Quotes About Behavior

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates.

When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain by numerous options and perhaps even by choosing for themselves. A nudge might be welcomed.

Or consider this one: people's judgments about strangers are affected by whether they are drinking iced coffee or hot coffee! Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee.27 This, too, happens quite unconsciously.

Drawing on some well-established findings in social science, we show that in many cases, individuals make pretty bad decisions—decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control.

Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee. 27 This, too, happens quite unconsciously.

Morality fell with society

People are not punished for their deeds, but by them~

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

The psyche's job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we'll behave in any situation. We're all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right . But even when the fog is pointed out, we're no better at navigating through it .

plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they're fast and fantastic at figuring out who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant.

The psyche's job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we'll behave in any situation. We're all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we're no better at navigating through it.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can't cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.)

Violent actors act violently not because they are mentally ill or come from violent subcultures or are brain damaged or have low self-esteem but because they have different phantom communities from the rest of us. That difference is the reason they attach different, violent meanings to their social experiences.

Not testosterone per se but the patriarchal preference for subjecting males to violentization, and their physical advantage in achieving early successful violent performances, explains why men are much more likely than women to be seriously violent.

Preventing and limiting violence means protecting children from brutalization in a country where physically punishing children continues to be acceptable behavior.

it is possible to argue that some people are violent and mentally ill, but it is no longer defensible to argue that people are violent because they are mentally ill.

Once violence is understood to be a behavior, not a pathology, the fact that it was responsive to social pressures no longer seems mysterious.

How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

We don't think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.