Quotes About Psychology

The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.

A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.

Eric Helzer and David Pizarro asked students at Cornell University to fill out surveys about their political attitudes while standing near (or far from) a hand sanitizer dispenser. Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.27

Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.

An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.

C]ultures create their own understandings of psychological phenomena, but many of those phenomena will occur regardless of what people think about them. (For example, death is socially constructed by every culture, but bodies die without consulting those constructions.)

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner's dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group.

Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.6

we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.

To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising.

In one of the most bizarre demonstrations of this effect, Eric Helzer and David Pizarro asked students at Cornell University to fill out surveys about their political attitudes while standing near (or far from) a hand sanitizer dispenser. Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.27

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

If you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.

la verdad es que nos preocupamos mucho por lo que otros piensan de nosotros. Las únicas personas que se sabe que no tienen un sociómetro son los psicópatas.

In other words, under normal circumstances the rider takes its cue from the elephant, just as a lawyer takes instructions from a client. But if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources. Intuitions come first, and under normal circumstances they cause us to engage in socially strategic reasoning, but there are ways to make the relationship more of a two-way street.

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

La habilidad para razonar de manera normal combinada con la ausencia de emociones morales es una combinación peligrosa.

origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.