Quotes About Psychology

We used to get into other players' heads mentally and physically. In my day it was me versus you, my future versus your future.

When you ask someone a question, you trigger an unconscious flashback of their having been put on the spot earlier in life by a teacher, parent, or coach, and you create a syntactical 'you versus me' disconnect.

When people reach age 12-14, they become obsessed with evil. The percentage of people who are good versus evil becomes reversed. It's part of the way that teens' minds are being reordered - it's just a developmental stage.

The responses of the baby monkey are very similar to those of a human baby.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

I am a great believer that your humor is developed at a very early age, and it doesn't ever change. You're basically the same person forever, so you find the same stuff funny forever.

I suppose for a very long time I've been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I am a victim of introspection.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

When people don't like themselves very much, they have to make up for it. The classic bully was actually a victim first.

The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

We coaches have to learn how to deal with that: How do I get to each one best - with a talk, with video analysis? And what sort of tone? We need our own coaches for that. The sports psychologist coaches me too.

It's as if a psychological norm is being established whereby comments left online are part of a video game and not real life. It's as if we've all forgotten that there's a real person on the other end, reading and being hurt by our vitriol.

I'm happy that I'm alive. I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive.

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis.

We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment.

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.