The Philosophy of Jonathan Haidt
By McKenna Mercurio-Morse ‘24
On November 10th, 2022, Greens Farms Academy welcomed Jonathan Haidt to campus. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist working at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Haidt received his B. A. from Yale University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then went on to do post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India and then taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia before teaching at Stern.
Haidt began his career studying negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance, but then moved on to understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). Additionally he has given four TED talks and written more than 100 academic articles. Haidt is currently working on writing two books: Kids In Space: Why teen mental health is collapsing and Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share. At NYU- Stern, Haidt is applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures.
During his time at GFA, Jonathan Haidt gave a presentation to the Upper School entitled “Kids In Space: What is happening to Gen Z, and how to bring them back to Earth.” In this presentation he discussed his research on why teen mental health is collapsing and how we can improve this. Additionally in his time on campus, Haidt had dinner with Mr. Campbell and many other members of the GFA community and sparked a conversation among LEAD members. For some members of the community, his words were “impactful” and “shocking.” Additionally , many would describe his presentation as “disturbing” and “offensive.” Ella Woodbury’ 23 found that throughout Haidt’s presentation, “he talked a lot about mental health and I felt like it was triggering to a lot of people.”
In an interview with Jakob Zapanta’ 24, he discussed what he enjoyed from the presentation and ideas that he was not so keen on: “I remember his presentation style of letting the audience ask questions and critique his work. It seemed interesting at first. He framed it as being a technique that he used to catch and learn from his mistakes.” However, through the course of the presentation Zapanta notes that, “as he went through those Q&A sessions it felt more and more like he was trying to assert his correctness instead of actually listening to the audience.” Additionally, when listening to an answer regarding a question asked about how he factored transgender children into his graphs Zapanta felt “pretty angry” in regards to how Haidt just dismissed the question.
