Quotes About Psychology

has long been known that effort can be the secret sauce that makes things better. One of the classic findings in psychology is that the more effort you put into something, the more you value it. This is the logic of Benjamin Franklin's classic advice on how to turn a rival into a friend—ask him or her to do you a favor. Having worked to help you, they'll like you more.

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, "High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Of all dead psychological theories, catharsis is the deadest.

As usual in psychology, the negative is more powerful than the positive.

Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

turns out that one can screw up being happy by trying to be happy—or at least by trying to be happy in the wrong way.

Here's how to freak out a baby: sit across from the baby, engage with him or her, and then suddenly become still. If this goes on for more than a few seconds, with you looking all corpselike, the baby will become upset.

Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "What constitutes a good life? . . . Flow research has yielded one answer, providing an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment. Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does" (italics theirs). But this is actually a poor answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. Flow can be trivial.

Kahneman: Altogether, I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that's one of the reasons that I actually left the field of happiness, in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

I believe this in part because of Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

In a similar study, people were asked to write about a past event that made them feel "most guilty," and then were asked to manipulate a shock machine to either increase or decrease a set amount of shock they were receiving. Again the guilty group gave themselves more shock than a control group, and the stronger the shock they gave, the more their guilt went away.

In experimental work, people tend to contribute more to a charity when they expect to endure pain and suffering for that cause—the so-called martyrdom effect.

benign masochism refers to the choice to pursue activities that are normally painful or unpleasant but not harmful.

If you ask one group of people whether they will participate in a charity that involves a five-mile run (grueling) and a second group whether they will participate if the event involves a picnic (pleasant), the people in the first group are more likely to agree.

trials they were asked, "How happy are you right now?" The main predictor of reported short-term happiness wasn't how much the subjects were making; it was how much they were making relative to their expectations. Momentary pleasure and pain are, at least in part, relative experiences.

It turns out, then, that if you think something is really going to hurt and it hurts just mildly, the magic of contrast can cause this mild hurt to transform into pleasure.

Choosing to experience pain to enhance subsequent pleasure is a powerful trick, but it only works some of the time.

Greater Effort Increases Perceived Value in an Invertebrate," Journal of Comparative Psychology

Regardless of their sex, good-looking faces light up the brain

choosing from among fifteen flavors of ice cream is harder than choosing from three. Indeed, there is a whole literature on the "paradox of choice" that focuses on the stress associated with difficult decisions.

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats.

My friend does get into her clients' heads, of course—she would be useless if she couldn't—but she doesn't feel what they feel. She employs understanding and caring, not empathy