Psychology

I do believe the abduction scenario is real.

It doesn't ask, was today good? It asks, what was good in today?

Optimism is the expectation of good things to happen. Resilient optimism is optimism that is built on a set of behaviours and stays strong when it's tested.

Toxic positivity aims to edit out the problem.

What I study in the research is rational optimism. It's how you take a realistic assessment of the present moment while maintaining a belief that your behaviour matters, especially in the face of challenges.

Optimism doesn't stop cars from hitting us. It doesn't stop reality from negatively affecting us.

It is a feeling of intense loneliness, isolation and helplessness that can only be resolved by negative habits which you believe will take away the pain, but which don't.

We can't make people feel better. What we can do is ensure that, through our kindness and our practical help, we don't make the situation a great deal worse for them.

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

Money allows you to deal with anonymous other people, not just your kin. There are things we do in families that we would find objectionable if they were transactions.