that the theory also works well to explain political differences. According to Haidt, liberals tend to endorse primarily

5040-505: Was later extended to explain the different moral reasoning and how they relate to political ideology, with different political orientations prioritizing different sets of morals. The research served as a foundation for future books on various topics. Haidt has written multiple books for general audiences, including The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) examining the relationship between ancient philosophies and modern science, The Righteous Mind (2012) on moral politics, and The Coddling of

5112-466: Was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine in 2012, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine in 2013. Although he is an atheist, Haidt has argued that religion contains psychological wisdom that can promote human flourishing, and that the New Atheists have themselves succumbed to moralistic dogma . These contentions elicited a variety of responses in

5184-427: Was titled "Moral judgment, affect, and culture, or, is it wrong to eat your dog?" and was supervised by psychologists Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske . Inspired by anthropologist Paul Rozin , Haidt wrote his thesis on the morality of harmless but disgusting acts. After obtaining his Ph.D., Haidt studied cultural psychology at the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow , during which period he trained at

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