Quotes About Behavior

Meine Handlungen und meine Hirnzustände durchkreuzen sich munter wechselseitig. Eine endlose Abfolge aus Tun und Sein, Sein und Tun: Do be do be do.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Keynes once wrote: 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

Whether you're heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.

Important influences can be hidden, but even when powerful situational determinants of behavior are staring us in the face, we can be oblivious to their impact.

Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the "Fundamental Attribution Error" (or FAE for short).

Christianity did, holding Jesus out not just as a model of right behavior, but an elder brother whose inheritance of immortality all God's children might share.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

First, incentives are not properly aligned. If you engage in environmentally costly behavior next year, through your consumption choices, you will probably pay nothing for the environmental harms that you inflict.

On traditional economic theory: We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.

Large plates and large packages mean more eating; they are a form of choice architecture, and they work as major nudges. (Hint: if you would like to lose weight, get smaller plates, buy little packages of what you like, and don't keep tempting food in the refrigerator.)

Wealth, too, is often separated into various mental accounts. At the bottom of this hierarchy sits the money that is easiest to spend: cash.

We don't have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs. We do, however, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

We are also greatly influenced by consumption norms within the relevant group. A light eater eats much more in a group of heavy eaters. A heavy eater will show more restraint in a light-eating group. The group average thus exerts a significant influence. But there are gender differences as well. Women often eat less on dates; men tend to eat a lot more, apparently with the belief that women are impressed by a lot of manly eating. (Note to men: they aren't.) So

A slightly longer answer is that people will need nudges for decisions that are difficult and rare, for which they do not get prompt feedback, and when they have trouble translating aspects of the situation into terms that they can easily understand. In

Roughly speaking, losses hurt about twice as much as gains make you feel good. This

a nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of Humans

The evidence suggests that when people get a windfall—and this seems to be the way people think about their tax refund, despite it being expected—they tend to save a larger proportion from it than they do from regular income, especially if the windfall is sizable.

First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed. If private companies or public officials think that one policy produces better outcomes, they can greatly influence the outcome by choosing it as the default.

Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are "loss averse.

our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

people are more likely to keep what they start with than to trade it, even when the initial allocations were done at random.