Psychology

Q: How does psychology fit into that picture? Do psychological needs count as survival needs ...? For example, there seems to be a psychological need for different kinds of human contact, and while there are certain survival benefits to such contact, these benefits don't seem to fully explain our needs in this area ...
Kelley: Well it's absolutely true that psychological evidence is relevant to ethics ... I think there's definitely a large need to integrate the valid psychological evidence—there's a lot of hokum in psychology—with the basic principles of the Objectivist view of human nature.

[W]hy are there some areas—like politics and religion—where irrationality seems especially pronounced? ... If you underestimate the costs of excessive drinking, you can ruin your life. In contrast, if you underestimate the benefits of immigration ..., what happens to you? In all probability, the same thing that would have happened to you if you knew the whole truth. In a sense, then, there is a method to the average voter's madness. Even when his views are completely wrong, he gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price. No wonder he buys in bulk.

I once asked a psychiatrist I knew if he was familiar with Szasz's work. "Oh, he's crazy!" he exclaimed, inadvertently illustrating Szasz's point that such labels are often used to stigmatize people who offend or disturb us ... [T]his psychiatrist ... was expressing an intellectual ... judgment. But Szasz's critique of psychiatry suggests that such distinctions are ultimately arbitrary. A psychiatrist could, if he were so inclined, diagnose as mentally ill someone with whose worldview he disagreed—which is essentially what it means to say that a person is "suffering from delusions."

Branden: ... [I]t's foolish to imagine that our physical differences do not result in any psychological differences, at least as tendencies ... [A] psychological study isolated a group of men and women ... judged to be highly creative individuals. They gave [them] tests and ... found ... that creative men tended to exhibit a high number of traits the world calls feminine, and that the women manifested a high number of the traits that the world calls masculine ... I have an explanation ...: highly creative people are at least in some respects more independent than the average person ...