Quotes About Psychology

Everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. Even if they don't explicitly acknowledge it, their minds are at work retelling or editing or updating a narrative that explains or excuses why they have spent their time on earth as they have.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.

Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm.

My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy," he said. "To understand the world by understanding why people, especially me, see it as they do. By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that's a psychologist!

The experimental psychologist "rarely attributes a deviation of results from expectations to sampling variability because he finds a causal 'explanation' for any discrepancy

Simply knowing about a bias wasn't sufficient to overcome it:

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

Hitler's doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.

The University of Michigan psychologist Dick Nisbett, after he'd met Amos, designed a one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are.

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

The eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology will answer just about any question you might have about psychology, clearly and directly. The nine-volume (and counting) A History of Psychology in Autobiography will answer just about any question you might have about psychologists, though less directly.

Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. "Lenny

recalls Avishai Margalit. "You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won't repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.

Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.

Inside him a quality and a chemical—intelligence and testosterone—wrestled for hegemony. At the moment the chemical was winning on points.

found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. "It

People who had post-traumatic stress disorder were considered weaklings," as one Israeli psychologist put it. Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable.

By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that's a psychologist!

It's bad when the dead talk in dreams," said Odessa.

The CEO of a major publishing house was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staffs. He hired a group of high-priced psychologists to find out what differentiated the creative employees from the others. After studying the staff for one year, the psychologists discovered only one difference between the two groups: The creative people believed they were creative and the less creative people believed they were not.

We're most reactive to the things we secretly accuse ourselves of.

We are most reactive to the things we secretly accuse ourselves of