Famous Psychologists Quotes

Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims. When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)

You have a famous relative. Family tradition has it we descend from St. Nicholas.” “Santa Claus? I thought he was make-believe.” “He is, but the person Santa Claus is based on is real. St. Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop—and a fine human being. He served in Turkey.

B.F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticising, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.

Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flow states, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologist with the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The psychologist Walter Mischel captured the conflict in an agonizing choice he gave four-year-olds in a famous 1972 experiment: one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.15 Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests, dilemmas that force us to choose between a sooner small reward and a later large reward.

Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In that book he says: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.

Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes.10 “Quite apart from the charm of the new and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience and thus satisfies the scientific need for ‘facts’; and, besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga11 also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos…. “Yoga practice...would be ineffectual without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.

If I start doing more things with my hands, whether that's woodworking or gardening or knitting or baking cookies, I might fall into the condition made famous by the psychologist with the impossible name: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That condition is "flow." It means becoming completely involved in an activity not for the sake of the outcome but for the sheer joy of it. It means feeling alive when we are fully in the groove of doing something. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the path to greatest happiness lies not with mindless consuming but with challenging ourselves to experience or produce something new, becoming in the process more engaged, connected and alive.

Religion has used ritual forever. I remember a famous study led by psychologist Alfred Tomatis of a group of clinically depressed monks. After much examination, researchers concluded that the group’s depression stemmed from their abandoning a twice-daily ritual of gathering to sing Gregorian chants. They had lost the sense of community and the comfort of singing together in harmony. Creating beautiful music together was a formal recognition of their connection and a shared moment of joy.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert’s famous description of the child’s “grasshopper mind”6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically “hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress. I’ve had court-mandated psychotherapy clients. They did not want my help. They were forced to seek it. It did not work. It was a travesty.

Imagine if we taught baseball the way that we teach science,” says UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik. “We would tell kids about baseball in the first couple of years. By the time they got to be in junior high, maybe we’d give them a drill where they could throw the ball to second base, over and over and over again. In college, they’d get to reproduce great, famous baseball plays, and then they’d never actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school.” High-quality project-based learning is, essentially, playing ball. There

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?

a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of now-famous experiments on the dangers of group influence. Asch gathered student volunteers into groups and had them take a vision test. He showed them a picture of three lines of varying lengths and asked questions about how the lines compared with one another: which was longer, which one matched the length of a fourth line, and so on. His questions were so simple that 95 percent of students answered every question correctly. But when Asch planted actors in the groups, and the actors confidently volunteered the same incorrect answer, the number of students who gave all correct answers plunged to 25 percent.

Einstein’s developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as every grandchild is. But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. And he generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famous thought experiments, such as imagining watching lightning strikes from a moving train or experiencing gravity while inside a falling elevator. “I very rarely think in words at all,” he later told a psychologist. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”4

The importance of the base rate was made famous by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who coined the phrase “the outside view and the inside view.” The inside view means looking at the specific case in front of you: this couple. The outside view requires you to look at a more general “comparison class” of cases—here, the comparison class is all married couples. (The outside view needn’t be statistical, but it often will be.)

Between 1951 and 1956, just as Osborn was promoting the power of group brainstorming, a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of now-famous experiments on the dangers of group influence. Asch gathered student volunteers into groups and had them take a vision test. He showed them a picture of three lines of varying lengths and asked questions about how the lines compared with one another: which was longer, which one matched the length of a fourth line, and so on. His questions were so simple that 95 percent of students answered every question correctly. But when Asch planted actors in the groups, and the actors confidently volunteered the same incorrect answer, the number of students who gave all correct answers plunged to 25 percent. That is, a staggering 75 percent of the participants went along with the group’s wrong answer to at least one question.

And sometimes, even though Dad said Dr. Snow was the best psychologist in the city and a very famous man, Jess thought there were things he didn't know either. "Time heals all wounds," he'd said to them once, his voice so soft and thoughtful he could have been talking to himself. It had seemed a cruel thing to say, though Jess knew he hadn't meant to be unkind. Vida had been really angry with him. "No, it doesn't!" she shouted. "You're wrong! It doesn't!

The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously suggested that after we take care of our most basic needs, such as food, shelter, and sex, we eventually strive for “ self-actualization,” or the realization of our full potential; in his words, “[Even if all our other] needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he [or she] is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write. What a [person] can be, he [or she] must be.

John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his name, once confessed: “I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.” Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be. Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.

Anatol Rapoport, a mathematical psychologist who was famous for his insights into social interactions: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’ You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of widespread agreement). You should mention anything that you have learned from your target. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.1 How many times have you heard or participated in a conversation that obeys these rules? Such guidelines have gone out of fashion recently, if they were ever followed.

The great psychologist Dr. George W. Crane said in his famous book Applied Psychology, “Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions. You can’t control the latter directly but only through your choice of motions or actions. . . . To avoid this all too common tragedy (marital difficulties and misunderstandings) become aware of the true psychological facts. Go through the proper motions each day and you’ll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions! Just be sure you and your mate go through those motions of dates and kisses, the phrasing of sincere daily compliments, plus the many other little courtesies, and you need not worry about the emotion of love. You can’t act devoted for very long without feeling devoted.

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)

Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes (7). “Quite apart from the charm of the new, and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience, and thus satisfies the scientific need of ‘facts,’ and besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga (8) also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos. “When the thing which the individual is doing is also a cosmic event, the effect experienced in the body (the innervation), unites with the emotion of the spirit (the universal idea), and out of this there develops a lively unity which no technique, however scientific, can produce. Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual with each other in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.” The Western day is indeed nearing when the inner science of self- control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of nature. This new Atomic Age will see men’s minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. Finer forces of the human mind can and must liberate energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction (9).

No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas. As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, “I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.”)

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves? In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order, and stability). Up one level are the need for love and for belonging. Above that is our desire for growth—the opportunity to attain personal goals, to master knowledge and skills, and to be recognized and rewarded for our achievements. Finally, at the top is the desire for what Maslow termed “self-actualization”—self-fulfillment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. Maslow argued that safety and survival remain our primary and foundational goals in life, not least when our options and capacities become limited. If true, the fact that public policy and concern about old age homes focus on health and safety is just a recognition and manifestation of those goals. They are assumed to be everyone’s first priorities. Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age. What’s more, our driving motivations in life, instead of remaining constant, change hugely over time and in ways that don’t quite fit Maslow’s classic hierarchy. In young adulthood, people seek a life of growth and self-fulfillment, just as Maslow suggested. Growing up involves opening outward. We search out new experiences, wider social connections, and ways of putting our stamp on the world. When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in. Given the choice, young people prefer meeting new people to spending time with, say, a sibling; old people prefer the opposite. Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

It is easy to understand why groups can fail. Bringing people together, giving them objectives and bidding them to work like a team regardless of body chemistry may not bring out the best in them. Moreover, almost all groups carry passengers. In a famous experiment, Max Ringelmann, a German psychologist, found that as more people joined a rope-pulling team, the average effort expended by individual team members fell. Indeed, studies of group behaviour reveal that most of the work in groups is done by a third of the membership.1

One of the most overlooked aspects of excellence is how much work it takes. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload, pursued with single-minded intensity. Strenuous effort over long periods of time is a repetitive theme in the biographies of the giants, sometimes taking on mythic proportions (Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Even the most famous supposed exception, Mozart, illustrates the rule. He was one of the lighter spirits among the giants, but his reputation for composing effortlessly was overstated—Mozart himself complained on more than one occasion that it wasn’t as easy as it looked1—and his devotion to his work was as single-minded as Beethoven’s, who struggled with his compositions more visibly. Consider the summer of 1788. Mozart was living in a city that experienced bread riots that summer and in a country that was mobilizing for war. He was financially desperate, forced to pawn his belongings to move to cheaper rooms. He even tried to sell the pawnbroker’s tickets to get more loans. Most devastating of all, his beloved six-month old daughter died in June. And yet in June, July, and August, he completed two piano trios, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, and three symphonies, two of them among his most famous.2 It could not have been done except by someone who, as Mozart himself once put it, is “soaked in music,…immersed in it all day long.”3 Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about 10 years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment.4 Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, labor.5 Nor is all of this work productive. What we see of the significant figures’ work is typically shadowed by an immense amount of wasted effort—most successful creators produce clunkers, sometimes far more clunkers than gems.6

So why do people tend to have mental health problems in more unequal places? Psychologist and journalist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious disease to explain the link. The 'affluenza' virus, according to James, is a 'set of vlaues which increase our vulnerability to emotional distress' which he believes is more common in affluent societies. It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. These kinds of values place us at greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder...

A house in the country to find out what’s true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you.” This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine. Marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.” When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. People are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. And infatuation is the most perilous aspect of human desire. Infatuation leads to what psychologists call “intrusive thinking”—that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. An old Polish adage warns: “Before going to war, say one prayer. Before going to sea, say two prayers. Before getting married, say three.” “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” We derail our life’s journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time.

But Nowlis, likely protecting his career, left quietly and, in fact, became a famous psychologist. Disgusted by what he called Kinsey’s “outrageous” child sex abuse protocol, Nowlis stayed silent about these crimes against children until Jones interviewed him165 half a century thereafter?166 Why?

n the 20th century, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner performed a famous set of experiments in which he tested different methods of introducing new behaviours in rats. These experiments brought to light how “the powers that be” can condition humans to love their servitude. In one set of experiments, Skinner attempted to cultivate new behaviours via positive reinforcement; he provided the rat with food anytime it performed the desirable behavior. In another set of experiments, he attempted to weaken or eliminate certain behaviours via punishment; he triggered a painful stimulus when the rat performed the behavior Skinner wished to eliminate. Skinner discovered that punishment temporarily put an end to undesirable behaviours, but it did not remove the animal’s motivation to engage in such behaviors in the future. “Punished behavior”, writes Skinner, “is likely to reappear after the punitive consequences are withdrawn.” (B.F. Skinner, About Behaviorism) Behaviors that were conditioned via positive reinforcement, on the other hand, were more enduring and led to long-term changes in the animal’s behavioural patterns.

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” MBSR,

Yet he appeared to be a year or two older than that. She sat down on the stool next to Syn. “Out of curiosity, why are you keeping me here?” It was against military protocol. In the past, whenever her father had “protected” her, she’d been moved to a safe location. Nykyrian took a drink of his juice before he answered. “When you’re being hunted to the extent you are, there’s no real safe place. You’re famous, which makes it all the harder to hide you. Better to keep you here where you have the advantage of knowing the terrain and are most comfortable.” “Not to mention, we’re using you for bait.” Nykyrian cocked his head at Syn. “Are you that drunk?” Syn’s eyes widened. “What? I wasn’t supposed to tell her that?” Kiara was horrified. “I’m bait?” “No, you’re not bait. Ignore the alcoholic whose view of reality is distorted by his brain-damaged hallucinations. What the psychologists have found is that people in your position cope best when there’s as little interruption as possible in their routine.” Kiara swallowed. “Not to mention we both know the one truth neither of you is talking about.” “And that is?” “That I’m really nothing more than a waco.” It was an assassin’s term that meant walking corpse. “I’m not going to live through the night, am I?

In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.” The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.

In The Heart’s Code, psychologist Paul Pearsall chronicles arresting accounts of our body’s cellular emotional intelligence. He tells of Claire Sylvia, the famous heart-lung transplant recipient who suddenly began craving new kinds of food—chicken nuggets and beer— as well as experiencing unfamiliar emotions. But why? Stunningly, in dreams, she had conversations with her donor (whose identity had been kept anonymous, standard hospital policy), which allowed her to locate his parents. They confirmed that her new tastes and feelings were those their son had too.

The relationship among faith, knowledge, and belief is suggested by a story involving the famous depth psychologist Carl Jung. In the last year of his life, he was interviewed for a BBC television documentary. The interviewer asked him, "Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?" Jung said, "Believe? I do not believe in God - I know." The point: the more one knows God, the less faith as belief is involved. But faith as belief still has a role: it can provide a basis for responding even when one does not know for sure, and it can also get one through periods of time in which firsthand experiences of God are lacking.

thepsychchic chips clips ii If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135 W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142 Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147 Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159 You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162 Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190 The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191 An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208 Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217 John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224 Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237 [on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go. One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.” Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257 Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251 JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252

Consider this simple parallelism: a husband and wife come to a marriage counselor seeking help. He tells one story about their problems. She tells quite a different story. The counselor, if well-trained and sophisticated, does not believe either party completely. Elsewhere in the same city, two physics students repeat two famous experiments. The first experiment seems to indicate that light travels in waves. The second seems to indicate that light travels in discrete particles. The students, if well-trained and sophisticated, do not believe either result. The psychologist, you see, knows that each nervous system creates its own model of the world, and the physics students of today know that each instrument also creates its own model of the world. Both in psychology and in physics we have outgrown medieval Aristotelian notions of "objective reality" and entered a non-Aristotelian realm, although in both fields we still remain unsure (and quick to quarrel with each other) about what new paradigm will replace the Aristotelian true/false paradigm of past centuries.

Dr. James Gilkey accurately describes this in his famous 1944 sermon titled “Gaining Emotional Poise”.

When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)

It’s not that it’s impossible to discipline with reward. In fact, rewarding good behaviour can be very effective. The most famous of all behavioural psychologists, B.F. Skinner, was a great advocate of this approach. He was expert at it. He taught pigeons to play ping-pong, although they only rolled the ball back and forth by pecking it with their beaks.101 But they were pigeons. So even though they played badly, it was still pretty good. Skinner even taught his birds to pilot missiles during the Second World War, in Project Pigeon (later Orcon).102 He got a long way, before the invention of electronic guidance systems rendered his efforts obsolete.

identity politics,” a contemporary tendency to align without question with categorical divisions like political parties, sexual orientation, skin color, class, et cetera, intolerantly, in the name of virtue. The famous psychologists Carl Jung and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson share this scientifically-minded perspective. According to Dr.

Meditation can generate several different kinds of altered states like strong emotional swings. Some of these states may be fun, but they are not the aim of exploring the whole universe of phenomena — seeing, listening, feeling, eating, touching, and thought — and of seeking our liberation amid the storm rather than demanding that the phenomenon match our desires. Practices of contemplation are powerful. When you work alone, and feel you're not free, please protect yourself. This dangerous feeling could include extreme fear, stress, uncertainty or even signs of the physical. Stay to speak with an instructor, a psychologist or a professional who can educate you about the procedure if something like this happens. Without wonder meditation is not a panacea. In fact when asked the spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti, "What good is all this contemplation doing?" It's no use at all," he responded. "Meditation isn't guaranteed to make you wealthy, gorgeous or famous. That's a mystery. You do want to achieve your goal, but you need to let go of the target-oriented, overachieving, task-centered way of doing and remain in the state of being that helps to incorporate your mind and body in your meditation. It is the paradox of the Zen instruction “Try not to try.” What to Do in an Emergency A professional teacher's guide is often required. A group called the Spiritual Emergence Network advises people suffering from a spiritual emergency and lets qualified psychologists and physicians discern between a psychological emergency and a mental breakdown. Another way to tell the difference is that the person who sees visions in a spiritual disaster realizes they are delusions, whereas in a psychotic breakdown the person believes the dreams are real. If you have feelings that are extremely unpleasant and no trainer is present, immediately stop the practice and concentrate on simple earthy stuff to get yourself focused. Dig into the yard, go out walking or jogging, get a workout, take a bath or a shower and eat heavy stuff. Slow down your spiritual awakening when you feel threatened by it.

To make things more confusing, for most physics equations, time can go in either direction (forward or backwards, +t or -t). This doesn’t really match with our everyday experience, even though the equations work out. Suffice it to say that so far, physicists have not been super helpful in improving our everyday understanding of the flow of time, although they are working hard on it.c What about philosophers? If you think time is completely subjective or mental and does not or cannot exist in the physical world, you are in good company with the likes of John McTaggartd and St Augustine.e In contrast, if you feel that time is both a physical fact as well as a mental experience, you will be in good company with most present-day philosophers, who think of time as the thing that describes how change happens; the thing that we try to measure by using a clock.f That’s not really clear either, but it seems a bit ahead of the physicists – maybe. How about the psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists? Most of them focus their investigations on the mental experience of time as opposed to physical time. People generally agree that there is a kind of order to the events we experience in our lives, which, when put together, we call the flow of time, temporal flow, or the “stream of consciousness” as psychologist William James famously put it.g Many psychologists and neuroscientists studying time and time perception try to understand this mystery by trying to figure out how the mind and brain create a sense of temporal flow.h The subjective sense of temporal flow is all very interesting, but it won’t get us precisely where we want to be, which is to understand how precognition of actual physical future events might actually be possible. Understanding the science of precognition can be thought of as understanding how we might access information about events that occur in the future of our own personal temporal flow, relative to our own personal “now”. This sounds like mental time travel rather than physical time travel, and that is a reasonable way to think about it. It could even be completely accurate. But you can also think about the science of precognition in physical terms, as trying to understand how future physical events can influence past physical events. Either way, when we have premonitions, it feels as if the future is pulling us forward both physically and mentally.

In a famous analysis, Yale psychologist Irving Janis identified groupthink as the culprit behind numerous American foreign-policy disasters, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War.

Even after his wife puts the knife up on a high shelf, out of the reach of her sleepwalking self, it continues to exert a hypnotic power over her, repeatedly calling forth what seems like some buried male, violent personality. Meanwhile Beverton himself falls into a somnambulistic state and assumes the persona of a victimized woman. After Beverton throws the knife in a snowy field, his wife finds it in her trance and stabs him in the shoulder. After Beverton recovers, a psychologist specializing in hypnotism (a character perhaps based on the doctor Robertson had visited for his real-life difficulties) tries to convince Beverton that he and his wife are acting out the telepathically received story of the famous Caribbean pirate Captain Henry Morgan and his captive sex slave Isobel, but with the sexes reversed. They were somehow picking up the thoughts of “some strong, projective personality—some man or woman thoroughly enthused and interested in the history of the seventeenth-century pirates.”22 Beverton listens to the doctor’s explanation but believes the truth goes deeper: Reincarnation is the real answer. They had actually been these figures in their past lives and at night were playing out their old relationship. Eisenbud noted that “The Sleep Walker” is a pretty weird gender-bender for such a resolutely masculine writer. What he didn’t catch is that Robertson may in this story have been expressing a strange truth about how he secretly understood his own fickle creative gifts. In the volume, Morgan Robertson the Man, one of Robertson’s friends, an artist named J. O’Neill, recalled that the writer believed that he had telepathically acquired the writing gift, the muse, of a young woman he had known years earlier but who had been unable to make anything of her talent due to a lack of “stickativeness.” In other words, Robertson believed his fickle and inconstant “astral helper” or “psychic partner”23 (in the words of another friend, Henry W. Francis) was specifically that of a female. He was effectively appropriating that muse telepathically, or allowing himself to be its vessel, because it was of no use to the woman anyway and he could profit better from it.

There are. Storytelling may be the mind’s way of rehearsing for the real world, a cerebral version of the playful activities documented across numerous species which provide a safe means for practicing and refining critical skills. Leading psychologist and all-around man of the mind Steven Pinker describes a particularly lean version of the idea: “Life is like chess, and plots are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.” Pinker imagines that through story we each build a “mental catalogue” of strategic responses to life’s potential curveballs, which we can then consult in moments of need. From fending off devious tribesmen to wooing potential mates, to organizing collective hunts, to avoiding poisonous plants, to instructing the young, to apportioning meager food supplies, and so on, our forebears faced one obstacle after another as their genes sought a presence in subsequent generations. Immersion in fictional tales grappling with a wide assortment of similar challenges would have had the capacity to refine our forebears’ strategies and responses. Coding the brain to engage with fiction would thus be a clever way to cheaply, safely, and efficiently give the mind a broader base of experience from which to operate.

Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. —The classic conscious auto-suggestion created by the famous French psychologist and pharmacist (the “father of auto hypnosis”), Émile Coué (1857–1926)

The historical changes in American marriage—from the pragmatic to the love-based to the self-expressive eras—exhibit striking parallels to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.

Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell. Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter.

B.F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour.

Ah, the old description-experience gap. Phil may not know the term, but he understands the concept—exactly what he’s been trying to tell me this whole time about poker terms. You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)

The idea of inner speech was made famous by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He noted that it is not quite the same thing as ordinary spoken language, as it is not as formal or rigid. Vygotsky was interested in how children acquire and use inner speech in the process of cognitive development. As explained by Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices, “It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.” Language and deliberative thought, and even consciousness, are closely entwined.

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.

One important reason that philosophers should take Nietzsche seriously is because he seems to have gotten, at least in broad contours, many points about human moral psychology right. Consider: (1) Nietzsche holds that heritable type-facts are central determinants of personality and morally significant behaviors, a claim well supported by extensive empirical findings in behavioral genetics. (2) Nietzsche claims that consciousness is a “surface” and that “the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to [non-conscious] instinctive activity,” theses overwhelmingly vindicated by recent work by psychologists on the role of the unconscious (e.g., Wilson 2002) and by philosophers who have produced synthetic meta-analyses of work on consciousness in psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Rosenthal 2008). (3) Nietzsche claims that moral judgments are post-hoc rationalizations of feelings that have an antecedent source, and thus are not the outcome of rational reflection or discursiveness, a conclusion in sync with the findings of the ascendent “social intuitionism” in the empirical moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt (2001) and others. (4) Nietzsche argues that free will is an “illusion,” that our conscious experience of willing is itself the causal product of non-conscious forces, a view recently defended by the psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002), who, in turn, synthesiyes a large body of empirical literature, including the famous neurophysical data about “willing” collected by Benjamin Libet.

In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn’t take it. She later described the experience: “I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren’t there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts.” Hearst didn’t just accept her captors’ “subjective” beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors “didn’t want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they’d get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that.” Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term “syndrome” may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be “designed” by natural selection to be brainwashed. Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation. Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups—twenty, forty, sixty people—from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation. Maybe that explains why you don’t have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn’t have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their “peers” (who were in fact confederates) voiced that opinion.

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a famous theory, known today as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,4 to explain human motivation. The basic idea is that certain needs trump others and you must satisfy lower-level needs before focusing on higher-level ones.

Geert Hofstede, a world-renowned cultural psychologist, concluded in a very famous study about cultural differences that America had the highest level of individualism in the world. That is pretty incredible. We are so programmed to think about “I” that we probably don’t even realize it.

The first is what some psychologists call “hot hate,” based on anger. Imagine yourself yelling at the television, and you get the picture. Most Americans would be ashamed to say “I hate Republicans” or “I hate Democrats.” But our market preferences tell the true story. We reward professional political pundits who say or write that the other side is evil or stupid or both. For some haters, the hot variety is a little too crude. They prefer “cool hate,” based on contempt, and express disgust for another person through sarcasm, dismissal or mockery. Cool hate can be every bit as damaging as hot hate. The social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman was famously able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether couples would divorce just by observing a brief snippet of conversation. The biggest warning signs of all were indications of contempt, such as sarcasm, sneering and hostile humor. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic — which Mr. Gottman has done thousands of times — and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes. Disagreement is normal, but dismissiveness can be deadly. As it is in love, so it is in politics. With just an ironic smile, one can dismiss an entire class of citizens as uncultured rubes or mindless theocrats. Feigning shock and dismay at the resulting indignation simply adds insult to injury. The last variety is anonymous hate.

The famous British child psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these aspects of personality our True Self and False Self. It is the True Self that lets us know what is authentic and what has become artificial, while the False Self is a diplomat of distrust, enforcing a lifestyle of guardedness, secrecy, and complaint.

Social psychologists have long known that the roles people fulfill—daughter, husband, lifeguard, boss, volunteer—have real-world impact on their behavior. Classic evidence for this comes from Phil Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which Zimbardo took a group of Stanford undergraduates and assigned some to be prisoners and others to be prison guards. The scenario extended over several days and the guards became increasingly abusive. They forced prisoners to do large numbers of push-ups; they interrupted their sleep and isolated them. Remember, these “guards” had been right-minded undergraduate students only days earlier.

The concept of “confirmation bias”—the tendency of people to favor information, true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs—was introduced in the 1960s by Peter Wason, a British psychologist. Wason did a famous series of experiments that explored how people give lesser weight to data that contradicts what they think is true. (As if we needed more proof that what’s hidden can make us draw the wrong conclusions.)

F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.

The American psychologist Elliot Aronson, who studied this phenomenon, famously assembled a discussion group of pompous, dull people. Some of the participants were made to endure an arduous selection process; others were allowed to join immediately, without expending any effort. Those who were given the runaround reported enjoying the group far more than the ones who were simply let in. Aronson explained what was happening here: whenever we’ve invested time, money or energy into something and it ends up being a complete waste of time, this creates dissonance, which we try to reduce by finding ways of justifying our bad decision. Aronson’s participants focused unconsciously on what might be interesting, or at least bearable, about being part of a deliberately boring group. The people who had invested very little effort in joining therefore had less dissonance to reduce, and more readily admitted what a waste of time it had been.

Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul. The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.