Jonathan Haidt Keynote Speaker

Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University—Stern School of Business
Named one of the top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine
New York Times Bestselling Author, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

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Jonathan Haidt's Biography

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

He received his B. A. from Yale University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He was a professor at the University of Virginia from 1995 until 2011, when he joined the Stern School of Business.

Haidt is a social psychologist whose 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 the co-developer of Moral Foundations Theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree (see CivilPolitics.org). He won three teaching awards from the University of Virginia and one from the governor of Virginia. His four TED talks have been viewed more than 8 million times. (Those talks are on political psychology, on religion, on the causes of America’s political polarization, and on how America can heal after the bitter 2016 election.)

He was named a “Top 100 Global Thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine. He is the author of more than 100 academic articles and three books: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). The last two books became New York Times best sellers.

At NYU-Stern, he is applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures (see EthicalSystems.org). Haidt is also working on increasing viewpoint diversity in the academy via Heterodox Academy, a collaboration among nearly 6000 professors who are working to increase viewpoint diversity and freedom of inquiry in universities. He is also the co-founder of the Constructive Dialogue Institute (formerly OpenMind) and its main offering, Perspectives, an educational program that teaches people and groups how to have productive conversations across many lines of difference.

His latest book, Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is available now.

The Anxious Generation: How overprotection and social media have damaged Gen Z, and what we should do now

In this talk, Jonathan Haidt discusses why Gen Z (born after 1995) has such extraordinary rates of mental illness. He'll explain how the loss of independence and free play (in the 1990s) combined with the move to a fully phone-based childhood (in the early 2010s) caused a collapse of mental health around 2012. He'll discuss how can we protect our children, and how we can work productively with Gen Z within companies and share his findings from the book.

Politics and Polarization

Why is America experiencing such intense political divisions, and such rapidly falling trust? Why is our political hostility spreading out into companies, schools, and religious congregations? In this talk, Jonathan Haidt will describe the many causal threads, the many reasons, with particular attention to the ways that social media has warped the fabric of society and invalidated some of the assumptions of America’s Founding Fathers. This talk includes advice for how to bridge divides, reduce polarization, and encourage civil discourse within any organization. (Draws on The Righteous Mind, his Atlantic article on our Uniquely Stupid time, and his recent research on social media).

Leadership in an Age of Anxiety and Polarization

Leading a company, or any group of human beings, has always been a challenge. Since 2017, that challenge has gotten much harder as political polarization coincides with the arrival of Gen Z in the workforce. Social media makes everything more explosive. In this talk I offer tools from social, moral, and positive psychology that can help leaders maximize cooperation, trust, and growth within their organizations. This presentation draws on The Righteous Mind, and Jonathan Haidt's projects at EthicalSystems.org and OpenMindPlatform.org.

Other topics:

Jonathan Haidt can also give talks on happiness and positive psychology; social media’s effects on democracy and mental health; business ethics; the value of viewpoint diversity; and what capitalism does to us and for us.