Quotes About Belief

Here's what this means: Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn't mean that others can't do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training. This is so important, because many, many people with the fixed mindset think that someone's early performance tells you all you need to know about their talent and their future.

Essa tradição demonstra também como a mudança das crenças individuais, mesmo as mais simples, é capaz de produzir efeitos profundos.

La creencia de que los miembros de la pareja tienen la posibilidad de cambiar no debe confundirse con la creencia de que cambiarán. Los miembros de la pareja tienen que querer cambiar, comprometerse con el cambio y emprender acciones concretas al respecto.

La mentalidad de crecimiento es la creencia de que las habilidades pueden cultivarse, pero no te dice cuánto cambio es posible ni cuánto tiempo requerirá. Y tampoco significa que todo, como las preferencias o los valores, pueda cambiarse.

Evidenced in a capacity for denial so that you do not let yourself know what is really going on. You may be hurting yourself and others, but you will not acknowledge it. You may also be hurt, but you will repress that knowledge as well. Or, you believe what others say even when their perspective is directly counter to your own inner knowing.

Much of the appeal of dogma in religion is that it gives its followers rules to follow that rescue them from having to find out who they are and what they really think.

For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world

Jews don't go camping. Life is hard enough as it is.

and thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.

Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.

even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It's much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.

As with the psychotherapists we discussed in chapter 4, training does not increase accuracy; it increases people's confidence in their accuracy.

Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.

This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realize that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; how even being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs.

The investigators asked them how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were far more certain about their choice than the folks waiting in line.19 Yet nothing had changed except the finality of placing the bet. People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can't undo it.

Self-justification is complicated enough when it follows our conscious choices and we know we can expect it. But it also occurs in the aftermath of things we do for unconscious reasons, when we haven't a clue about why we hold some belief or cling to some custom but are too proud to admit it.

Our lives are in God's hands, and that's the best possible place they could be.

I still don't believe it," Christina said. "I shook hands with the president." "You shook—that's what you did!" Alex teased her. "Your hand was shaking like a leaf.

Love will find a way.

Stephen had just come from a class discussion in which several students believed that the right cup of herbal tea would save them from pain and sorrow. Well acquainted with pain and sorrow, Stephen did not contribute to the discussion. He merely crossed these idiots off his list of possible friends.