Timothy D. Wilson:

When economists think about how to solve a problem such as closing the achievement gap in education, or reducing teenage pregnancy, their inclination is to use incentives. What if we pay people to do well in school, give kids money to study and to get good grades? Or what if we take girls who are at-risk for becoming pregnant and pay them a dollar for each day they are not pregnant?

To a social psychologist, it is a little naïve to think that adding external incentives is all you have to do. Not to say that incentives can't work, but they can sometimes backfire if you look at it through the eyes of the person who is getting that incentive. There's some research in social psychology suggesting that external incentives can undermine intrinsic interest in an activity because people begin to think that the only reason they're doing it is for the money. That erodes any interest in that activity there was to start with.

Human Foibles

Posted on February 2, 2013 | Leave a comment | Edit

Telling people facts does not usually help them:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
Being aware of cognitive biases does not protect against them.  People just project and deny that they are subject to them.  The smarter you are, the more vulnerable you are to it.

When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.
The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz2Jj9gHZWl
No Such Thing as Character:

So what to make of this?  Well, the fact that for most people facts don’t change their minds, they are self-deceptive and lack consistent morals should not detract from the fact that there are folks that do not match the trend.  In other words, there are always outliers.
Also, I would imagine that there are circumstantial variables that could be introduced in order to help people respond more rationally to facts, to be less defensive, to look at their own behavior in a more clearsighted way, and to act in a more consistently admirable way.  I think that is the trick of our trade.  Priming our clients for honesty and goodness, to embrace the good, the true and the beautiful, for sweetness and light, and the best the human race has produced.  After all, there is something in man that inclines him to greek, there is something in him that inclines him to philosophy – there is something in him that admires truth and beauty – else many of the great works of art and science would have never been created, discovered or appreciated throughout the ages.  But they do and they have, and so there is still hope for the human race.

Theoretical Contributions:

• The importance of identifying one's own motivations in achieving success - and the realization that many people are avoidant or unable to say what their motivations are.  Hence the importance of focusing on the concrete details of the person's life, and of the here and now in helping the client to realize this and then to take advantage of this self-knowledge.
• Importance of "secure base" from which to explore careers and people, and (Adler) importance of encouragement from family/friends
• Addressing inner conflict with making career choices
• Importance of early childhood experiences
• Jungian "God" in helping direct self towards work they love

Psychiatry vs. Psychology

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2006/10/psychology_vs_psychiatry.html

If I was a good clinical psychologist– PhD helpful but not necessary, master’s is fine– I would find two or three good psychiatrists and set up a group…  I would find the nearest academic institution with a “residents’ clinic.”  That’s a gold mine.  There are a lot of private insurance patients there, who need short term therapy.   These academic clinics almost never have enough therapists, because the ones that are on staff are not really incentivized to see extra patients; they’re on salary.  So there is a massive number of patients who could benefit from therapy, but are on a waiting list…  “Hi, I’m a therapist, send me patients” is very different than, “Hi, I specialize in Grief Counseling, short and long term, so if you have any patients…” … Try to meet psychiatrists wherever you can, but the best place I know is through drug reps.  Go to one of the “drug dinners” and meet the psychiatrists who attend.  Find a psychiatrist-parent– hell, any kind of doctor– in your kid’s school, meet them, let them know you’re open for business.  Meet the guidance counselor, tell them you specialize in adolescent issues. (Obviously, make sure you actually do specialize in adolescent issues.)  Or Family Systems model.  Or divorcing parents.  Etc.  Remember: it’s not “why refer to me?” It’s, “who else are they going to refer to?”  A doctor who has any sort of emotional connection to you (i.e. met you once) will more likely refer to you than anyone else.

"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought... At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; ...each object is loosed into a group of impressions — colour, odour, texture — in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, experience contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. 

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced...  Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. 

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; ...and he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. 

Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.  Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake." -Walter Pater, "The Renaissance"

Eric Hoffer - "The Passionatte State of Mind"