Quotes About Psychology

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. 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. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

I had dinner with my father last night, and made a classic Freudian slip. I meant to say, "Please pass the salt," but it came out, "You prick, you ruined my childhood.

Jonathan Kellerman

Beneath our laughter lay a fundamental difference in how we each viewed the world. Psychologists believe people can change. They have to, or else what's the point of psychology? The opposite is true for law enforcement. We rely on the principle that people tend to make the same stupid mistakes, over and over.

Jonathan Kellerman

Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.

And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they're too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they've become habituated to them.

I'm self-aware enough to know that I have a somewhat fractured personality. Not exactly multiple personality disorder, but clearly there were different drivers at the wheel depending on my mood, and depending on my needs. Over

As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected. (15)

It's hard to imagine two personalities less alike than the pair who shared Ulysses Maxwell's mind. Where Lyssy was sunny and outgoing, as friendly and disingenuous as a puppy dog, Max was brooding and saturnine, with a sardonic wit and the compassion of a starving alley cat—if they hadn't occupied the same body, he'd have strangled the cheerful little bastard years ago.

Here's the truth: people, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

An Ivy League teacher told me, "I've found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it.

As Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf put it, propaganda "must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.… [P]ersistence is the first and most important

This kind of short-term state of mind is called affective happiness; it relates to affect, our momentary emotions.

Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.

A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,

It was as if, having met so many of my own goals, some perverse organ of my brain was busy creating new, spurious ones.

What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story.

The enemy must in some way be dehumanized, degraded to less than full human status. Collectively, the population [and soldiers] of the other country must become "gooks," "Nips," "Japs," "Krauts," or "Huns." One must first hide from the full humanity of the opponent before [one] is able to kill him. -- Rev William Mahedy

I have emphasized the religious roots of dishonoring the enemy and its toxic psychological results. However, any ideology that debases the enemy endangers the lives of soldiers while they fight.