Quotes About Psychology

I made myself smile and I'm actually feeling better!

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage

How Groups Amplify Noise

We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm.

the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

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.

The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

Systematic errors are known as biases

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. I

an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause.

In simple words, prospect theory cannot deal with disappointment.

Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasonable argument.

The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable. Our two disciplines seemed to be studying different species, which the behavioral economist Richard Thaler later dubbed Econs and Humans.

He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.

framing effects: the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem.

The "Florida effect" involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness.

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The

We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic.

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. The

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality