Quotes About Psychology

If doing something once makes you have fear, doing it over and over and over again is only going to reinforce that fear.

People think they are afraid of these things, but they are not. It's not the object. It's not the height that makes you afraid, it's your brain. We know this because other people can be at the same height and they don't get afraid. The question becomes: what is the person who feels fear doing inside his head and, even more important, what is the person who feels calm or confident in those situations doing inside his head?

Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white, phhhhhp. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can't see it.

When I studied phobias, I didn't study the people who had them. I studied the people who got over them.

Actors and directors have written about it, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and even biologists have pondered it. What is acting, and how is it done? How does someone become someone else? Can someone become someone else? How much of what an actor does is due to that mysterious quality we call talent?

the naive forms of Christian moral motivation - bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven - stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others.

The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day.

The first thing a human being is loyal to, Yen Lo observed, is his own conditioned nervous system.

is a good deal of scientific support for the hypothesis that higher levels of thinking depend on language.

Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement 'I am an important person', but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.

PROBLEM 1. Assume yourself richer by $300 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure gain of $100, or [72%] B. A 50% chance to gain $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0. [28%] PROBLEM 2. Assume yourself richer by $500 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure loss of $100, or [36%] B. A 50% chance to lose $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0.

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories. When they overestimate their personal immunity from harm, people may fail to take sensible preventive steps. If people are running risks because of unrealistic optimism, they might be able to benefit from a nudge. In fact, we have already mentioned one possibility: if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic.

Loss aversion helps produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings.

Roughly speaking, losses hurt about twice as much as gains make you feel good. This

a nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of Humans

The evidence suggests that when people get a windfall—and this seems to be the way people think about their tax refund, despite it being expected—they tend to save a larger proportion from it than they do from regular income, especially if the windfall is sizable.

Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are "loss averse.

our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people adopt what we will call the "yeah, whatever" heuristic.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

people are more likely to keep what they start with than to trade it, even when the initial allocations were done at random.

What this means is that people do not assign specific values to objects. When they have to give something up, they are hurt more than they are pleased if they acquire the very same thing.

people's choices are pervasively influenced by the design elements selected by choice architects.

That does not mean something is wrong with us as humans, but it does mean that our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.