John Tierney > Quotes

“To survive, life has to win every day. Death has to win just once. A small error or miscalculation can wipe out all the successes. The negativity bias is adaptive, the term biologists use for a trait that improves the odds of survival for an individual or a group.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“At Thanksgiving dinner, hand out pens and ask everyone at the table to write on the tablecloth something for which they’re grateful.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“1, and preferably a little higher. So we’ll suggest a guideline that we’ve taken to calling the Rule of Four: It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. We offer this as a rough gauge. We’re not claiming to have discovered a universal constant like the speed of light or Avogadro’s number. It’s a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. It doesn’t apply to”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“Freud's ideas, as usual, turned out to be both remarkably prescient and utterly wrong.”
― John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“by letting them return items long after the normal thirty-day grace period. Rental-car companies and hotels have learned to combat sticker shock by warning customers in advance of all the taxes and fees that will be added to the bill. But some businesses remain stubbornly oblivious to the peak-end rule. Why do so many shopping expeditions end with a long line at the checkout counter, and so many airline flights end with a half-hour wait at baggage claim? Why do so many online newspaper articles end with a correction informing the reader of some trivial mistake made in an earlier version? In the print era, running corrections was the only way to set the record straight once the paper had come off the presses, but today any error”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“The first step in dealing with bad apples is to identify them. If you’re trying to decide whether or not someone deserves the label, Sutton suggests starting with two questions: After talking to the alleged asshole, do you feel worse about yourself—oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful? A more elaborate approach is to use the Big Five personality test.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“Religious types now feel tremendously energized because they see things swinging back their way. This is exactly the feeling that accompanies the Second Religiousness. Although it seems to suggest a new beginning, it is in fact spelling the end. It's the last hurrah before the total collapse of the civilization. The Roman empire embraced Christianity, and then it died! It was Christianity that assassinated it.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“When the researchers asked adults in the United States, Canada, and India whether life is long or short, and whether it’s easy or hard, the North Americans were no more sanguine than the Indians despite their statistical advantages in life expectancy and income.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“Harvard Business Review and a subsequent popular book, The No Asshole Rule. In looking for a scientific justification for the no-asshole rule, he discovered the literature on negativity bias and then focused on it in his own”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“Look around you. Look closely at your neighbors and the strangers you pass in the streets. Are they starting to morph into fellaheen? Is social media a global electronic machine - a cyber factory - for generating fellaheen ... people who have lost all sense of history and are focused entirely on themselves? Dante called them 'Ignavi' and said they were the most abject people of all.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“A sane psychological religion can be constructed, and Jungian psychology is the best route to it. Jordan Peterson should be using his undoubted intellect to create a new religion for a new Age – a psychological religion, by which is meant a religion that is predicated on the work of the great psychologists. Jungian psychology will of course be at its core. The last thing we need is the rebirth of Judeo-Christianity. Rather than draw archetypes from the past, which lock us into the past, we need archetypes to lead us into the future. We need the world’s greatest psychologists working on constructing the healthiest, sanest religion there has ever been, one which changes human psychology forever and makes us the masters of our own fate.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“negative environment overwhelms the positive genes.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“A central thesis of both Spengler and Toynbee is that the world of late civilization was resacralized – made religious again – not because critical intelligence was persecuted and repressed, or starved of resources, but because it ended up attacking and refuting itself. Rationalism ate itself. Today, postmodernism is a hyper-cynical and skeptical critical philosophy, laying waste to all truth claims, including, arguably, its own. This can never satisfy anyone, so the world moves on to something else. It rediscovers religion. It’s more fun, if nothing else. All philosophical traditions turn on themselves and kill themselves. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he might as well have said, “Philosophy is dead.” And he was arguably its leading assassin. He was Brutus plunging the dagger into Caesar. When you do that, Christ appears where Caesar once stood. It’s essential for intellectuals to make absolute truth claims. If they don’t, priests, prophets and gurus will do so, and fill the vacuum. Jordan Peterson increasingly postures as a guru proclaiming absolute truth (the Logos). But at least he’s a guru exposing the people to the great intellectual ideas of Nietzsche and Jung.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon