Quotes About Psychology

Abused people cling to their abusers.

Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem?

Maybe (she was deliberately inflaming her own resentment now, and she knew it)

Her antipathy towards Strike seemed to have evaporated. He was not surprised; he had met the phenomenon many times. People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions; the question was how you made them do it. Some, and Ursula was evidently one of them, were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being.

mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.

Concerns about relative position are a hard fact of human nature. No biologist is surprised that they loom so large in human psychology, since relative position was always by far the best predictor of reproductive success. People who didn't care how well they were doing in relative terms would have been ill-equipped for the competitive environments in which we evolved. Few parents, on reflection, would want their children to be stripped of positional concerns completely.

In another study, the psychologist Martin Seligman and his coauthors asked people to engage in five exercises that had been shown in earlier work to boost feelings of well-being.15 One was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for an earlier kindness. This step, they found, was associated with a larger and more persistent increase in happiness scores than any other of the four other exercises.

The psychological fact of suggestion is that if statements are made again and again in a confident manner, without argument or proof, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.

There are three dominant worldviews in psychology and philosophy. Each worldview is represented

In the ages of faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural perception to understand their practical inadequacy.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

And a 2015 study by Trevor Foulk and his colleagues from the University of Florida shows that even a single exposure to a rude person (e.g., a mildly insulting email from a customer) can turn a person into a "carrier," who in turn infects others with the negative behavior—so it spreads much "like the common cold.

Some assholes take a similar kind of pleasure in your pain. When they do something that generates a strong reaction from you—be it obsequious ass-kissing, effusive apologizing, trembling with fear, giving in to tears or anger, or sending that long and carefully worded email you spent an hour crafting in response to their imaginary emergency—the pleasure centers in their twisted minds light up.

It's sound social psychology because, as I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, "The more time and effort that people put into anything—no matter how useless, dysfunctional, or downright stupid it might be—the harder it is for them to walk away, be it a bad investment, a destructive relationship, an exploitive job, or a workplace filled with browbeaters, bullies, and bastards.

Better yet, combine your warmth and flattery with requests that they do a small favor or two FOR YOU. This strategy is akin to what author David McRaney calls "the Benjamin Franklin effect," which is based on experiments that show we come to like people that we do nice things for and to dislike people that we treat unkindly.

But flattery, smiles, and other signs of appreciation (even if not entirely sincere) can be useful for convincing volatile and vindictive people to tamp down their inner angst and anger—so they won't take it out on you.

Other studies suggest that some people are grumpy, insulting, or overbearing primarily because they are insecure about their abilities and prestige. This is a hallmark of petty tyrants, which

As we saw in chapter 5, research on schoolyard and workplace bullying shows that people who ruminate about getting even, rather than letting it go, suffer negative effects including anxiety, depression, and sleep problems.

You know the difference between a psychopath and a homeopath?" She shook her head. "Some psychopaths do no harm.

Robert J. Shiller

The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling unable to escape from forces more powerful than any individual, one subordinates everything to adapting to them.

Feeding that ego by consistently printing and televising stories about the murders was assuring that there would be more murders.

Robert K. Ressler

In actuality, the sociopath is not without a morality; he is simply without the one we want.