Quotes About Psychology

the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.

An inconsistency is built into the design of our mind.

the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains. This is loss aversion.

when the repeated words or pictures are shown so quickly that the observers never become aware of having seen them. They still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently. As should be clear by now, System 1 can respond to impressions of events of which System 2 is unaware. Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees.

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here

there is a large amount of objective ignorance in the prediction of human behavior.

The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes

Happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does.

Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

you should know that correcting your intuitions may complicate your life.

She says experience has taught her that criticism is more effective than praise. What she doesn't understand is that it's all due to regression to the mean.

sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1.

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought.

The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2. In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer.

Regla del pico final: la estimación en retrospectiva global estaba bien predicha por el valor medio del nivel de dolor manifestado en el peor momento de la experiencia y al terminar esta. • Olvido de la duración: la duración del procedimiento no tuvo efecto alguno sobre las estimaciones del dolor total.