Behavioral Psychology

No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad

A charming person is not one that glimmers but holds a mirror to your glow — a conversation with them makes you fall for them by making you fall for yourself.

This is choice paralysis. Previous generations didn’t have many options so they stuck together through hard times and made it work. Now, abundance (or its illusion) has led people to feel less satisfied. People are now more anxious about making a choice and less certain that the one they made was correct.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

This shift has moral as well as economic consequences. When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust,... See more

People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

In Freudian language, ambivalence is the ability to hold contradictory feelings toward a person. A child loves their mother, but can also sometimes be extremely angry at her. A person holds love and hate, attraction and disgust, excitement and boredom, connection and disconnection with a person. The ability to be able to hold these contradictions... See more

Totalitarianism took freedom from people, Lifton noted. But it gave them something in return: It freed them from freedom.

For the ordinary person in a totalitarian system, facts and truth are all provided. Explanations for observations are provided. Meaning is provided. Everything is cut-and-dried. Clear answers. An important struggle between good... See more

Since Freud, psychologists have distinguished between theories of autoplastic and alloplastic change. With autoplastic change, the problem is the patient, and the patient must first improve himself. With alloplastic adaptation, the problem is the environment, and the subject should change his surroundings.