Quotes About Psychology

Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification.

System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.

The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough.

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).

They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.

The shape of the response was an inverted V. As you experienced it if you tried Add-1 or Add-3, effort builds up with every added digit that you hear, reaches an almost intolerable peak as you rush to produce a transformed string during and immediately after the pause, and relaxes gradually as you "unload" your short-term memory.

Can your System 1 distinguish degrees of belief? The principle of WYSIATI suggests that it cannot.

And here, the effects are not those you might imagine. Being in a good mood is a mixed blessing, and bad moods have a silver lining. The costs and benefits of different moods are situation-specific.

asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains shows up almost everywhere.

a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance.

probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction.

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog

However, when the subjects were placed in a positive mood—induced by watching a five-minute video segment—they became three times more likely to say that they would push the man off the bridge. Whether we regard "Thou shalt not kill" as an absolute principle or are willing to kill one stranger to save five should reflect our deepest values. Yet our choice seems to depend on what video clip we have just watched.

Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions.

The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgment.

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.

when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.

Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death. Other

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.

puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.