Jonathan Haidt Quotes

I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can't do individually.

One seldom hears or sees a quarrel among them. Even strangers trust each other more than acquaintances in Europe. People are far more sincere and generous than in Germany

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing.

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.

Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.

If you know each other well, you want to do business with people you know well. You don't do business with strangers.

You kill strangers deliberately so you don't accidentally kill the people you love.

I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.

I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.

Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

If you are a cooperative animal you need to watch what you get. If you, or even a whole community, invest in something but then a few individuals receive a much larger return, it's not a good arrangement. If it happens consistently, it's time to look for an arrangement that is more beneficial. That's why we're so sensitive to how rewards are being divided.

Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

We now know, from the latest research about neurons, that we are hard-wired for empathy. We're hard-wired for cooperation. That is something about what we are as people - what it means to be a human being. And what Barack Obama was addressing was not just race or just the nature of politics. The great speeches address who we are as people, what it means to be a human being.

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior

Mainly, the reason people who didn't succeed had trouble because they had trouble forming teams. They didn't know how to collaborate.