Jonathan D. Haidt

The prize citation for Dr. Haidt’s 2023 Barry Prize reads:

By challenging reductionist models of human moral behavior with ingenuity, rigor, and wit, Jonathan Haidt has dramatically advanced the scientific study of moral psychology at the individual and social levels. His pathbreaking work has helped us better comprehend why human beings find it so difficult to understand, and to welcome as neighbors, those who believe differently than we do about the things that matter most to us, and to seek peaceful and productive ways of engaging fundamental differences. The Academy honors Dr. Haidt’s distinguished contributions to humanity’s capacity to discern and manage the most challenging aspects of its own social life.

Jonathan D. Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff).  He has given four TED talks. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently writing two books: Kids In Space: Why teen mental health is collapsing, and Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share.

November 2023