Fear is the State’s psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.
Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.
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.
If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.
The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.
The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?
Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.
One can’t live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.