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 then taught for 16 years in the psychology department at the University of Virginia.
Haidt’s original research, from 1987 through the mid 2010s, examined the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. During this period, he and his collaborators developed Moral Foundations Theory. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of digital media and AI to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction.
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). More recently, he wrote two #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) and The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World (2025, with Catherine Price).
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 In The Anxious Generation (2024), he describes the “great rewiring of childhood,” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. In 2025, Haidt co-authored The Amazing Generation with Catherine Price.
Haidt continues to promote reforms that address the youth mental health crisis through his fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Anxious Generation Movement. Through coordinated action across policy, behavior, and culture, TAG brings together parents, educators, and young people to dismantle the phone-based childhood and restore healthy development grounded in play, independence, and real-world connection.
Haidt’s earlier research examined the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures, including the cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission has long been to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite moral differences.
He has co-founded organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including Heterodox Academy, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.
He is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind.
He has written more than 100 academic articles which have been cited over 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has given four TED talks, and was named a TIME100 Health leader.