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Jonathan Haidt is a social and cultural psychologist. He received his
Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did
post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa,
India. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since
1995. His research focuses on morality – its emotional foundations,
cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career
studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and
vengeance, but then moved on to the understudied positive moral
emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. He is
currently developing a comprehensive theory about the “seven
foundations” of human morality which describes the “first draft” of
the moral mind given to us by natural selection, and also describes
the cultural and developmental processes by which that draft gets
revised into multiple forms. He is applying this theory to understand
political divisions in the United States. He was the 2001 winner of
the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, and a 2004 winner of the
Virginia “Outstanding Faculty Award,” conferred by Governor Mark
Warner. He was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting
Professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007. He is the author of
“The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.”
His next book, to be published by Pantheon in 2011, is “The Righteous
Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.”
Free and open to the public.