Quotes About Psychology

No matter what the psychologists say, complaining doesn't make us feel better. Maybe temporarily, but in the long run complaining creates a cycle of negativity that feeds itself and grows. Think about it. For years psychologists had their patients hit punching bags to relieve anger only to find out recently that this practice creates more violence. It works the same with complaining. When we complain, we feed the negativity.

I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.

NOCEBO: Latin for "I will harm"; a negative placebo; physical manifestation of pessimism; self-fulfilling prophecy of disbelief. In the nocebo effect, a bad result occurs without any physiological bias. In one study, women who believed they were more prone to heart disease were four times more likely to die of it than women with the same risk factors but without a pessimistic outlook.

BYSTANDER EFFECT: Phenomenon documented by social scientists in which people are less likely to help someone in distress when there are others present who can render assistance

Because there is something about tyranny, monarchy, and authoritarianism that "works," by which I mean there is something in our wiring that finds such systems natural.

I've always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. Reminds me of my childhood.

What does running from a bear have to do with social anxiety? Everything.

It was all by design, as he said later. Angry fighters don't think clearly. They don't stick to their plans. They get frustrated, sloppy. Clay knew that Liston was sensitive about his image, that he yearned for respect, and so Clay worked to deny him that respect. By labeling Liston an ugly bear, Clay was tweaking his opponent's most sensitive nerve and perhaps using racism to do it

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai

Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants.

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don't take people's moral arguments at face value. They're mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you'll find either selfishness or stupidity.

You don't need a social scientist to tell you that people behave less ethically when they think nobody can see them.