Quotes About Psychology

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they're less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people's lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical.

Now, if concepts are undefinable, that means they aren't built out of more elementary concepts, which means they must themselves be elementary concepts, which means they must be innate.

Kahneman and Tversky conclude that people are not risk-averse across the board, though they are loss-averse: they seek risk if it may avoid a loss.29

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

Ä°nsanlar dil konusunda merakl? olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ula??labilir k?sm?d?r. Ä°nsanlar dil hakk?nda bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doÄŸas?n?n iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceÄŸini bilirler.

Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4

The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3

The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.

Cognitive Reflection Test

The question is whether language determines thought—whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways.

Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the "I'm OK, They're Not" illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

the theory of the hedonic treadmill

Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people.

Steven Pinker

People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.

The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.