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
While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Emotions often outweigh logic in persuasion, making it important to connect with people's feelings.
This quote by Jonathan Haidt emphasizes the significant role that emotions play in shaping opinions and beliefs. While presenting logical arguments and evidence can be valuable, they are often ineffective if the audience's feelings are already biased against the speaker. Therefore, it is crucial to engage with people's emotions to foster understanding and influence their perspectives.
Themes
EmotionsPersuasionLogicArgumentsFeelings
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about climate change, one might quote this to emphasize the need for emotional engagement alongside scientific data.
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
It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word -- on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray.
EpictetusRead
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Toni MorrisonRead
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
The essence of peace is to merge two opposites. Therefore your notions should not scare you if you see another, who absolutely opposes you, and you presume that there is no chance for peace between you two. On the same token when you see two individuals who are exactly two opposites, never say it would be impossible for them to reconcile. On the contrary, and this is the perfection of peace to make it between two opposites.
Nachman Of BreslovRead
This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.
Atul GawandeRead