Psychology Quotes
If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand [...] if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?
We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.
The motives by which we act are inscribed in our intimate structure as mammals, as hunters, as social beings: reason illuminates these connections, it does not generate them. We are not, in the first place, reasoning beings. We may perhaps become so, more or less, in the second. In the first instance, we are driven by a thirst for life, by hunger, by the need to love, by the instinct to find our place in human society... The second instance does not even exist without the first. Reason arbitrates between instincts but uses the very same instincts as primary criteria in its arbitration.
The brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it`s a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup.
How we behave is a balancing act between our future and present selves. In the future, we want to be fit, but in the present, we want the candy bar. In the future, we want to be a well-rounded, wellinformed intellectual virtuoso, but right now we want to watch Jersey Shore. Behavioral economists call this present bias - the gap between your preferences for your future self and your preferences in the current moment.
Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.
An old joke about behaviorists is that they don't believe in beliefs, they think that nothing can think, and in their opinion nobody has opinions.
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.