Jonathan Haidt

In the positive psychology class I teach at the University of Virginia, the final project is to make yourself a better person, using all the tools of psychology, and then prove that you have done so.

Adversity may be necessary for growth because it forces you to stop speeding along the road of life, allowing you to notice the paths that were branching off all along, and to think about where you really want to end up.

You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening connections—helping friends, expressing gratitude to benefactors.

Seneca was right: 'No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.'

When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, 'Love and work.'

Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, 'Work is love made visible.'

We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, 'Joy’s soul lies in the doing.'

The big finding was that people experienced longer-lasting improvements in mood from the kindness and gratitude activities than from those in which they indulged themselves.

If you are a pessimist, you are probably feeling gloomy right now. But despair not! The key to growth is not optimism per se; it is the sense making that optimists find easy. If you can find a way to make sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people would be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

I began by analyzing lists of virtues from around the world. Virtues are social constructions. The virtues taught to children in a warrior culture are different from those taught in a farming culture or a modern industrialized culture. There’s always some overlap among lists, but even then there are different shades of meaning. Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad all talked about compassion, but in rather different ways. Nonetheless, when you see that some version of kindness, fairness, and loyalty is valued in most cultures, you start wondering if there might be some low-level pan-human social receptors (analogous to taste receptors) that make it particularly easy for people to notice some kinds of social events rather than others.

When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us to the ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the 'other’ group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.

The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underproduction in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

We are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world instead.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. ... This is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, ‘We are forever elsewhere.’ This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015. This is the birth of the phone-based childhood. It marks the definitive end of the play-based childhood.

These results offer clear evidence that 13, which is the current (and unenforced) minimum age for opening an account on social media platforms, is too low. Thirteen-year-olds should not be scrolling through endless posts from influencers and other strangers when their brains are in such an open state, searching for exemplars to lock onto. They should be playing, synchronizing, and hanging out with their friends in person while leaving some room in the input streams to their eyes and ears for social learning from their parents, teachers, and other role models in their communities.

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conforming engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, wheres parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.

Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.

The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’ So what was the opportunity cost to children and adolescents when they started spending six, or eight, or perhaps even 16 hours each day interacting with their devices? Might they have exchanged any parts of life that were necessary for healthy human development?

As the CEO of Netflix put it on an earnings call with investors when asked about Netflix’s competitors, ‘You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin.’

Most of my students say the last thing they do at night right before closing their eyes is to check their texts and social media accounts. It’s also the first thing they do in the morning before getting out of bed. Don’t let your children develop this habit.

As Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, explained, ‘There is more to us than we know. If we can be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less. There exists within everyone a grand passion, an outlandish thirst for adventure, a desire to live boldly and vividly through the journey of life.