Social Psychology Quotes

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

the more I know about people, the better I like my dogs.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

People love to see people fall.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events.

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

People are strange when you're a stranger.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

I love observing people.

I taught at the FBI for four decades - how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.

The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

Proximity doesn't breed familiarity.

It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

When government programs fail, it is often because public officials are clueless about how human beings think and act.

People tolerate those they fear further than those they love.

I am an observer, I like to watch people. I am into psychology and people - how they act and such.