Quotes About Psychology

You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.

message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability.

The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The

On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.

As I described earlier, System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true. System 2 is capable of doubt, because it can maintain incompatible possibilities at the same time.

Why did you stop working just now?" The answer from inside the lab was often, "How did you know?" to which we would reply, "We have a window to your soul.

I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits.

You can see why the common admonition to "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.

Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett

If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?

Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as "a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems

the prediction of the future is not distinguished from an evaluation of current evidence—prediction matches evaluation. This is perhaps the best evidence we have for the role of substitution.

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative. These conclusions were well established for choices about gambles and sure things in the domain of money.

people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task.

It appears to be a feature of System 1 that cognitive ease is associated with good feelings.

These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster.

The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails—neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases we often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. This is the slow thinking of the title. Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive

In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.

Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.