Social Psychology Quotes

“In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. KNOWING A MAN WELL NEVER LEADS TO HATE and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. TRY TO UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER!”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo

“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“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 Zimbardo

“إن الكثيرين لا يريدون منا حلاًّ لمشكلاتهم، بقدر ما يريدون القلب الذي يتوجَّع ويتأسَّى، وكما قيل:
ولابد من شكوى إلى ذِي مَروءةٍ يواسيك أو يسليك أو يتوجَّعُ”
― سلمان العودة, بناتي

“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.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“There is one thing that, more than any other, throws people absolutely off their balance — the thought that you are dependent upon them. This is sure to produce an insolent and domineering manner towards you. There are some people, indeed, who become rude if you enter into any kind of relation with them; for instance, if you have occasion to converse with them frequently upon confidential matters, they soon come to fancy that they can take liberties with you, and so they try and transgress the laws of politeness. This is why there are so few with whom you care to become more intimate, and why you should avoid familiarity with vulgar people. If a man comes to think that I am more dependent upon him than he is upon me, he at once feels as though I had stolen something from him; and his endeavor will be to have his vengeance and get it back. The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men, is to let it be seen that you are independent of them.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”
― Stanley Milgram

“Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“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.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“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?”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.”
― Philip Zimbardo

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

“One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“She wasn’t interested in making other people comfortable, which I really liked about her.”
― Amy Tintera, Listen for the Lie

“Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."
 A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“Most people can see that dictators are not extraordinary people in any way, yet they are credited with single-handedly assembling and upholding tyrannies.”
― Heather Marsh, How to Dismantle a Dictatorship

“Prefer a sincere stab than a fake smile”
― MIGUEL ANGEL SAEZ GUTIERREZ

“It’s hard to control other people’s reaction to your behavior, what you can control is your behavior”
― Lynn Ujiagbe

“Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, and Tanaka (1991) proposed a model of the characteristics of aggressors that suggests that coercive sex may be conceptualized as resulting from the convergence of (1) relatively high levels of ‘impersonal’ sex and (2) hostile, dominating characteristics… According to this model, the determinants of coercive sex can often be traced to early home experiences and parent–child interactions… Individuals experiencing this type of home environment may develop negative views of male–female relationships, which may foster a relatively impersonal orientation to sexuality, a hostile ‘schema’ about social relationships, or both.” (pp. 281–282)”
― David M. Buss, Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives

“What I had done was terrible and almost impossible to understand. There was no rhyme or reason to it. So once again I felt the need to emphasize that my downfall couldn’t be explained away with a couple of glib theories, sound bites, or one-line summaries. You could come up with a whole list of possible explanations: a desire to achieve something, naked ambition, laziness, nihilism, a lust for power, status anxiety, the urge to find solutions, the need to feel whole, pressure to “publish or perish”, arrogance, emotional flakiness, loneliness, disappointment, low attention span, addiction to answers, etc etc etc, but none of these constructs had sufficient explanatory power to reveal why I’d done what I had. You’d need the whole set, and then a whole lot more. I’d spent years trying to find simpler and more concise explanations and theories to describe human behavior, but all the time that I’d been looking for order, structure, and simplicity, I’d been
keeping my eyes more and more tightly shut to reality until the inevitable happened, and I’d crashed and burned. And in so doing, I’d rather neatly proven the opposite of what I’d been looking for. If you want things to be extremely clear and simple, just close your eyes.”
― Diederik Stapel, Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud

“An individual may become aware that their sexual fantasies are racially charged or socially inappropriate. As a result, they might attempt to suppress or rationalize their desire by identifying as a supporter of racial equality or anti-racism. This cognitive dissonance leads to a justification of their fantasies as expressions of appreciation for diversity, rather than as symptoms of internalized racial bias.”
― Andrea Sane Romero, The Fetish of Welcome

“Labels divide. Shared needs unite. A country does not heal through louder shouting. It heals through deeper listening.”
― Glenn A. Maltais

“Ego is not an attitude, it's a disease of the mind. Every disease demands a choice: heal it, or perish with it.”
― Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"

“I have been interested in history since I was in grade school. I have had the opportunity to visit so many historical sites and this has helped provide me with a clearer understanding of what occurred at various locations.”
― Daniel Patrick Brown

“The era of opportunity on YouTube is over. Now, the era of slavery has begun”
― Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"

“There is an uncanny power in words that appear to issue from a superhuman source, and it would be dangerous to assume that this power cannot still move the world today. It is manifested around us in the charismatic movement, in hundreds of occult groups of one kind or another, and in many UFO-related writings such as those inspired by SPECTRA, AFFA, and others we will investigate. This material is variously received as a manifestation from God, as a sign of lunacy, or as a dangerous form of social deviance. Most often, the words of the “entity,” whether it claims to be of a space origin or to represent some dead person like “Aunt Martha” does nothing more than borrow words and expressions that exist as thoughts, possibly unconsciously, in the minds of the persons who attend the meeting. For this reason, exposure to such phenomena is hazardous to psychic health!”
― Jacques F. Vallée, The Invisible College

“This is another reminder that one cannot understand the UFO phenomenon without taking into consideration all of its possible symbolic ramifications, no matter how seemingly remote from our technological reality. But the story of UMMO teaches us much more, as we slowly unravel the relationship between the reality of our beliefs and what we like to call the “objective” reality of our physics. The fact is that the beliefs of humanity can be manipulated both by physical and symbolic means. Certainly this is one of the objectives of UMMO, whether it is a prankish game, a psycho-sociological test or a sinister plot. But UMMO is only a small part of the total phenomenon, and the time has clearly come to assess the full impact of our strange, bewildering confrontation with it.”
― Jacques F. Vallée, The Invisible College