Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He completed post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. From 1995 to 2011, he was a professor at the University of Virginia, before joining the Stern School.
Haidt is a social psychologist whose research explores morality — its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental trajectory. He began by studying negative moral emotions (disgust, shame, vengeance), later turning to positive moral emotions like admiration, awe, and moral elevation.
He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations Theory and co-founder of the research site YourMorals.org. His work helps people understand and respect the moral motivations of those with differing viewpoints — see CivilPolitics.org for more.
He has won three teaching awards from the University of Virginia and one from the Governor of Virginia. His four TED Talks — on political psychology, religion, America’s political polarization, and post-2016 healing — have been viewed over 6 million times.
Haidt was named a “Top 100 Global Thinker” by Foreign Policy in 2012, and one of the “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine.
He is the author of over 90 academic articles and three bestselling books:
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
- The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff)
The last two books were New York Times bestsellers.
At NYU-Stern, Haidt applies his research to business ethics, studying how organizations can structure themselves to be resistant to ethical failures — see EthicalSystems.org.
He is also a founder of Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit network of nearly 2,500 professors working to promote viewpoint diversity and freedom of inquiry in higher education.
Additionally, he co-developed OpenMindPlatform.org, an educational program designed to help people and organizations have more productive conversations across differences.
His next book, Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life, is expected from Pantheon Press.