Author
Jonathan Haidt
The social psychologist who gave the divided self a rider and an elephant, and tested ancient wisdom against the data.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who taught for many years at the University of Virginia and is now at New York University's Stern School of Business, where his research has covered moral psychology, happiness and, more recently, the effects of social media on adolescents.
The Happiness Hypothesis, published in 2006, took ten ideas from ancient philosophy and religion and tested each against modern psychology; its rider and elephant, its adaptation principle and its formula H = S + C + V became standard vocabulary. The Righteous Mind followed in 2012, on why people are divided by politics and religion.
With Greg Lukianoff he wrote The Coddling of the American Mind in 2018, and in 2024 The Anxious Generation, on smartphones and childhood, which became one of the most discussed books of its year.
The signature
Haidt writes as a scientist who respects the old texts and checks them: a claim from Buddha or Marcus Aurelius, then the studies, then a verdict. His signature is the metaphor that carries research into ordinary speech, the rider and the elephant above all, and the willingness to say when the ancients were right.