David G. Myers > Quotes

“Truth never seems obvious until it is known.”
― David Myers

“Magician James Randi has used this empirical approach when testing those claiming to see glowing auras around people’s bodies:
Randi: Do you see an aura around my head?
Aura seer: Yes, indeed.
Randi: Can you still see the aura if I put this magazine in front of my face?
Aura seer: Of course.
Randi: Then if I were to step behind a wall barely taller than I am, you could determine my location from the aura visible above my
head, right?
Randi once told me that no aura seer has agreed to take this simple test.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“We look for wonders and the unseen reality-the hand of God- in things extrordinary, when more often his presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday events of which life is woven.”
― Meyers Jeeves Through the Eyes of Faith

“Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“Compliance with legitimate authority was also apparent in the strange case of the “rectal ear ache” (Cohen & Davis, 1981). A doctor ordered eardrops for a patient suffering infection in the right ear. On the prescription, the doctor abbreviated “place in right ear” as “place in R ear.” Reading the order, the compliant nurse put the required drops in the compliant patient’s rectum.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“People tend to humanize their pets and dehumanize their enemies.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (2006) reported that there are more than 100 billion galaxies. One of these, our own relative speck of a galaxy, has a few hundred billion stars, many of which, like our Sun-star, are circled by planets. On the scale of outer space, we are less than a single grain of sand on all the oceans’ beaches, and our lifetime but a relative nanosecond.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“As morning approaches, body temperature rises, then peaks during the day, dips for a time in early afternoon (when many people take siestas), and begins to drop again in the evening. Thinking is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian arousal. Try pulling an all - nighter or working an occasional night shift. You’ll feel groggiest in the middle of the night but may gain new energy when your normal wake - up time arrives.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“If depression, loneliness, and social anxiety maintain themselves through a vicious circle of negative experiences, negative thinking, and self-defeating behavior, it should be possible to break the circle at any of several points—by changing the environment, by training the person to behave more constructively, or by reversing negative thinking. And it is. Several therapy methods help free people from depression’s vicious circle.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Unhappy people—especially those bereaved or depressed—tend to be more self-focused and brooding. A depressed mood motivates intense thinking—a search for information that makes one’s environment more understandable and controllable (Weary & Edwards, 1994). Happy people, by contrast, are more trusting, more loving, more responsive. If people are made temporarily happy by receiving a small gift while mall-shopping, they will report, a few moments later on an unrelated survey, that their cars and TV sets are working beautifully—better, if you took their word for it, than those belonging to folks who replied after not receiving gifts.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Nearly a century ago, French engineer Max Ringelmann (reported by Kravitz & Martin, 1986) found that the collective effort of tug-of-war teams was but half the sum of the individual efforts. Contrary to the presumption that “in unity there is strength,” this suggested that group members may actually be less motivated when performing additive tasks. Maybe, though, poor performance stemmed from poor coordination—people pulling a rope in slightly different directions at slightly different times. A group of Massachusetts researchers led by Alan Ingham (1974) cleverly eliminated that problem by making individuals think others were pulling with them, when in fact they were pulling alone. Blindfolded participants were assigned the first position in the apparatus and told,
“Pull as hard as you can.” They pulled 18 percent harder when they knew they
were pulling alone than when they believed that behind them two to five people
were also pulling.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Do self-fulfilling prophecies color our personal relationships? There are times
when negative expectations of someone lead us to be extra nice to that person,
which induces him or her to be nice in return—thus disconfirming our expectations.
But a more common finding in studies of social interaction is that, yes, we do to
some extent get what we expect (Olson & others, 1996).
In laboratory games, hostility nearly always begets hostility: People who perceive
their opponents as noncooperative will readily induce them to be noncooperative
(Kelley & Stahelski, 1970). Each party’s perception of the other as aggressive,
resentful, and vindictive induces the other to display those behaviors in selfdefense,
thus creating a vicious self-perpetuating circle. In another experiment,
people anticipated interacting with another person of a different race. When led
to expect that the person disliked interacting with someone of their race, they felt
more anger and displayed more hostility toward the person (Butz & Plant, 2006).
Likewise, whether I expect my wife to be in a bad mood or in a loving mood may
affect how I relate to her, thereby inducing her to confirm my belief.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Good ideas in psychology usually have an oddly familiar quality, and the moment we encounter them we feel certain that we once came close to thinking the same thing ourselves and simply failed to write it down.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“Act happy. We can sometimes act ourselves into a frame of mind. Manipulated into a smiling expression, people feel better; when they scowl, the whole world seems to scowl back. So put on a happy face. Talk as if you feel positive self-esteem, are optimistic, and are outgoing. Going through the motions can trigger the emotions.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Political rituals — the daily flag salute by schoolchildren, singing the national anthem — use public conformity to build a private belief in patriotism.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“The benefits of feelings of control also appear in animal research. In research done before today’s greater concern for animal welfare, dogs confined in a cage and taught that they could not escape shocks learned a sense of helplessness. Later, these dogs cowered passively in other situations when they could escape punishment. Dogs that learned personal control (by successfully escaping their first shocks) adapted easily to a new situation. Researcher Martin Seligman (1975, 1991) noted similarities to this learned helplessness in human situations. Depressed or oppressed people, for example, become passive because they believe their efforts have no effect. Helpless dogs and depressed people both suffer paralysis of the will, passive resignation, and even motionless apathy.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“At any moment, you and I are aware of little more than what’s on the screen of our consciousness. But beneath the surface, unconscious information processing occurs simultaneously on many parallel tracks.”
― David G. Myers, Psychology

“Биологическое предназначение мышления не столько в том, чтобы мы не заблуждались, сколько в том, чтобы мы выжили.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). By contrast, the social facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior (Mullen & Baumeister, 1987). So, when being observed increases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility. When arousal and diffused responsibility combine, and normal inhibitions diminish, the results may be startling. People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining hall, snarling at a referee, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive self-gratification (group vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Youths sharing antisocial tendencies and lacking close family bonds and expectations of academic success may find social identity in a gang. As group identity develops, conformity pressures and deindividuation increase (Staub, 1996). Self-identity
diminishes as members give themselves over to the group, often feeling a satisfying oneness with the others. The frequent result is social contagion—group-fed arousal, disinhibition, and polarization. As gang expert Arnold Goldstein (1994) observed, until gang members marry out, age out, get a job, go to prison, or die, they hang out.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Through social “contagion,” groups magnify aggressive tendencies, much as they polarize other tendencies. Examples are youth gangs, soccer fans, rapacious soldiers, urban rioters, and what Scandinavians call “mobbing”— schoolchildren in groups repeatedly harassing or attacking an insecure, weak schoolmate (Lagerspetz & others, 1982). Mobbing is a group activity.”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“Fearing a court martial for disobedience, some of the soldiers at My Lai participated in the massacre. Normative influence leads to compliance, especially for people who have recently seen others ridiculed or who are seeking to climb a status ladder (Hollander, 1958; Janes & Olson, 2000).”
― David G. Myers, Social Psychology

“No matter how sensible-seeming or wild an idea, the smart thinker asks: Does it work? When put to the test, can its predictions be confirmed? Subjected to such scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas sometimes find support.”
― David G. Myers

“Smart thinking, called critical thinking, examines assumptions, appraises the source, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions. Whether reading online commentary or listening to a conversation, critical thinkers ask questions: How do they know that? What is this person’s agenda? Is the conclusion based on anecdote and gut feelings, or on evidence? Does the evidence justify a cause–effect conclusion? What alternative explanations are possible?”
― David G. Myers