Faculty News

Prof. Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Righteous Mind," is highlighted

Cover of The Righteous Mind
Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "We have learned a lot about the nature of humankind since the 1950s. In his best-selling book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the human mind to a rider (reason) on an elephant (intuition). Back in the 1950s we thought that the rider was in charge, or ought to be. Evidence is accumulating from several fields that this view is wrong; the elephant is in charge and the rider is a much better rationalizer in hindsight than a reasoner in prospect. It seems that, with our limited conscious mental capacity, our minds have evolved to make fast 'good enough' decisions under pressure of time and conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes, especially in evolutionarily unfamiliar contexts, these intuitions play us false, but most of the time they work just fine and we couldn’t live without them."

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