教师节特辑丨哈佛心理学家:影响我最深的一句话,是"去败坏你的头脑"

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教师节到了,我们给哈佛老马出了一道题:「能不能分享一句,对你影响最深的话?」

不是心灵鸡汤,而是一句听起来有点"离经叛道"的话——出自现代心理学之父威廉·詹姆斯在 1890 年的《心理学原理》里的引用:

"只有一个被学问'带坏'了的头脑,才会把天经地义的事,重新看成怪事;才会去追问——人类那些出于本能的举动,究竟'为什么'。"

我们每个人生来就带着一套"看人的直觉": 别人为什么那样做,我们扫一眼好像就懂,根本不觉得有什么需要解释。可正是这套"我懂了"的直觉,悄悄挡住了我们真正理解人心。而詹姆斯说:你得先让学习"败坏"掉这份想当然,才能把熟悉的一切重新看陌生,才敢开口问那个最简单、也最难的字——"为什么"。

老马说,正是这句话,把他领进了进化心理学的大门。
—— 这个教师节,也想问问屏幕前的你:有没有哪一句话,曾经彻底改变过你看世界的方式? 评论区聊聊。

📌 感谢《老师在B站》特辑的大力支持。关注哈佛老马，一起走进“都市丛林里的恋爱心理学”系列。
 🎬 本账号非搬运:内容由老马教授本人原创,国内团队负责制作发布与收集大家的反馈;教授也会不定期"空降"评论区回复大家!


It's Teachers' Day, so we gave Harvard's Max a challenge: "Could you share one line that has shaped you the most?"

What he offered wasn't a feel-good cliché, but something that sounds almost heretical — a line quoted by William James, the father of modern psychology, in his 1890 work The Principles of Psychology:

"It takes… a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act."

Every one of us is born with an intuitive read on people: we glance at how others behave and feel like we already get it — nothing there seems to call for an explanation. But it's exactly that "I already get it" that quietly blocks us from truly understanding the human mind. What James is saying is this: you first have to let learning "corrupt" that sense of the obvious, so you can make the familiar strange again — and dare to ask the simplest, and hardest, question of all: why.

That single line, Max says, is what led him into evolutionary psychology.

This Teachers' Day, we'd love to ask you too: is there a line that once changed the way you see the world? Tell us in the comments.