AFT Book Club: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt 

Social Psychologist, New York University's Stern School of Business

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. In his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness he brings to light the  “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. Jon continues to push towards the reforms to put an end to the youth mental health crisis through his public health campaign, The Anxious Generation. 

Overall, Haidt’s research uncovers the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.

Haidt is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers 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(co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles, which have been cited nearly 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.”  He has given four TED talks and strives to shine a light into what makes morality with his continued work.