Quotes About Psychology

Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.

decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.

Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, 'He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,' were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.

The reason Big Pharma spends so much on small gifts as well as the big ones is well known to marketers, lobbyists, and social psychologists: being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

young social psychologist named Leon Festinger

As Debra and Frank's problems accumulated, each developed an implicit theory of how the other person was wrecking the marriage. (These theories are called "implicit" because people are often unaware that they hold them.)

Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.

These findings do not mean that people enjoy painful experiences or that they enjoy things because they are associated with pain. What they mean is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Unromantic explanations—such as the structure of work—are better predictors of how men and women will get along than are explanations based on male and female "nature.

What makes us become us? What fucks us up and why?

My middle school health teacher told us that you can hold eye contact for ten seconds before scaring or seducing someone

My shrink would say that I'm not respecting boundaries

Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.

Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date.

Frederick left the young couple gazing into each other's eyes. Revolting, the way otherwise sensible people could carry on, he decided. Something to do with being married, no doubt. Perhaps it damaged the brain.

the abuser's desire to abuse is not created by the child - it is there before the child appears

This is what Jung's predecessor, Sigmund Freud, called "the return of the repressed.

As Jung emphasized: "Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.