Empirical Social Psychology Quotes

Whether it is rational or empirical, your approach to life must always be empathetic. Emotional intelligence is acquired when knowledge and empathy are combined and applied to situations regularly in everyday life. ~ Stewart Stafford

The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living. ~ Barbara Hambly

The fear of failure is not just the greatest fear of man, it is the fear of man. All other fears are avatars of the fear of failure. ~ Anup Kochhar

Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings ~ Sigmund Freud

Stop talking about "rape" and start talking about "sex", and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties. ~ Aberjhani

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it - they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation ("Clearly . . ."), threat ("It would be unscientific to . . ."), authority ("As Popper showed . . ."), insult ("This work lacks the necessary rigor for . . ."), and belittling ("Few people today seriously believe that . . ."). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that "college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students. ~ Steven Pinker

Tread very carefully where injustice is concerned, because it takes very little for the oppressed to become the new oppressors. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Aristotle's position on anger is that it is one of the most complex and distinctive of the human emotions, that it involves bodily, psychological, social, and moral dimensions, and that anger can and ought to be felt and acted upon in a number of right ways. ~ Gregory Sadler

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane... ~ Philip K. Dick

We praise the singer, not the composer.
We admire the painting, not the painter.
We judge by the cake's icing, not its bread.
We evaluate the workers, not their head.

We rate highly the cuisine, not the chef.
We point fingers at others, not our self.
We look at peoples' faces, not their hearts.
We always assess the ends, not the starts. ~ Rodolfo Martin Vitangcol

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

We can live without technology, but not without people. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Psychology of Social Media.

'Likes' & 'Followers' are just a measure of our insecurity when we live out our lives on social media. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

I like developing characters who I find to have interesting psychology. Like politics and sex, but I'm really looking at bigger social problems that interest me, and that I can obsess over for a while. ~ Mora Stephens

Selection shapes brains that maximize the number of offspring who survive to reproduce themselves. This is very different from maximizing health or longevity. It is also different from maximizing matings. That is why organisms do things other than having sex. Especially humans. Having the most offspring requires allocating plenty of thought and action to getting resources other than mates and matings, especially social resources, such as friends and status. Everyone else is doing the same thing, creating constant conflict, cooperation, and vast social complexity whose comprehension requires a huge brain. ~ Randolph M. Nesse

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah?
Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it. ~ Mark Manson

Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind. ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

Hostility, malice, and sadism are the result of helplessness and self-loathing; that they are all produced by adaptation to a hypercritical social reality and are not attributable to innate aggression. ~ Arno Gruen

What, after all, is the creation? What is man; a creature fabricated by God; or is he the product of millions of years of evolution… and is he heading towards what we might call superman? or towards his doom? ~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri

The Fear of failure is the greatest fear of man. Even the fear of death is fear of failing to continue life. ~ Anup Kochhar

To say a person with a symptom is behaving in a way that is not of the ordinary implies that there is an ordinary way to behave. ~ Brien Pittman

Reading has been proven to sharpen analytical thinking, enabling us to better discern patterns – a handy tool when it comes to the often baffling behaviour of ourselves and others. But fiction in particular can make you more socially able and empathetic. Last year, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology published a paper showing how reading Harry Potter made young people in the UK and Italy more positively disposed towards stigmatised minorities such as refugees. ~ Hephzibah Anderson

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. ~ Friedrich Hayek

The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings. ~ Abhijit Naskar

fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack. It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible. And ~ Clifford D. Simak

Today, Islam effectively resists secularization primarily because of its use of shame. Within the community, each person's sexuality is tied to his or her family and to the community. To violate the sexual rules of Allah violates both the family and the community. This powerful distortion allows Islam to remain isolated from secular sexual influences. The terror of social sanction or violence keeps young people from following their heart. It prevents healthy sexual exploration and development in men and women. ~ Darrel Ray

All the evidence over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and the profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky, against the real needs of their occupants. The psychology of high-rise life had been exposed with damaging results. Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here. ~ J.G. Ballard

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium - a nostalgic version of the status quo - that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginitive. ~ Geoffrey Miller

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don't know it. ~ Daniel J. Levitin