Quotes About Psychology

Maybe that's the fate of someone who spends his life delving into other people's minds – listening to their worst fears, unmasking their flaws and discovering their motives. Maybe a man like that begins to rust or seize up – haunted by too many ghosts in the machine.

In a deep psychological sense, we have no self unless we have a secret. We grab for them whenever we begin losing ourselves in our social group or work or marriage. We reassert our identity as somebody apart.

is so fundamental to our existence; it is wired into our DNA. That's why babies learn to fake cry before they're a year old and to bluff by the age of two. By four a child is an accomplished liar, and by five, he or she realises that truly outrageous lies are less likely to be believed.

I once asked Leon Festinger, one of the smartest men in the world, whether or not he ever felt inept. He replied, "Of course! That is what keeps you ept.

According to Panksepp, seven primal emotional and motivational feelings that appear to be common features of animal and human consciousness at both a behavioral and a neural level are SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, GRIEF, and PLAY.

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct.

Festinger was the intellectually intense discoverer of "cognitive dissonance," the idea that when a personal belief is challenged by new information, we tend to ignore the new information in order to reduce mental conflict.

As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum

When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face.

Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let's call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

On Being Sane in Insane Places

The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic

everything was obvious in retrospect. They even had a name for it: "hindsight bias." It referred to the difficulty of remembering how little you knew at the time, how uncertain things were, before they all played out. Even wildly contingent events looked inevitable in retrospect. But they weren't. And it's actually psychologically difficult to imagine not knowing back then what you know now.

This idea is not new. In the 1920s the great Harvard psychologist William McDougall also suggested that religious miracles might be the result of the collective psychic powers of large numbers of worshipers.

Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?

I didn't do it; I can just imagine doing it. Maybe that's the difference between crazy and not crazy.

Modern humans' group-minded interdependence thus served to spread human sympathy and helping to all in the group, best characterized as a sense of loyalty to the group. As a consequence, there emerged in modern humans a distinctive in-group/out-group psychology.

he thought emotionally, not strategically.

The War on Terror is ultimately a battle for the human mind and heart.

All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself." —Adolf Hitler

Killing is a brutal, vicious, dangerous job," Wuu said. "Empathy for the enemy delays your reactions and gets you killed. It is necessary to think of them as nonhuman, as 'krauts,' 'gooks,' or 'aardvarks,' to enable you to shut off the civilized part of your brain and revert to the killer mentality. By thinking of your own culture as nonhuman, you