Quotes About Social

Social psychologist Leon Festinger described a "social comparison process"10 as a human universal. People everywhere compare themselves with others of similar social rank, paying much less attention to those who are either far above them or far below them on the social ladder.

Wildfire did not run through dry woods as fast as gossip ran through women.

Most people go along with the crowd. They do things because everybody else does it.

It is that same fear, the fear of ostracism that causes people to conform and not question commonly accepted opinions or popular trends.

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature… I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important and products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right.

Pictures aren't intellectual media. Pictures are pictures. The movie business belonged to the celebrity people and they wouldn't begin to know how to portray an intellectual book like his.... But what he saw at this point was a social pattern of values, a film, devouring an intellectual pattern of values, his book. It would be a lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life. As such it would be immoral.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is.

There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.

The more income inequality, the less likely people are to help someone (in an experimental setting) and the less generous and cooperative they are in economic games.

there are studies showing that one oxytocin receptor gene variant is associated with extreme aggression in kids, as well as a callous, unemotional style that foreshadows adult psychopathy.54 Moreover, another variant is associated with social disconnection in kids and unstable adult relationships. But unfortunately these findings are uninterpretable because no one knows if these variants produce more, less, or the usual amount of oxytocin signaling.

The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.

maintaining the high rank is about social intelligence and impulse control: knowing which provocations to ignore and which coalitions to form, understanding other individuals' actions.

If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.

you can't begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior.

In other words, while evidence of corporate social responsibility (scenario C) boosts sales a bit, it's far more effective when the individual and the business share social responsibility and the individual determines the amount of money donated.

And behavior is altered by "situational labels"—call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite.

it's human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.

The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.

With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.

What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically protective can take the form of marriage, contact with friends and extended family, church membership, or other group affiliations.

The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.