Quotes About Psychology

As with visual illusions, we can't make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can't unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can't make us resist motivated reasoning.

There's a name for this: Resulting. When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad. (Psychologists

In fact, losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us.

Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don't have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live.

Quitting is hard, too hard to do entirely on our own. We as individuals are riddled by the host of biases, like the sunk cost fallacy, endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion, which lead to escalation of commitment. Our identities are entwined in the things that we're doing. Our instinct is to want to protect that identity, making us stick to things even more.

That's why Daniel Kahneman thinks he needs a quitting coach, and why we all ought to see that need.

And the effect is stronger the more the ticket costs. Imagine if, instead of $95, you had spent $150 or $250 or $500. As the price tag grows, so does the effect of sunk costs.

This phenomenon is known as omission-commission bias.

This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it's not even in the vicinity.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long, particularly in the face of bad news.

When we're choosing among new options, loss aversion causes us to favor the ones that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value. In other words, our aversion to taking a loss causes us to make decisions a rational actor would not.

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Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates.

Gone with the Wind" are just as decisive as the Oedipus complex

Once a guy has taken out his dick, you think he is going to do it every time.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world," psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed.

Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are repeating words, phrases, and even sounds that function as magnets of unconscious meaning, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas. He called such markers in speech 'signifiers.

Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.

I'd thought sexuality was instinctive or natural, but it's profoundly linked to inner security and cultural context.

Some people are genetically programmed to be difficult.

We're naturally programmed to endure a muddle of emotions as we leave childhood behind.

Different fragrances promote different emotions, and I find that fragrance gets me in the frame of mind for that person.

Every time that I'm in the dark, I imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. It's kind of like a drug in that way - darkness seems to change the way I think - making me way more prone to fear.