Quotes About Behavior

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

In a typical study, higher testosterone levels would be observed in those male prisoners with higher rates of aggression. But being aggressive stimulates testosterone secretion; no wonder more aggressive individuals had higher levels.

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.

in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women; thus

Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.

these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that "it's only a figure of speech"—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies

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

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.

As you study the trait in more environments, the heritability score will decrease. This is recognized by Bouchard: "These conclusions [derived from a behavior genetics study] can be generalized, of course only to new populations exposed to a range of environments similar to those studied."31

The explains why basal levels of testosterone have little to do with subsequent aggression, and why increases in testosterone due to puberty, sexual stimulation, or the start of mating season don't increase aggression either.

Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she'll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother,*23 and she'll stop maternal behaviors, including nursing. Oxytocin

John Archer in a definitive 2006 review, "There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and … administration of testosterone to volunteers typically does not increase their aggression." The brain doesn't pay attention to fluctuations of testosterone levels within the normal range.

The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the "warrior gene" variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior than does believing that you have it.

Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability.65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent.

Another study explored the neurobiology of conforming.16 To simplify, a subject is part of a group (where, secretly, the rest are confederates); they are shown "X," then asked, "What did you see?" Everyone else says "Y." Does the subject lie and say "Y" also? Often. Subjects who stuck to their guns with "X" showed amygdala activation.

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.

by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are "biological" and those that would be described as, say, "psychological" or "cultural." Utterly intertwined.

I can't really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we'll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.

Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she'll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother,fn6,23 and she'll stop maternal behaviors, including nursing.

willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games.

Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. Metaphorically, the frontal cortex says, "Screw it. I'm tired and don't feel like thinking about my fellow human.