Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.
Jonathan HaidtRead
I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the author's pursuit of understanding the diversity of moral values across different cultures.
Jonathan Haidt's quote captures his academic journey into the exploration of morality as it manifests in various cultural contexts. By comparing moral judgments in India and the U.S.A., he emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding how ethical standards can differ significantly depending on cultural backgrounds, highlighting the complexity of moral psychology and its implications for global discourse.
Themes
MoralityCultureEthicsJudgmentResearch
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on cultural ethics, this quote can serve to discuss the importance of understanding moral diversity.
More from Jonathan Haidt
All quotes →Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Jonathan HaidtRead
Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.
Jonathan HaidtRead
Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?
Jonathan HaidtRead
If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
Jonathan HaidtRead
When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.
Jonathan HaidtRead
Similar quotes
Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.
Bren BrownRead
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham LincolnRead
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Samuel JohnsonRead
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.
Henry BestonRead
Distance lends enchantment to the view.
Mark TwainRead
You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in hid eyrie at night!
J. R. R. TolkienRead