Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt (born 1963) is an American social psychologist and author who teaches business and society at the New York University Stern School of Business, where he holds the Thomas Cooley Chair in Ethical Leadership. His research centres on the psychology of morality and moral emotions such as disgust and elevation. He is best known for moral foundations theory, which proposes that human moral reasoning rests on innate intuitive modules shaped by biological and cultural evolution, and for the social intuitionist model, which holds that moral judgment is driven mostly by fast automatic intuitions, with reasoning often serving to justify them afterwards. He later applied this work to political ideology and to business ethics. Haidt has also reached a wide public through books including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, some of whose conclusions and methods remain controversial.