强纳森·海特

乔纳森·大卫·海特（Jonathan David Haidt，1963年10月19日—）是美国社会心理学家、作家以及史登商学院教授。他的主要研究领域是道德心理学和道德情感。曾被《外交政策》杂志评为“全球顶级思想家”之一，被《前景》杂志评为“世界顶级思想家”之一。

道德基础理论

1997年，海特与一群学者共同提出道德基础理论。 于海特的著作《正义之心》，进一步发展。 理论认为人的道德关注有六组面向：关怀/伤害、公平/欺诈、忠诚/背叛、权威/颠覆、圣洁/堕落、自由/压迫。

Jonathan David Haidt ( HYTE; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He is a professor of business and society and the Thomas Cooley Chair in Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. Haidt's main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.

Haidt's main contributions to the field of psychology come from his theory of moral foundations, which attempts to explain the origins of human moral reasoning on the basis of innate "modules", resulting from biological and cultural evolution. The theory was later further developed to explain variation in moral reasoning as it relates to political ideology, positing that people arrive at different political orientations due to prioritizing different sets of morals. Haidt's current research applies moral psychology to business ethics.

Haidt has written multiple popular psychology books, including The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) examining the relationship between ancient philosophies and modern science, The Righteous Mind (2012) on moral politics, and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) on rising political polarization, mental health, and college culture. In 2024, he published The Anxious Generation, arguing that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting has led to a "rewiring" of childhood and increased mental illness. Some of his conclusions and methodologies are controversial.

Biography

Early life and education

Haidt was born to a secular Jewish family and was raised in Scarsdale, New York. His grandparents were Russian and Polish natives who immigrated as teenagers to the U.S., where they became garment workers. Haidt described his upbringing as "very assimilated", identifying as an atheist by age 15. His father, an Ashkenazi Jew, was a corporate lawyer. His family were generally New Deal liberals.

In 2024, Haidt recalled that, at age 17, he experienced an existential crisis upon reading Waiting for Godot and other existential literature. After attending Scarsdale High School, he graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1985, then briefly held a job as a computer programmer before pursuing graduate studies in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in the field in 1988 and 1992, respectively, on a graduate fellowship awarded by the National Science Foundation. His dissertation, titled "Moral judgment, affect, and culture, or, is it wrong to eat your dog?", was supervised by psychologists Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske. Inspired by anthropologist Paul Rozin, Haidt wrote his thesis on the morality of "harmless" but disgusting acts.

From July 1992 to June 1994, Haidt was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, where he studied cultural psychology under the supervision of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. Haidt called Shweder "the teacher that most affected me". At Shweder's suggestion, Haidt researched moral complexity in Bhubaneswar, India, where he conducted field studies and "encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal". From July 1994 to August 1995, he was a postdoctoral associate with the MacArthur Foundation under psychologist Judith Rodin.

Academic career

In August 1995, Haidt became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he was eventually named an associate professor in August 2001, then a full professor of the university's psychology department in August 2009. He remained at Virginia until 2011, winning four awards for teaching, including a statewide award conferred by Governor Mark Warner. Haidt also earned a reputation for challenging the general assumptions in moral psychology. His research, centered on the emotional origins of morality with particular focus on the emotions of disgust and elevation, led to the publication of The Happiness Hypothesis in 2006.