Quotes About Psychology

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.

Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

I think that emotional marks are made early on. Even if you can rationalize them as you grow up, they still leave that dank sadness you can never truly shake.

What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats.

I learned that one's mentality can influence how they react to physical obstacles.

My books are never about the crimes. They are about how the characters react to the crimes.

The dumber half of the audience - whether they're male or female, and a lot of them are male - for some reason responds very quickly to the feminine voice. How can I put it? They kind of instantly react to the female voice in a positive way quicker than they would the male voice.

I've just always sort of been mesmerized by our minds and how people think and how people react differently.

Really, laughing is such a strange reaction to something. The idea of it is so bizarre, so instinctual, and kind of magical.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

So many reactions in our lives are based on what happened to us when we were younger.

Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.

I've been reading a lot about what the Internet does to our brains.

Horror films are very effective to me; they have an impact on me. I think that real life things scare me a lot more.

I think safely experiencing fear by watching a horror movie makes real life a little less frightening.

I don't have any special approach for playing dark characters. That's because I never looked at them as dark characters per se. For me, they were real people.

We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.

Playing a real person, it does add an extra level of thoughtfulness. You're portraying someone who actually existed, so instead of saying, like, 'OK, I think this would make the scene better,' it's more a question of, 'What do I think the real Jeffrey Dahmer would do?'

When a story is flying along, and I'm so into it that my 'real' world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a 'flow state,' and it's better than publication, money, awards, fame.

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.