Daily Inspiration Quote by Hans Bender

“Free yourself” is doing double duty here: it’s a pep talk dressed as a methodological warning. Coming from a psychologist who lived through a century of ideological certainties and scientific revolutions, Bender’s line reads less like self-help than an argument about how minds - and disciplines - get trapped. “Rigid conduct of tradition” isn’t just customs and etiquette; it’s the inherited scripts that quietly dictate what counts as evidence, what questions are respectable, which explanations feel “natural.” In psychology, tradition can masquerade as common sense: the comforting story we tell about people because it’s familiar, not because it’s true.

The phrase “new forms of probability” is the tell. Bender isn’t merely advocating novelty; he’s pointing to a shift in how knowledge gets produced. Probability suggests humility, uncertainty, models instead of dogmas - a readiness to trade single-cause narratives for distributions, competing hypotheses, and messy human variance. It’s also a rebuke to the moral certainty that tradition often carries. Traditions don’t just predict behavior; they prescribe it, rewarding conformity with the feeling of being right.

The subtext is disciplinary: psychology can become its own tradition, clinging to favored theories, old diagnostic categories, or tidy lab effects. Bender’s imperative is to treat the mind as something that changes under new conditions - social, technological, statistical - and to let our tools change with it. The “open yourself” matters: intellectual flexibility is framed as a psychological act, not just an academic choice.