Jonathan Haidt

Background

About Jonathan Haidt

I'm a social psychologist who was happily conducting basic research on moral psychology at the University of Virginia when I stumbled into a business school. I just wanted a way to spend a year in NYC to promote my book The Righteous Mind. I found a temporary position at NYU-Stern, and discovered a whole new way of thinking, a whole new set of opportunities to apply moral psychology. Stern liked me too, and hired me permanently in 2012. My goal at Stern is to use the latest research on moral psychology to make complex social systems (such as firms) work better. Better means higher social and moral capital, and with a greater ability to suppress cheating, self-aggrandizing, and the sort of short term thinking and risk taking that can destroy an organization. I am co-leading a collaborative effort to collect the existing research relevant to this task; see With my lead researcher, Zach Rausch, I write a Substack on my latest research: AfterBabel.com. All articles are free. I also continue to run several efforts to apply moral psychology to the problems of political polarization, demonization, and paralysls; see and