Quotes About Behavior

People seemed to "decide" how much to eat based on box size as much as taste.

Deep within our brains, as in theirs, our shadowy unconscious mind is continuously applying the lessons of our past experience to predict the consequences of our current circumstances. In fact, one way to characterize a brain is as a prediction machine.

In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called "theory of mind," or "ToM," this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people's past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold given their present or future circumstances.

Do we, like the flight instructors, believe that harsh criticism improves our children's behavior or our employees' performance?

Research suggests that your happiness set point as well as circumstances and recent events accounts for much but not all of your happiness level. What about the rest? That's due to our behavior, and the good news is, in contrast to the others, this factor is very much under our control.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.

And when people interpret the behavior of someone who is a member of a minority, they interpret it in the context of preconceived stereotypes.51

That the variation in human characteristics and behavior is distributed like the error in an archer's aim led some nineteenth-century scientists to study the targets toward which the arrows of human existence are aimed.

The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people often hesitate or sugarcoat their true opinion. Suppose I ask my students, "Did you like my discussion of the stochastic nature of the

Humans usually try to guess the pattern, and in the process we allow ourselves to be outperformed by a rat.

Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences.

Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new "social physics" describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet's analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state of motion, so the mass behavior of people, if social conditions remain unchanged, remains constant.

Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no course of behavior can be more dangerous.

Dr. Melvin Connors sums it up nicely in just three words: culture stretches biology

Girls spend slightly more time playing with the doll than with the truck. Boys on the other hand typically spend great deal more time playing with the truck rather than with the doll.

We are what we do with our attention."64

Are people innately altruistic? is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong.

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that whatever you say to them, they always purr.

Well, then,' the Cat went on, 'you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr: If they would only purr for 'yes,' and mew for 'no,; or any rule of that sort, she had said, so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?

I wish creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!, You'll get used to it in time, said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

As a general rule, do not kick the shins of the opposite gentleman under the table, if personally unacquainted with him; your pleasantry is liable to be misunderstood – a circumstance at all times unpleasant.

you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.