Quotes About Psychology

This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.

We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us.

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.

People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind114. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: "At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it."115

hyperbolic discounting, and

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

Herr Docktor Getwin Mittelmind (PhD, MD, BFA, University of Salzburg) was a spark who specialized in mad psychology. A specialized field to be sure. He was not locked away in Castle Heterodyne because he built giant anteaters. No, he was locked away in Castle Heterodyne because he could take a perfectly ordinary group of people and within six days they would build a giant anteater—because it was the logical thing to do.

I'M PLAYING LOOSE — Game: Average 2 players before the flop Action: First to the pot, and raising Players: 9- to 10-handed

He accepted without question the notion that there is such a thing as 'normal,' that most people have attained it, and that it could be achieved by his patients if only they would have a successful therapy.

So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?

Social psychologists have long known that getting people to publicly commit to a belief is a great way to freeze it in place, making it resistant to change. The stronger the commitment, the greater the resistance.

In his 1972 classic, Victims of Groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis—one of my PhD advisers at Yale long ago—explored the decision making that went into both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.

Jerry-5486: "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that's why they broke down—just couldn't stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this.

Bad systems" create "bad situations" create "bad apples" create "bad behaviors," even in good people.

diffusion of responsibility, in any form it takes, lowers the inhibition against harming others.

Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.

The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.

These days, it literally is all about 'me'. In an analysis of over 750,000 books published between 1960 and 2008, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. We, Us) decreased 10 per cent, while during this same timeframe, the use of first person singular pronouns (i.e. I, Me) increased 42 per cent, and second person pronouns (i.e. You, Your) quadrupled.

Psychological determinism asserts that every thought and feeling we have and every action we perform is caused by events in the past.

Futureoriented people believe that when you choose a behavior, you choose its future consequences, but Zajonc, Bargh, and many others in social psychology have demonstrated that sometimes you do not choose a behavior. Sometimes a behavior chooses you based upon the environment in which you find yourself.