Quotes About Psychology

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To

This one broaches the topic in still another way: what we can learn about our makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words.

Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings.

being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learning disability, left-handedness, major depressions, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual orientation, and many other conditions run in families, are more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, are better predicted by people's biological relatives than by their adoptive relatives, and are poorly predicted by any measurable feature of the environment.

The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.

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loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

Once again, it's good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes.

Weber's Law: for an increase in intensity to be noticeable, it must be a constant proportion of the existing intensity.

But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own.

Moving from philosophy to psychology, we discover a big problem with the claim that most of our thinking is metaphorical: people effortlessly transcend the metaphors implicit in their language.

Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Normative models also serve as benchmarks against which we can assess how human schlemiels do reason, the subject matter of psychology and the other behavioral sciences.

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.

As the decades pass, depressed people are more likely to die of suicide and other causes, so the old people who remain in a sample are the mentally healthier ones, making it seem as if everyone who was born long ago is mentally healthier.

As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it.

The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements: fear and love. Love is of the soul. Fear is of the personality.

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

When you lose your hair, it has an impact on confidence and your overall self-esteem whether it affects your career or your love life.

Hate and love are essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as a person who hates