2019-10-08
1 小时 9 分钟I was first exposed to Jonathan Haidt's work about a dozen years ago when I stumbled upon this book called the happiness hypothesis.
It was my very early introduction to this world of positive psychology and the exploration of human flourishing from sort of a more scientific meets ancient wisdom lens.
My mind was absolutely blown open by that book, and I have paid close attention to his work over the years.
In the intervening years, he wrote another book about morality called the Righteous Mind, and a more recent book called the Coddling of the american mind about sort of the state of education from the standpoint of how we learn and how the culture of learning in higher education, especially these days, has become really fraught.
And we explore this entire sweep.
We explore his early days, what led him to move from his PhD to then jump into India to study all sorts of really fascinating things around purity, pollution, and sanctity, how that relates to the way we live our lives, how that relates to spirituality and morality, and we explore happiness.
We explore a lot of the touch points of his journey and really kind of zoom the lens out then, and look at how all these things fit together, piece together into the exploration of a life well lived.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
You end up going to undergrad at Yale, you find yourself doing your PhD at Upenn, you get out of your grad work, and while a lot of people, the path would be either you go into, you try and get a teaching job, or you go into industry, you go to India.
How does that unfold and why?
So, in social psychology, it's not terribly common to do a postdoc, but it's not uncommon.
And I finished my PhD in 1992, and it was on moral judgment across cultures, a study I did in Brazil and the United States, across social class as well.
And that was testing a debate.
It's like a perfect grad student thing to do.
Like there's a debate between two major figures in the field.
And I developed the experimental design that was going to disambiguate it was going to be the conclusive test between Richard Schwader, a cultural anthropologist, who said that the moral domain is very broad and it varies across cultures, and Elliot Turiel, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, who had argued that there's a kind of a universal moral domain around harm, rights, and justice.
So I'd done this study in Brazil and the United States, came out beautifully vindicated.
Richard Schwader's views about cultural variation.
And I was able to get a postdoc then working with Schwader at the University of Chicago while I was there.