Jonathan Haidt

Social Psychologist, Author

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). In 2015, he cofounded Heterodox Academy to advocate for viewpoint diversity and open inquiry at universities. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018, he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently 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.

The first 50 years of my life, from 1963 to 2013, were the greatest period of social progress and the extension of rights and inclusion in human history. Progressives should have been celebrating success and vowing to continue on toward the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Instead, because of changes to social media platforms in the early 2010s, new, terrible, and illiberal ideas flooded into universities, and from there to the rest of our institutions. I co-founded Heterodox Academy to push back against illiberalism in universities. I joined FAIR’s advisory board because FAIR is pushing back everywhere else. 

Jonathan Haidt
Social Psychologist, Author