Quotes About Psychology

Social influences come in two basic categories. The first involves information. If many people do something or think something, their actions and their thoughts convey information about what might be best for you to do or think. The second involves peer pressure. If you care about what other people think about you (perhaps in the mistaken belief that they are paying some attention to what you are doing—see below), then you might go along with the crowd

there is no question that social pressures nudge people to accept some pretty odd conclusions—and those conclusions might well affect their behavior.

The bottom line is that Humans are easily nudged by other Humans. Why? One reason is that we like to conform. Doing What Others Do

People will be risk-averse for gains, but risk-seeking for losses

losses hurt about twice as much as gains make you feel good.

Loss aversion produces inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings. Loss aversion operates as a kind of cognitive nudge, pressing us not to make changes, even when changes are very much in our interests.

On average, those who eat with one other person eat about 35 percent more than they do when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75 percent more; those in groups of seven or more eat 96 percent more.

When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain by numerous options and perhaps even by choosing for themselves. A nudge might be welcomed.

Or consider this one: people's judgments about strangers are affected by whether they are drinking iced coffee or hot coffee! Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee.27 This, too, happens quite unconsciously.

Drawing on some well-established findings in social science, we show that in many cases, individuals make pretty bad decisions—decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control.

Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee. 27 This, too, happens quite unconsciously.

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies

The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.

Con qué rapidez se acepta lo increíble si se ve con frecuencia!

Stay sane inside insanity.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

Oddly enough, there's no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?

What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump?

But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate?

I'd given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal.

Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he's even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He'll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.