Quotes About Psychology

Naomi, you think this is all an accident? It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

But denial . . . well, you know what they say about denial." Ben nodded, seeing where this was going now, not wanting to show what he really thought of it. "It has no survival value.

She wondered what it was about men that wed them more to a way of doing things than to achieving their ostensible goals.

You start slow. You find the subject's limits and get him to spend some time there. He gets used to it. Before long, the limits have moved. You never take him more than a centimeter beyond. You make it feel it's his choice.

It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.

So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.

Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.

This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be uncomfortable. Thaler suggests the expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them the longer they will sit in your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully depreciated psychologically, you will throw them away.

Notice that the curve falls steeply at the beginning and then gradually levels off. This reflects what might be called the "decreasing marginal disutility of losses.

The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.

there is a cost to having an overload of choice.

I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.

When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of "satisficing" in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.

Seligman's discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don't have control.

you will depend on how you do your accounting. People often talk jokingly about how "creative" accountants can make a corporate balance sheet look as good or as bad as they want it to look. Well, the point here is that we are all creative accountants when it comes to keeping our own psychological balance sheet.

The ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation . Simply put, we used get to things and then we start to take them for granted.

So by forcing us to look around at what others are doing before we make decisions, the world of bountiful options is encouraging a process that will often, if not always, leave us feeling worse about our decisions than we would if we hadn't engaged in the process to begin with. Here is yet another reason why increasing the available options will decrease our satisfaction with what we choose.