Psychology.md

Psychology

• "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." (Steven Furtick)
• "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (Upton Beall Sinclair)
• "[H]appiness [is] the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride show[s] the reverse pattern; it [is] the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women." (Jessica L. Tracy and Alec T. Beall)
• "Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did -- that the first 'Harry Potter' really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn't know that at the time -- our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised." (Duncan J. Watts)
• "[W]hen people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called 'cumulative advantage', or the 'rich get richer' effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still." (Duncan J. Watts)
• "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." (Noam Chomsky)
• "We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into 'flow', also known as being 'in the zone', where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone." (Joel Spolsky)
• "It's when we have no firsthand information and must rely on the news that the world gets scary." (David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg)
• "We know from psychological research that a steady diet of news about violence, corruption and incompetence leads to increased fear, learned helplessness, hopelessness, cynicism, depression, isolation, hostility, contempt and anxiety. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote: 'The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.'" (David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg)

Learning

• "Instead of studying, a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying." (Edward Hirt)
• "The kids who race ahead in the readers without much supervision get praised for being smart. What are they learning? They're learning that being smart is not about overcoming tough challenges. It's about finding work easy. When they get to college or graduate school and it starts being hard, they don't necessarily know how to deal with that." (Carol Dweck)
• "[A] science survey class [...] consists almost entirely of the theories that turned out to be right -- not the folks who believed in the mythical 'N-rays', declared that human beings had forty-eight chromosomes, or saw imaginary canals on Mars. [...] The people who believed in them frequently come across as ludicrous yokels, even though many of them were distinguished scientists who made real contributions to their fields." (Megan McArdle)
• The most important lesson kids should learn is "the ability to learn from their mistakes, to be knocked down and to pick themselves up -- the ability, in other words, to fail gracefully." (Megan McArdle)
• "I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested." (Noam Chomsky)

Motivation

• "Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly." (Alain de Botton)
• "If your job is to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning, and if your job is to eat two frogs, eat the big one first." (Mark Twain)
• "No one 'builds a house'. They lay one brick again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries -- they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built -- but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built." (Tim Urban)
• "But the best thing [to fight procrastination] is to recognize that you don't have to be in the mood to do a certain task -- just ignore how you feel and get started." (Ana Swanson)

Social psychology

• Milgram experiment
  • One of the most famous social science experiments of all time
  • Showed that most people will obey an authority figure even if the authority gives orders that conflict with the subject's morals.
  • Milgram wanted to prove that Germans have a stronger willingness to obey to authorities. Being the child of two eastern-European Jews, survivor's guilt after the Holocaust was probably one part of Milgram's motivation.
  • Milgram's work followed the Asch conformity experiments (where participants make judgments about drawn lines) but Milgram wanted to turn it "into a more humanly significant experiment".
  • The subjects were ordered to to give allegedly painful electric shocks to other people, who were in fact actors.
  • First tried on Americans in New Haven, the experiment showed subjects to be far more obedient than expected, so Milgram knew the German comparison wouldn't matter anymore.