Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of the subject book, The Righteous Mind. He conducted vast research and study in gathering the information for this book and in making reasonable conclusions from the wealth of material that he amassed.

By the time the twenty-four year-old Haidt arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student, the field of moral psychology had been largely defined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. But Haidt felt uneasy about some of their conclusions in that they seemed to ignore an important element of human nature: emotion. He was very liberal at the time and was full of indignation over Ronald Reagan and the conservative groups such as the piously named Moral Majority.

Haidt became interested in a class offered by anthropologist Alan Fiske which required the students to...