Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) 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, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The book that he was supposed to be writing instead of this one will be titled Three Stories about Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life.

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). He is also the co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, a collaboration among more than 2000 professors who are working to increase viewpoint diversity and mutual understanding in universities.