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Jonathan Haidt books: every book Jonathan Haidt wrote and recommended
Across 16 podcasts. Every show Jonathan Haidt appears on, in one place — not just one.
Books by Jonathan Haidt
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The Happiness Hypothesis
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The Righteous Mind
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The Anxious Generation
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The Coddling of the American Mind
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Flourishing
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To Be Honest
Jonathan Haidt’s most recommended books
- Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
- American girls by Nancy Jo Sales
- Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves
- Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves
- Coming apart by Charles A. Murray
- On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is a professor of business and society and the Thomas Cooley Chair of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. Haidt's main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions. During an appearance on The Ezra Klein Show, Haidt recommended and assigned three specific books to help individuals become stronger emotionally, smarter by regaining attention, and more sociable. The first was William B. Irvine's The Stoic Challenge, which he cited for making stoicism accessible when facing setbacks. The second was Cal Newport's Deep Work, which he highlighted in relation to human attention. The third was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which he praised as a timeless work by a great social psychologist. In the same conversation, Haidt recommended David T. Courtwright's The Age of Addiction to illustrate the history of human cravings and market-based economies, and recommended Johann Hari's Stolen Focus when discussing human attention and screen habits.
Books recommended by Jonathan Haidt
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The Coddling of the American Mind
The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt investigates how modern safetyism, declining childhood resilience, and the rapid rise of social media are negatively impacting the mental health and emotional development of younger generations.
Discussed“And so we wrote an Atlantic article called the coddling of the American mind. We turned that into a book in 2017. We went much deeper.”
Where to get it
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Free-Range Kids
Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy is a provocative parenting guide that advocates for granting children greater autonomy, independent exploration, and unstructured free play to foster resilience and maturity.
Recommended“I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenazy, the woman who wrote 'Free-Range Kids.' She and I co-founded an organization called Let Grow; parents, please go to letgrow.org for all kinds of ideas on how to help your kid have more independence, which makes them more mature and less fragile.”
Where to get it
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The Anxious Generation
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is a contemporary psychological study examining how the rise of smartphones, social media, and a shift toward safetyism have devastated adolescent mental health and created a severe youth loneliness crisis.
Discussed“Uh and uh you know, I think what I'm arguing in the book, in The Anxious Generation, um is that now we know. We didn't know in 2012 when we were letting our kids have it, but now we know.”
Where to get it
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The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is an insightful exploration of moral psychology that investigates why good people are divided by politics and religion.
Discussed“That figures in my first book the happiness hypothesis and again in my book the righteous mind in trying to understand moral emotions.”
Where to get it
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Deep Work
Deep Work by Cal Newport is a practical guide on cultivating focused success and eliminating distractions in an increasingly noisy world.
Recommended“uh the second book is by Cal Newport it's called Deep work and this is why I'm so passionate about attention without your attention you can't do anything”
Where to get it
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The Stoic Challenge
The Stoic Challenge by William B.
Recommended“here are the three books the first is the stoic challenge by William Irvine it really makes stoicism just so accessible you learn to like when you get setbacks the students learn to say like oh I just missed the subway”
Where to get it
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How to Win Friends and Influence People
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a classic self-help manual focused on interpersonal communication, relationship building, and effective social influence.
Recommended“and then the third book is Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People it is timeless he he's writing in the 30s and he is such a great social psychologist”
Where to get it
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Stolen Focus
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari is a compelling exploration of how modern technology, social media, and contemporary distractions systematically degrade human attention spans.
Recommended“Johan Harry has this wonderful book stolen focus and I believe he's right when he says if we adults clear it out”
Where to get it
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American girls
American girls by Nancy Jo Sales is a gripping and unsettling investigation into modern girlhood and how digital technology and social media have reshaped the developmental landscape for young people.
Discussed“Also, there's a book called American Girls. It's horrifying. I forget the author, but she goes through how boys use nude pics of their female classmates as currency.”
Where to get it
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Daring Young Men
Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves is a sociology and parenting book that examines the structural challenges, employment struggles, and educational disparities facing modern boys and men.
Discussed“That is as Richard Reeves has shown, he wrote the book of Boys and Men.”
Where to get it
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Of Boys and Men
Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves is an insightful sociological examination of the modern challenges, educational struggles, and structural disadvantages currently facing boys and men.
Discussed“That is as Richard Reeves has shown, he wrote the book of Boys and Men.”
Where to get it
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The Happiness Hypothesis
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt is a popular psychology book that explores ancient wisdom through the lens of modern scientific research.
Discussed“so my first book was called the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom”
Where to get it
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Coming apart
Coming Apart by Charles A.
Discussed“He's just written a book about social class this is the most important thing to understand how America is coming apart by social class his book is called coming apart”
Where to get it
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On Liberty
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill is a foundational 19th-century philosophical essay that defends the liberty of the individual against the absolute power of the state and societal conformity.
Discussed“so this is John Stuart Mill wrote one of the most important books in the Western tradition on Liberty Chapter two of on Liberty is the best set of arguments ever made for free speech”
Where to get it
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The Black Swan
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an influential examination of how highly improbable, unpredictable events profoundly impact history, finance, and human society.
Discussed“a word coined by Nassim Taleb the guy who wrote the Black Swan because there are certain systems and he was I think he was motivated by the collapse of the banking system”
Where to get it
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Keeping Together in Time
Keeping Together in Time by William H.
Recommended“there's a wonderful book called keeping together in time by William mcneel uh he was either he signed up or he was drafted into World War II train training at a camp in Texas”
Where to get it
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The Age of Addiction
The Age of Addiction by David T.
Recommended“one is an incredible book called the age of addiction by David cordr and he Chronicles how you know people have always like wanted you know sugar”
Where to get it
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The Great Experiment
The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk is a political science book that investigates the complex challenges and historical precedents of building stable, diverse democracies.
Recommended“uh and there's a wonderful book by yasha monk called the great experiment that talks about the difficulty of diversity in democracy”
Where to get it
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The Rise of Victimhood Culture
The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning is an academic yet accessible sociological study that examines the shifting moral frameworks governing modern grievances, conflicts, and social interactions in Western societies.
Recommended“there's a great book on victimhood culture by Manning and Campbell are the authors”
Where to get it
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain's classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn follows a young boy and an escaped slave navigating the Mississippi River while confronting the deeply ingrained prejudices of antebellum American society.
Discussed“and emotional reasoning is one of the things that led to the the trigger warnings and all these feelings of fragility and being unsafe in a class where we have to read Huckleberry Finn or something”
Where to get it
The other 12 books Jonathan Haidt recommended or discussed, ranked
- Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
- Friends by Robin Dunbar
- iGen by Jean M. Twenge
- Meditations by Aurelius Marcus
- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff
- Suicide by Émile Durkheim
- The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein
- The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff, Rikki Schlott
- The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris
- The Turner Diaries by WILLIAM LUTHER. PIERCE
- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... by Steven Pinker
Appearances
Other mentions (77: passing, ad reads, own books), the 30 most recent
“So that's why that's why my group says, we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16.”
“Um so that's why that's why my group says we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16.”
“Because I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation, focusing on teen mental health. That was the mystery that popped up in the mid-2000s.”
“So in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, um there's I there's a metaphor in there. It's It's about 10 ancient ideas and I use a lot of metaphors to explain ancient ideas”
“Gen Z is very bad at risk taking. Now let me make clear, none of this is a criticism of them. Building on what Greg and I argued in the Codling of the American Mind, we overprotected the hell out of them.”
“So actually, so I guess the quickest answer to your question is what I do in the Anxious Generations, I propose four norms that we can coordinate.”
“When my book came out, When The Anxious Generation came out in March of 2024, especially college-educated women, mothers in professional circles, they all read it or their book clubs talked about it.”
“And that happened because some others read The Anxious Generation in English before it came out in Portuguese, and they got moving on it.”
“there's this weird graph that I have in the book which shows the number of hours both men and women spend in parenting”
“but your first book Is All About moral framework MH connect these for me”
“what you're bringing up is one of the divisions that I talked about in The Righteous Mind between left and right”
“we had a conversation mostly on chapter eight of the anxious generation on the spirituality chapter”
“and so I get deeply involved in in what's going wrong with our democracy and that's that's the Righteous Mind”
“what's going wrong with our universities that's the codling the American mind and my project at herox Academy”
“so I really want to emphasize puberty as that's puberty is one of the key ideas in my book so in the anxious generation I really focused on well the subtitle is how the great rewiring of childhood is is causing an epidemic of mental illness”
“but when I was doing the research for the codling the American mind I found according to FBI statistics there's only about 100 to 150 true kidnappings a year”
“I think what I'm arguing in the book, 'The Anxious Generation', is that now we know; we didn't know in 2012 when we were letting our kids, but now we know we've overprotected our kids in the real world, and we've under-rot them online, and we have to reverse both of those mistakes.”
“So first let me say parents should go to anxiousgeneration.com. It's a beautiful new website that that is amazing company built for me and we have all kind and then click on take action. We have all kinds of suggestions for parents for teachers.”
“right so in the book in Chapter 2 and three I I spent a lot of time going into what childhood is”
“the book is focused on the great rewiring which is 2010 to 2015”
“a couple of my favorite graphs in the book favorite in that they're you know kind of horrible but uh they're dramatic”
“in digging into the data on addiction what I what I found what you what what I report in the book um is that video games are not particularly harmful for boys in general and on average whereas social media is harmful to girls in general and on average not all but a lot you know”
“so what I do in the anxious generation is I lay out what childhood is what adolescence is um and how we subverted it”
“my first book was called the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom”
“and that's something that I took from the happiness hypothesis that around the world you you see many cultures talk about a vertical dimension of life”
“that's what I do in the book”
“and at the same time I was working on this book The Calling the American mind and so like half my mind was like you know the world's going to blow up we're going to have war with North Korea and you know Donald Trump is going to be unstable and and my wife is going to Korea with my”
“At the same time, I was writing The Coddling of the American Mind, which was all about what was happening to Gen Z and young people.”
“the fourth norm is um far more Independence free play and responsibility in the real world because this is the other half of the story in the you know in the anxious generation a lot of it is about the the great rewiring of childhood into the phone based childhood”
“but what we lost is the play based childhood what we lost is a childhood in which you go out and you experience challenges and setbacks without supervision”