Quotes About Behavior

What accounts for TIT FOR TAT's robust success is its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. Its

Lesson One was: "Be nice and forgiving." Lesson Two was more exploitative: "If others are going to be nice and forgiving, it pays to try to take advantage of them.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don't fit in—to ostracize them even further.

Once norms are broken without consequence, further breakage ensues.

As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it.

They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of "belligerent behavior" or "emotional outbursts" in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.

On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent's attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.

people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.

what is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action,

First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don't.

In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.

Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.

our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think.

Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others' actions to decide how they themselves should act.

once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.

we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.

Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.

Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.

The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.