Quotes About Behavior

the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a unified trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.

A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype.

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the "principle

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.

Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.

this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people's honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren't.

So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?

Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.

Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But

But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.

what they meant by myopia is that alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, "a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.

the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. "When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, 'Pft, that's just getting started,'" reports alcohol researcher Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge-drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common.

A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.