Quotes About Psychology

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. This

costs are not losses.

and this capability is certainly not restricted to humans. Even in modern humans, System 1 takes over in emergencies and assigns total priority to self-protective actions. Imagine yourself at the wheel of a car that unexpectedly skids on a large oil slick. You will find that you have responded to the threat before you became fully conscious of it.

the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose

Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk

Social psychology comes into the picture here, because the answer that a truthful CFO would offer is plainly ridiculous. A CFO who informs his colleagues that "there is a good chance that the S&P returns will be between –10% and +30%" can expect to be laughed out of the room. The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters.

Losses are weighted about twice as much as gains in several contexts:

I am generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases, but this is an exception.

Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would have seen your pupils dilate.

What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I'll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.

teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

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.

intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian

dilate. Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story.

The observation that "90% of drivers believe they are better than average" is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.

Further experiments showed that people were driven to overstate the accuracy not only of their original predictions but also of those made by others.

common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.

When asked how much they will pay to get overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high scorers.

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. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms:

System 1 is much better at dealing with individuals than categories.