A Quote by Jonathan Haidt

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt

Quote Topics

Like Most Mostly Nature Other Our Ourselves Out Primates Social

Quote Author

Jonathan Haidt
American - Psychologist
Born: October 19, 1963

If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.

Richard Preston

On the one hand, our social nature is our greatest beauty - it means that we have natural empathy and sympathy. But our social nature also means that we may let ourselves be controlled by the judgments of others, precisely because we care so much about our status in community.

Frances Moore Lappé

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

Robert Sapolsky

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Clay Shirky

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

Angela Carter

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

Louise J. Kaplan

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.

Muriel Barbery

Dogs and other animals we bring into our homes serve as one of our most important links to Mother Nature. We may not think about it consciously, but they are our lifelines to a part of ourselves that we are at the brink of losing altogether.

Cesar Millan

It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.

Jon Katz

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

Ian Mcewan

If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.

Stephen Covey

It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

Jane Goodall

I think the most common meme is that it's too difficult to change. It's too risky to change. My nature doesn't allow me to change. When you're thinking that, you're not understanding what your nature is. All of us come from this place of well-being, love, and kindness. But we've taken on these other things, and we think that they're our nature. Our nature really is to be like God.

Wayne Dyer

We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.

Alice Dreger

In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.