Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research focuses on morality––its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance but then moved on to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation.

Haidt is the co-developer of Moral Foundations Theory and of the research site YourMorals.org. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree. He won three teaching awards from the University of Virginia and one from the governor of Virginia. His four TED talks have been viewed more than 8 million times. (Those talks are on political psychology, on religion, on the causes of America’s political polarization, and on how America can heal after the bitter 2016 election.)

He was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine. He is the author of more than 100 academic articles and multiple books, including "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom," "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion," and "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure." The last two books became New York Times best sellers. In 2024, he published "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

At NYU-Stern, he is applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures. Haidt is also working on increasing viewpoint diversity in the academy via Heterodox Academy, a collaboration among nearly 6000 professors who are working to increase viewpoint diversity and freedom of inquiry in universities. He is also the co-founder of the Constructive Dialogue Institute (formerly OpenMind) and its main offering, Perspectives, an educational program that teaches people and groups how to have productive conversations across many lines of difference.

Haidt received his B.A. from Yale University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He was a professor at the University of Virginia from 1995 until 2011 when he joined the Stern School of Business.