Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan David Haidt, born October 19, 1963, is an American social psychologist. He earned his PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania under Jonathan Baron and conducted cultural-psychology fieldwork influenced by Richard Shweder, then taught for many years at the University of Virginia before moving to the New York University Stern School of Business as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership.

He is best known academically for moral foundations theory and the social intuitionist model of moral judgment, which argues that moral reasoning is largely a post-hoc rationalization of fast intuitive responses. For the mind-power lineage his most relevant work is The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), in which he tests ten “great ideas” from religious and philosophical traditions - about happiness, the self, adversity, and virtue - against contemporary psychological research.

Its governing image is the rider and the elephant: conscious reasoning (the rider) is small and often rationalizing atop a large automatic emotional system (the elephant), so lasting change in mood and outlook comes less from willing it directly than from training the elephant through practices such as meditation, cognitive therapy, and chosen environments.

Haidt is careful to distinguish well-supported findings (set-point and adaptation, the limits of pure willpower) from older claims, keeping the book inside the evidence.