Roy F. Baumeister
Roy Frederick Baumeister was born on May 16, 1953, in Cleveland, a city where he began what would become a career shaped by American academic life. A citizen of the United States, he works in English and has built his professional identity as a social psychologist.
Baumeister pursued his education at Princeton University and Duke University, two institutions that grounded him in the discipline he would make his own. He went on to work as a psychologist and university teacher, focusing on social psychology. Among his published works is Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, a book that brought his thinking on self-control to a broad readership. His contributions to the field earned him the William James Fellow Award, a formal recognition of his standing within psychology.
Baumeister was educated in the United States and has carried out his career as a social psychologist and university teacher there. His book Willpower remains a concrete marker of his engagement with questions of human behavior, and the William James Fellow Award stands as a documented acknowledgment of his work in the discipline.
Quotes by Roy F. Baumeister
The magnitude gap is also reflected in different time perspectives. Oppression, violence, and cruelty fade much faster into the distant past for the perpetrator than for the victim.
The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
We’ve seen parents successfully use a variant of this approach when an infant cries to be fed. Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it’s hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But.
Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator’s own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.
The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.
The reliance on judgments by others is essential. Indeed, if we limited our examination of evil to acts that perpetrators themselves acknowledge as evil, there would be hardly any such acts to examine.
The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.
The result suggests that telling yourself ‘I can have this later’ operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree – and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat... the ones who’d postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.
Culture is partly made out of information. There are at least two main types of this information. One is a set of shared beliefs and values. The other is shared knowledge of how to do things. Culture consists of both.
A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil – less wrong – to the perpetrators than to the victims.