The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author whose works include 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, an influential if controversial assessment of campus culture in the late 2010s. In this book, Haidt and his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, argue that “emotional safety” has replaced freedom of expression and inquiry as core academic values and that this overprotective culture is impeding the development of young minds. In 2024, Haidt published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, in which he argues that the prevalence of social media in childhood, coupled with the decline of real-world play, is causing an epidemic of anxiety and other mental illnesses in children. 

Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and he is a regular contributor to The Atlantic magazine. Haidt completed his doctoral work in social psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation focused on the morality of actions that do not cause concrete harm but are nonetheless regarded as wrong, disgusting, or taboo.