Quotes About Psychology

Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness

One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, "Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don't do it with information. We do it with identity: 'If I buy a BMW, I'm going to be this kind of person.

a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we're angry, we know we're right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money.

Many people have discovered that, when it comes to changing their own behavior, environmental tweaks beat self-control every time.

The higher numbers get, the less sensitive we get to them, a phenomenon psychologists have labeled "psychophysical numbing.

forming a habit isn't all environmental—it's also mental.

The higher numbers get, the less sensitive we get to them, a phenomenon psychologists have labeled "psychophysical numbing." Moving on the number scale from 10 to 20 feels significant. But moving an equal distance from 340 to 350, even though it's the same increase, we feel nothing… that's "numbing.

The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

The value of the new A&W burger depended on consumers comparing two fractions: 1/3 and 1/4. But fractions are difficult for everyone, because they're parts of things as opposed to whole objects. We like to count things, and fractions don't equal "things." So, we jump to the closest available whole numbers. 4 is bigger than 3, so we mistakenly infer that a 1/4-pounder is a bigger burger than a 1/3-pounder.

the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings.

psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words—every one that he could find in the English language—and found that 62 percent of them were negative versus 38 percent positive.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people's charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

Compounding this preference for the status quo is another bias called loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone's identity is likely doomed to failure. (That's why it's so clumsy when people instinctively reach for "incentives" to change other people's behavior.)

researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.

Knowledge does not change behavior

Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun (2004). "Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence," Psychological Inquiry 15: 1–18. The researchers have a test of post-traumatic growth, called the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), that you can find online. We also recommend the excellent Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg. Also see:

Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don't like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they're acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they'll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned above, and Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. One of the handful of books that provides advice on making decisions better is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which was written for "choice architects" in business and government who construct decision systems such as retirement plans or organ-donation policies. It has been used to improve government policies in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries.

Fundamental Attribution Error." The error lies in our inclination to attribute people's behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

One of IDEO's designers even sketched out a "project mood chart" that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It's a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled "hope," at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled "confidence," at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled "insight.

Why are you attracted to self-sabotage? I

What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains?