Wikipedia Deep Dive

Jonathan Haidt

12 min read

Here is a question that has puzzled philosophers for millennia: when you make a moral judgment—say, that lying is wrong, or that cruelty is evil—where does that judgment actually come from? Most of us, if pressed, would say we reason our way to moral conclusions. We weigh the evidence, consider the consequences, and arrive at a logical position. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has spent his career studying how humans actually think about right and wrong, has a different answer. And it's one that challenges everything we think we know about ourselves as rational beings.

Haidt argues that moral judgment is mostly automatic. It happens in a flash, driven by gut feelings and emotional reactions. The reasoning comes afterward—not to discover the truth, but to justify what we've already decided.

He calls this "social intuitionism," and he illustrates it with a memorable metaphor: the elephant and the rider. Your conscious, reasoning mind is the rider, perched atop a massive elephant of automatic processes, emotions, and intuitions. The rider can nudge the elephant a little, but when push comes to shove, the elephant goes where it wants. The rider's main job is to be the elephant's press secretary, coming up with post-hoc explanations for decisions the elephant has already made.

From Existential Crisis to Moral Psychology

Haidt's path to becoming one of the most influential thinkers on morality and politics began, somewhat fittingly, with a crisis of meaning. Growing up in Scarsdale, New York, in a secular Jewish family of New Deal liberals, he had what sounds like a comfortable suburban upbringing. His father was a corporate lawyer. His grandparents, Russian and Polish immigrants, had worked in the garment industry. By fifteen, Haidt had declared himself an atheist.

Then, at seventeen, he read Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

The play, for those unfamiliar, is a masterpiece of existential absurdity. Two characters wait endlessly for someone named Godot who never arrives. Nothing happens. Nothing is resolved. The play strips away the comforting illusions we tell ourselves about purpose and meaning. For a seventeen-year-old already inclined toward philosophical questioning, it was apparently devastating.

Haidt channeled this existential awakening into academic study. He went to Yale, graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a degree in philosophy. After a brief stint as a computer programmer—one imagines him quickly realizing that code wasn't going to answer the big questions—he headed to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work in psychology.

His dissertation topic gives a hint of where his research would eventually lead: "Moral judgment, affect, and culture, or, is it wrong to eat your dog?" The question sounds absurd, but that's precisely the point. Haidt was interested in moral judgments that seem obviously wrong to most people but involve no actual harm to anyone. Why do we find certain things morally repugnant even when we can't articulate a rational reason?

The Disgust Connection

Before Haidt could build his grand theory of moral psychology, he needed to understand a specific emotion: disgust.

Working with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley, Haidt developed the Disgust Scale, a tool to measure how sensitive individuals are to things that trigger revulsion. What they found was fascinating. Disgust, they argued, evolved originally as a "guardian of the mouth"—a visceral reaction designed to keep us from eating things that might contain pathogens. Rotten meat, feces, signs of disease: these trigger an automatic avoidance response that protected our ancestors from infection.

But disgust didn't stay confined to food. Over the course of biological and cultural evolution, it expanded to become what Haidt and his colleagues call a "guardian of the body more generally, and of the social and moral order." We now feel disgust not just at spoiled food, but at moral violations—certain kinds of betrayal, taboo behaviors, people we consider morally impure.

This insight would prove crucial to Haidt's later work. If disgust had jumped from the physical to the moral realm, perhaps other emotions had made similar leaps. Perhaps our entire moral sense was built not on reason, but on emotional foundations that evolved for other purposes entirely.

The Moral Foundations

In 2004, Haidt began developing what would become his most influential contribution to psychology: moral foundations theory. Working with Craig Joseph, Jesse Graham, and drawing on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder—whom Haidt studied under at the University of Chicago and called "the teacher that most affected me"—he proposed that human morality rests on a set of innate psychological foundations.

Think of it like taste. Your tongue has receptors for sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Different cultures use these basic tastes to create wildly different cuisines—a Japanese dashi broth tastes nothing like a Mexican mole sauce—but they're all working with the same underlying biology. Haidt suggested that morality works the same way. Different cultures construct different moral systems, but they're building on the same innate foundations.

He identified five original foundations:

Care/Harm — Our sensitivity to suffering, especially of the vulnerable. This is why we instinctively want to protect children and why cruelty disturbs us.
Fairness/Cheating — Our sense that people should get what they deserve and that cheaters should be punished. This evolved from the need for reciprocal cooperation.
Loyalty/Betrayal — Our tendency to form coalitions and our sensitivity to who is in our group versus outside it. Traitors trigger a special kind of moral outrage.
Authority/Subversion — Our responsiveness to hierarchy and respect for legitimate leaders. This foundation helps groups maintain order and coordinate action.
Sanctity/Degradation — Our sense that some things are sacred and others are polluting. This is where disgust comes in, operating in the moral realm.

Later, Haidt added a sixth foundation: Liberty/Oppression, reflecting our sensitivity to attempts by others to dominate or control us. He also refined the fairness foundation, splitting it into equality (everyone should get the same) and proportionality (people should get what they earn).

Why Liberals and Conservatives Can't Understand Each Other

Here's where Haidt's work becomes politically incendiary—and also practically useful.

When he and his colleagues applied moral foundations theory to political ideology, they found a striking pattern. Liberals, broadly speaking, tend to rely heavily on just two or three foundations: care, fairness (especially equality), and liberty. When a liberal evaluates a policy or moral claim, they're primarily asking: Does this cause harm? Is it fair? Does it oppress anyone?

Conservatives, by contrast, tend to draw on all the foundations more equally. They care about harm and fairness too, but they also give significant weight to loyalty, authority, and sanctity. A conservative might oppose a policy not because it causes direct harm, but because it undermines respect for tradition, or weakens group solidarity, or violates something sacred.

This creates a fundamental asymmetry in political discourse. Liberals often genuinely cannot understand conservative moral reasoning. When a conservative says something like "that policy undermines the family" or "that shows disrespect for our traditions," the liberal hears those as coded excuses for what must really be simple prejudice or self-interest. The conservative cares about foundations that the liberal's moral palette doesn't register as valid moral considerations.

Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to understand liberal morality reasonably well—it's a subset of their own—but may see liberals as morally impoverished, as caring only about harm and equality while missing huge dimensions of the moral life.

Haidt, who identifies as a political centrist, has been critical of the ideological homogeneity in academia. In a 2011 TED talk, he pointed out that psychology as a discipline has strong biases against conservative viewpoints, which limits its ability to understand a significant portion of the population. This critique led him to co-found Heterodox Academy in 2015, an organization dedicated to increasing viewpoint diversity in universities.

The Elephant Versus the Rider

Haidt's most famous metaphor, the elephant and the rider, appears throughout his popular books. It captures his core insight about moral psychology: we are not the rational creatures we imagine ourselves to be.

The elephant represents automatic processes—the fast, intuitive, emotional systems that make most of our decisions without conscious deliberation. The rider represents controlled processes—our conscious, reasoning mind that can plan, analyze, and deliberate.

This division maps onto what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2 in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is fast, automatic, and effortless. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and requires concentration. Kahneman's research showed that System 1 does most of the work in our mental lives, with System 2 stepping in only occasionally.

What Haidt adds to this picture is the relationship between the two systems when it comes to moral judgment. The elephant doesn't just influence our moral decisions—it makes them. The rider's job is mostly to rationalize and explain the elephant's choices to ourselves and others. We are, in Haidt's memorable phrase, more like lawyers than scientists when it comes to moral reasoning. A scientist tries to find the truth, wherever it leads. A lawyer starts with a conclusion and looks for arguments to support it.

This is why moral arguments so rarely change anyone's mind. You're not arguing with someone's reason; you're arguing with their elephant. And elephants are not easily persuaded by clever arguments.

The Happiness Hypothesis

Before Haidt became famous for his work on political polarization, he wrote a book attempting to synthesize ancient wisdom with modern psychology. The Happiness Hypothesis, published in 2006, examines ten "Great Ideas" about happiness from philosophers and religious thinkers—Plato, the Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Jesus—and tests them against what psychological research has revealed about human flourishing.

The book emerged from Haidt's involvement in the positive psychology movement, which began in the late 1990s under the leadership of Martin Seligman. Positive psychology argued that the field had spent too long studying dysfunction and pathology; it was time to study what makes people thrive.

One of Haidt's contributions to this field was the study of "moral elevation"—a warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness acts of moral beauty. He named it in tribute to Thomas Jefferson, who had described the emotion in detail in a letter about the benefits of reading great literature. When we see someone act with exceptional courage, kindness, or integrity, we experience elevation: a warm feeling in the chest, a sense of calm, and a desire to become better ourselves.

In a striking finding, Haidt and his colleagues discovered that feelings of moral elevation cause breastfeeding mothers to produce more milk, suggesting the involvement of oxytocin—sometimes called the "bonding hormone." Witnessing moral beauty doesn't just make us feel good; it triggers a physiological response associated with caregiving and social connection.

The Anxious Generation

Haidt's most recent work has taken a sharp turn toward a different kind of moral concern: what's happening to children and teenagers raised on smartphones and social media.

In The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, Haidt argues that the rise of smartphone-based childhoods, combined with increasingly overprotective parenting, has led to what he calls "the great rewiring of childhood." Children who once spent their time in free play, exploring the neighborhood, and navigating social situations face-to-face now spend hours each day scrolling through social media, comparing themselves to carefully curated images, and experiencing social interactions through screens.

The result, Haidt argues, is an epidemic of anxiety and depression, particularly among teenage girls. He points to surveys showing sharp increases in mental health problems among adolescents beginning around 2012—right when smartphones with front-facing cameras and Instagram became ubiquitous.

Not everyone is convinced. A review in Nature by developmental psychologist Candice Odgers noted that several meta-analyses and systematic reviews have found no consistent association between social media use and well-being. A study across 72 countries found no consistent relationship between the rollout of social media and mental health outcomes. The largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use.

Odgers called Haidt "a gifted storyteller" whose "tale is currently one searching for evidence."

This criticism highlights an interesting tension in Haidt's work. His research on moral foundations emphasizes how our intuitions often run ahead of our reasoning—how we form conclusions based on gut feelings and then find evidence to support them. Critics might wonder whether Haidt's own concerns about smartphones and social media follow the same pattern: a strong intuition that something is wrong with how kids are growing up, followed by a search for supporting data.

The Centrist Prophet

Throughout his career, Haidt has positioned himself as someone trying to bridge divides rather than win arguments. He's criticized the political left for not understanding conservative morality. He's criticized the New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—for dismissing religion without understanding its psychological functions. He's warned that American democracy faces a "very good chance" of catastrophic failure within the next few decades.

His approach has won him admirers across the political spectrum. Foreign Policy named him one of their "top global thinkers" in 2012. Peter Wehner, writing in The Atlantic, said that "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."

David Mikics of Tablet magazine called him "the high priest of heterodoxy"—which captures both his influence and the somewhat paradoxical position he occupies. Haidt has made a career of pointing out that people are not as rational as they think, that our moral intuitions are shaped by evolution and emotion rather than logic, and that we construct elaborate rationalizations for positions we've already reached on gut feeling.

And yet he continues to believe that understanding these truths about ourselves can help us do better—that knowing about the elephant and the rider can help the rider do a slightly better job. That understanding why conservatives and liberals talk past each other might help them find common ground. That recognizing how our moral intuitions can lead us astray might make us more humble and more open to other perspectives.

Whether that hope is itself a product of reason or intuition, Haidt probably couldn't say. The elephant keeps its secrets.