Psychologists From The United States

"A sane society would be asking questions about the very nature of a society and culture that creates so much trauma for children.... We live in a society that prioritizes profits for large corporations and power for large institutions. We live in a society in which, for example, the cause of depression and suicide has been, for decades, falsely attributed by psychiatry and Big Pharma to a chemical imbalance theory long known to be untrue—an untruth that has made billions of dollars for drug companies and increased power for psychiatry through increased use of antidepressants which are known to actually increase suicide... just one of many examples that we do not live in a sane society."

"A good deal is said these days about being oneself. It is supposed to be healthy to be oneself. While it is a little hard for me to understand how one could be anything else, I suppose what is meant is that one should not strive to become anything other than what he is. This strikes me as a very dull way of living; in fact, I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are. Well, I’m not so sure we would all be better off - perhaps it would be more accurate to say life would be a lot more interesting."

"There is another meaning that might be attached to this admonition to be oneself; that one should not try to disguise himself. I suspect this comes nearer to what psychologists mean when they urge people to be themselves. It is presumed that the person who faces the world barefaced is more spontaneous, that he expresses himself more fully, and that he has a better chance of developing all his resources if he assumes no disguises."

"What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders who he really is - whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be."

"What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders who he really is - whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. Adam must have experienced such a moment."

"It is important, then, to see confirmation, or the validation of one’s constructs, as securing a base upon which one can build major revisions of [one’s] construct system. This is why we so often cite security as necessary for broad advancement, whether in a person or in society. This is why the arts and sciences flourish at a higher level when nations and people are led to believe they are on the right track."

"In the very first course in psychology that I took I sat in the back row of a very large class, tilted my chair against the wall, made myself as comfortable as possible, and kept one ear cocked for anything interesting that might turn up. One day the professor, a very nice person who seemed to be trying hard to convince himself that psychology was something to be taken seriously, turned to the blackboard and wrote an 'S,' an arrow, and an 'R.' Thereupon I straightened up my chair and listened, thinking to myself that now, after two or three weeks of preliminaries, we might be getting to the meat of the matter."

"George Kelly's 1955 personal construct psychology can be viewed as perhaps the first constructivist theory of personality and psychotherapy — and in many respects, and in many respects, the most comprehensive. Kelly's work has often been classified as an early cognitive theory."

"Out of all this I have gradually developed the notion that psychology is pretty much confined to the paradigms it employs and, while you can take off in a great many directions and travel a considerable distance in any of them — as indeed we have with stimulus-response psychology — there is no harm in consorting with a strange paradigm now and then. Indeed the notion has occurred to me that psychology may best be regarded as a collection of paradigms wooed by exphysicists, ex-physiologists, and ex-preachers, as well as a lot of other intellectual renegades. Even more recently it has struck me that this is the nature of man; he is an inveterate collector of paradigms."

"The labyrinth is conceived as a network of constructs, each of which is essentially an abstraction and, as such, can be picked up and laid down over many, many different events in order to bring them into focus and clothe them with personal meaning. Moreover, the constructs are subject to continual revision, although the complex interdependent relationship between constructs in the system often makes it precarious for the person to revise one construct without taking into account the disruptive effect upon major segments of the system."

"I have been careful not to use either of the terms, 'emotional' or 'affective'. I have been equally careful not to invoke the notion of 'cognition'. The classic distinction which separates these two constructs has, in the manner of most classic distinctions that once were useful, become a barrier to sensitive psychological inquiry. When one so divides the experience of man, it becomes difficult to make the most of the holistic aspirations that may infuse the science of psychology with new life, and may replace the classicism now implicit even in the most 'behaviouristic' research."

"Is it a phenomenological theory? Granted that... phenomenology comes from various shapes and sizes, our fundamental postulate does not make the usual phenomenological commitments. We did not say, for example, that one is surrounded only by his perceptions. In fact, we started this discussion by asserting that there is a sense in which all of us are caught up in our circumstances. Nor do we say that each personal world is an island universe. The words 'personal' and 'private' are certainly not synonyms. I think the tree that falls in the primeval forest makes a bang just like any other tree. Moreover. we might sometimes, although at the moment cannot say how, take an interest in the noise that centuries ago nobody heard and eventually makes something scientifically important out of it."

"Johann Herbart’s work on education and particularly mathematical psychology influenced me. I think mathematics is the pure instance of construct functioning—the model of human behaviour."

"Images are defined to be information structures, with different kind of images representing different kind of information about what the actor is doing, why and how, and what kind of progress is being made."

"I sketched an epistemological position that assumed the reality of events, independently of how they are perceived. In taking this stand I broke off with the position known as phenomenology; at least I broke off with phenomenology to the extent that it is a form of pure philosophical idealism."

"Man anticipates events by construing their replications."

"Fundamental Postulate and its Corollaries"

"I have been so puzzled over the early labelling of as ‘cognitive’ that several years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cognitive theory."

"The classic threefold division of psychology into cognition, affection, and conation has been completely abandoned."

"To begin, image theory assumes that decision makers use three different schematic knowledge structures to organize their thinking about decisions. These structures are called images, in deference to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960), whose work inspired image theory. The first of the three is the value image, the constituents of which are the decision maker's principles. These are the imperatives for his or her behavior or the behavior of the organization of which he or she is a member and serve as rigid criteria for the rightness or wrongness of any particular decision about a goal or plan. Principles serve to internally generate candidate goals and plans for possible adoption, and they guide decisions about externally generated candidate goals and plans."

"Man develops his way of anticipating events by construing, by scratching out his channels of thought. Thus he builds his own maze. His runways are the constructs he forms, each a two-way street, each essentially a pair of alternatives between which he can choose."

"Paradigms are the most general-rather like a philosophical or ideological framework. Theories are more specific, based on the paradigm and designed to describe what happens in one of the many realms of events encompassed by the paradigm. Models are even more specific providing the mechanisms by which events occur in a particular part of the theory’s realm. Of all three, models are most affected by empirical data - models come and go, theories only give way when evidence is overwhelmingly against them and paradigms stay put until a radically better idea comes along."

"[The evildoer's] behavior has been threatening to those whose own morality is insecure; and as long as he is seen as having exemplified the tempting way of life, there are those who will need to punish him as a prophylaxis for their own temptations."

"[The behaviour of the decision maker reflects economics’ utilitarian paradigm] which means that they strive to acquire desirable pay offs and if their decisions processes correspond to the processes dictated by utility theory and probability theory. That is, decision-making in the sense of acquisition of desirable payoffs, will be most successful if the attractiveness of each option is summarised as the sum of the probability - discounted utilities corresponding to its potential pay offs and if the decision maker chooses the option which offers the greatest sum."

"Decision making is essentially social behaviour, even when there is nobody else present, because one anticipates how others will react and factors this into the decision. [...] Organizations per se do not make decisions, but individuals in organizations do. And when they do, they must take others into account."

"We attempt to use the phenomenologist's approach to arrive at personalized constructs which have a wide range of meaning for the given individual; then we attempt to piece together this high-level type of data with what we know about other persons."

"The Theory of Narrative Thought begins with the assumption that everyday thought is in the form of narratives, which are causally motivated, time-oriented chronicles, or stories, that connect the past and present with the future, thereby giving continuity and meaning to ongoing experience. Narratives are not simply the voice in your head, nor are they simply words, like a novel or a newspaper article. They are a rich mixture of memories and of current visual, auditory, and other aspects of awareness, all laced together by emotions to form a mixture that far surpasses mere words in their ability to capture context and meaning."

"While we could agree with the psychological phenomenologists and assign an important place to generalization within the realm of the individual, we were quite sure that some data must be lifted from the realm of the individual and construed nomothetically that is, in a realm comprising many individuals."

"The elements of narratives are symbols that stand for real or imagined events and actors, where the latter are animate beings or inanimate forces. The glue that binds the elements is causality and implied purpose. The narrative is a temporal arrangement of events that are purposefully caused by animate beings or are the result of inanimate forces. The narrative’s story line is the emergent meaning created by arranging the elements according to time, purpose, and causality. Just as arranging words into sentences creates emergent meaning that unarranged words do not have, and just as arranging sentences into larger units creates even more emergent meaning, arranging events, actors, time, purpose, and causality into a narrative creates the emergent meaning that is its story line or plot.A “good narrative” is coherent and plausible; coherent when effects can be accounted for by causes and plausible when the actions of its actors are consistent with their own or similar actors’ actions across contexts (i.e., across different narratives). We tend to believe that good narratives are valid."

"Diagnosis is all too frequently an attempt to cram a whole live struggling client into a nosological category."

"From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs we may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation."

"The first way in which one notices that a sentiment structure is different from an erg is that the emotional (ergic goal) qualities which enter it are very diverse, whereas in an erg they are all of one quality, e. g., gregariousness, sex... The sentiment brings together attitudes, in fact, with several different ergic roots, but only one source of learning."

"Overt anxiety... that part of anxiety of which the individual is aware and ready to speak."

"Subjectively the possession of a role factor is felt as a 'mental set' which modifies all ordinary responses. The very same stimulus is perceived in a different way when one is in the role and when one is out of it... Technically, we handle this change of perception the same way in a role as in a mood—both of which can intrude on the ordinary personality — by this special factor, L, which can be called a modulator factor. A modulator factor comes into action only when the usual ordinary 'focal stimulus' comes into the orbit of a set of role cues which we may call the 'ambient' or surrounding stimulus."

"Dominance... is shown in assertive, independent, confident and stubborn behaviour."

"Psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'."

"(Personality is)... that which tells what a man will do when placed in a given situation."

"Psychology appeared to be a jungle of confusing, conflicting, and arbitrary concepts. These pre-scientific theories doubtless contained insights which still surpass in refinement those depended upon by psychiatrists or psychologists today. But who knows, among the many brilliant ideas offered, which are the true ones? Some will claim that the statements of one theorist are correct, but others will favour the views of another. Then there is no objective way of sorting out the truth except through scientific research."

"The danger is not only that politicians and private institutions with axes to grind will find tame or corruptible social scientists to support their positions. The greater danger which recent experiences both here and abroad, e.g., Lysenkoism in Russia, have revealed is that partisans primarily political in interest and intention either accidentally or deliberately infiltrate the ranks of science. In the case of the Lysenko episode, and comparable events in Nazi Germany, the disturbing realization to scientists was that the exile or death of those ejected from their academic positions followed what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists, but was actually politically staged."

"A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories."

"Of course, science lives by confusing theories, but what were accepted as 'theories' even by the many professional psychologists and psychiatrists were very poor limitations of what physical scientists call a theory."

"Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance: that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties."

"(W)hereas Milgram’s findings need constant reiteration in every generation, Harlow’s research no longer surprises us. One might say that its very success has made teaching it unnecessary: No one would argue against Harlow’s findings, as many students always want to do with Milgram’s."

"[Harlow] kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

"Apathetic Annie was complacent and serene Though suffering from , and But Annie did not really care Though life was nearly gone For Annie had a tumor of the ."

"Because that's how it feels when you're depressed."

"Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were."

"Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned missions as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists."

"In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity."

"In the first place I have an enormous regard for common sense. Any time we discover some great thing and it contradicts common sense, we better go back to the laboratory and check it."