Social Cognition Quotes

Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.

Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

He that is warme, thinkes all so.

Chimps are unbelievably like us - in biological, non-verbal ways. They can be loving and compassionate and yet they have a dark side... 98 per cent of our DNA is the same. The difference is that we have developed language - we can teach about things that aren't there, plan for the future, discuss, share ideas

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

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

We're terrible at realising what goes on in other people's heads because we are trapped inside our own.

Humans only really learn from each other by storytelling. We didn't evolve to memorize things. We evolved to hear each other's stories and feel them in our heart. Your life is the most powerful story you can tell.

one never knows really how things are with other people, they just do always seem more spirited than oneself somehow.

We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.

Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers

The ability to understand people is a choice.

...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

Understanding human nature. Perception. That's how I see acting - perception and communication.

Schizophrenia --its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it--remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"--a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.

Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.