Jonathan Haidt

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.

Moral foundations theory

In 2004, Haidt began to extend the social intuitionist model to identify what he considered to be the most important categories of moral intuition. The resulting moral foundations theory, co-developed with Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, and based in part on the writings of Richard Shweder, was intended to explain cross-cultural differences in morality. The theory posited that there are at least five innate moral foundations, upon which cultures develop their various moralities, just as there are five innate taste receptors on the tongue, which cultures have used to create many different cuisines. The five values are:

Care/harm

Fairness/cheating

Loyalty/betrayal

Authority/subversion

Sanctity/degradation

Haidt and his collaborators asserted that the theory also works well to explain political differences. According to Haidt, liberals tend to endorse primarily the care and fairness foundations, whereas conservatives tend to endorse all foundations more equally. Later, in The Righteous Mind, a sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, was presented. More recently, Haidt and colleagues split the fairness foundation into equality (which liberals tend to endorse strongly) and proportionality (which conservatives tend to endorse strongly). In this work, they also developed the new revised Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 which has 36 items, measuring Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. He has also made the case for Ownership to be an additional foundation.

Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist, and expressed a desire to reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility.

In a 2011 Ted talk, Haidt argued that liberals and conservatives differ in their value systems and that disciplines like psychology have biases against conservative viewpoints.

In 2019, Haidt argued that there is a "very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy" citing political polarization and the "culture war".

In 2022 Haidt resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology after refusing to write an equity, inclusion, and anti-racism statement, which the Society requires presenters at its annual research conference to submit.

Haidt has at times received criticism for making comments that have been seen as homophobic and transphobic.

Haidt was a speaker at an event at The Heritage Foundation in October 2025, where he encouraged parents and policy makers to continue pushing their school boards and state legislators for "bell-to-bell" cellphone bans in schools.

He has suggested that the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields is due to an innate difference in interests between men and women, and that the disparity is not necessarily an indication of discrimination. Haidt believes that "trigger warnings, affirmative action and accusations of sexist disparities weaken students through 'special treatment'".

Haidt is a member of the advisory board of the University of Austin, an unaccredited, "anti-woke", conservative organization.