Psychologists From The United States

"There's literally no difference between a physician recognizing a disease from a "facial expression", and a little child pointing to something and saying "doggie"."

"People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them. Amos made a great deal of difference, and when he died, life was dimmed and diminished for many of us. There is less intelligence in the world. There is less wit. There are many questions that will never be answered with the same inimitable combination of depth and clarity. There are standards that will not be defended with the same mix of principle and good sense. Life has become poorer. There is a large Amos-shaped gap in the mosaic, and it will not be filled. It cannot be filled because Amos shaped his own place in the world, he shaped his life, and even his dying. And in shaping his life and his world, he changed the world and the life of many around him."

"In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting."

"I've called Daniel Kahneman the world's most influential living psychologist and I believe that is true. He pretty much created the field of behavioural economics and has revolutionised large parts of cognitive psychology and social psychology. His central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That's a powerful and important discovery."

"A huge part of Danny's work is on how we think – and how profoundly irrational we can be. That, too, is transforming business, however slowly, and explains the million copies he has sold of his new book. But, in the great sweep of history, I suspect he will be most remembered as the man who made happiness respectable."

"An experiment about your next vacation will allow you to observe your attitude to your experiencing self: At the end of the vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow a potion that will wipe out all your memories of the vacation. How would this affect your vacation plans? How much would you be willing to pay for it, relative to a normally memorable vacation? My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.Imagine a painful operation during which you will scream in pain and beg the surgeon to stop. However, you are promised an amnesia-inducing drug that will wipe out any memory of the episode. Here again, my observation is that most people are remarkably indifferent to the pains of their experiencing self. Some say they don’t care at all. Others share my feeling, which is that I feel pity for my suffering self but not more than I would feel for a stranger in pain.I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."

"Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. Indeed, we can be deeply moved even by events that change the stories of people already dead. We feel pity for a man who died believing in his wife’s love for him when we hear that she had a lover for many years and stayed with her husband only for his money. We pity the husband although he had lived a happy life. We feel the humiliation of a scientist who made a discovery that was proved false after she died, although she did not feel the humiliation. Most important, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero."

"The mystery is how a conception that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: Once you have accepted a theory, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has observed, disbelieving is hard work."

"Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person -- you already feel fortunate. Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders -- not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge."

"Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant cognitive bias. Because optimistic bias is both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic."

"We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness."

"The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true."

"Although humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgements and better decisions. [...] [They] also need protection from others who deliberately exploit their weaknesses [...]."

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."

"A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome."

"Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness, but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse."

"The first advice is to slow down, and not follow your first impulses."

"A plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. [...] There is a clear contrast between the effects of income on experienced well-being and in life satisfaction. Higher income brings with it higher satisfaction, well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience. [...] Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely."

"Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound."

"A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. [...] And when there is no overweighting, there will be neglect."

"Many unfortunate human situations unfold [...] where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters."

"He weights losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal."

"There is no evidence that risk takers in the economic domain have an unusual appetite for gambles on high stakes; they are merely less aware of risks than more timid people are."

"He's taking an inside view. He should forget about his own case and look for what happened in other cases."

"Subjective confidence in a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgement is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."

"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."

"It took Francis Galton several years to figure out that and regression are not two concepts – they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean."

"There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases."

"The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. [...] The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed."

"It is the of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."

"disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."

"Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed."

"Whether we consider Nazi Germany or Abu Ghraib prison, there were many people who observed what was happening and said nothing. At Abu Ghraib, one photo shows two soldiers smiling before a pyramid of naked prisoners while a dozen other soldiers stand around watching passively. If you observe such abuses and don’t say, “This is wrong! Stop it!” you give tacit approval to continue. You are part of the silent majority that makes evil deeds more acceptable."

"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."

"The “Lucifer Effect” describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in “total situations,” where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play."

"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of authority and groupthink that play a critical role in our socialization. Asch showed that once the standard is set, people will adopt it and go along with it, even if it is illogical. When the stakes are raised, as they were in Milgram's work, people may struggle with unethical commands, but the majority still obey. And when authorities set parameters but leave the decision-making to the rest of us, we still have a tendency to impose strict control on those we consider deviant. All of these findings affirm the power of culture, socialization, and our widespread fear that we will be judged and punished. Since human beings have a desperate need for safety, approval, and belonging (which yields access to group resources), the worst kind of punishment is ostracism. This shunning may be subtle or extreme."

"The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the “heroic elect,” a myth that reinforces two basic human tendencies. The first is to ascribe very rare personal characteristics to people who do something special — to see them as superhuman, practically beyond comparison to the rest of us. The second is the trap of inaction — sometimes known as the "bystander effect." Research has shown that the bystander effect is often motivated by diffusion of responsibility, when different people witnessing an emergency all assume someone else will help. Like the “good guards,” we fall into the trap of inaction when we assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to act the hero."

"I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan. Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts."

"It is not just rank-and-file psychologists who are protesting. Former APA president Philip Zimbardo is an international expert on interrogation and torture, and the author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. We asked for his response to the oft-repeated argument that psychologists can protect prisoners from abuse. "I think that's a lie," he told us. "Nobody is paying psychologists to go to the prison to make life easier for the prisoners. Psychologists in operation in Guantánamo Bay, in Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan have almost no power to make any meaningful change. They are hired guns. You do what the boss wants, or you don't get back. So to say that psychologists are needed to maintain the dignity of prisoners, their health and so forth-that has no basis in reality.""

"During these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say, "Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..." And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now." Silence. And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?" And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now." I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..." "Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.""

"I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about."

"When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

"Only when I know who I am will I know what is possible."

"There are three stages in this journey that I have been on. The first. the social science stage; the second, the psychedelic stage; and the third, the yogi stage."

"Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn't label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn't make it, that the psychologists didn't really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren't getting to the crux of the matter. My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being "objective" for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out. ... Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn't know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn't add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable."

"Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology [at Stanford and Harvard], and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled."

"Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved."

"I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist."

"I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware "I" was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion. Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness — one of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that "I", that scanning device — that point — that essence — that place beyond. A place where "I" existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something else — that "I" Knew — it really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurance — David Reisman's other-directed being, was over."

"I thought at that moment, "Wow, I've got it made. I'm just a new beautiful being — I'm just an inner self — all I'll ever need to do is look inside and I'll know what to do and I can always trust it, and here I'll be forever." But two or three days later I was talking about the whole thing in the past tense. I was talking about how I "experienced" this thing, because I was back being that anxiety-neurotic, in a slightly milder form, but still, my old personality was sneaking back up on me."