View source for Jonathan Haidt

'''Jonathan Haidt''' (born 1963) is a social psychologist whose work in [[Moral Psychology|moral psychology]] has reshaped the understanding of how moral judgments are formed, how political disagreements are structured, and how cultures configure innate moral intuitions.

His most influential contributions include '''social intuitionism''' — the thesis that moral judgment is driven by rapid affective responses with reasoning serving primarily as post-hoc justification — and '''[[Moral Foundations Theory|moral foundations theory]]''', which proposes that human moral cognition is built on six innate psychological systems shaped by evolutionary pressures. Both frameworks draw extensively on [[Evolutionary Game Theory|evolutionary game theory]], [[Cultural Evolution|cultural evolution]], and cross-cultural psychology to argue that moral disagreement is less a failure of reasoning than a clash of differently tuned moral perception.

Haidt's work has been both celebrated and criticized: celebrated for bringing empirical rigor to questions long treated as purely philosophical; criticized for a perceived political bias in the moral foundations framework and for overstating the automaticity of moral judgment at the expense of genuine deliberative change. The debate itself has become a focal point in the broader conversation about whether [[Psychology|psychology]] can displace [[Philosophy|philosophy]] in the study of ethics.

[[Category:Psychology]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Culture]]