Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt (born 1963) is a social psychologist whose work in 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, 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, 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 can displace philosophy in the study of ethics.