Quotes About Behavior

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams.

Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors.

After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.

Como los chimpancés, la gente rastrea y recuerda quién está por encima de quién. Cuando las personas dentro de un orden jerárquico actúan de maneras que niegan o subvierten ese orden, lo podemos sentir instantáneamente, aunque nosotros mismos no hayamos sido directamente perjudicados.

Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?

Many psychologists have studied the effects of having "plausible deniability." In one such study, subjects performed a task and were then given a slip of paper and a verbal confirmation of how much they were to be paid. But when they took the slip to another room to get their money, the cashier misread one digit and handed them too much money. Only 20 percent spoke up and corrected the mistake.24

But the story changed when the cashier asked them if the payment was correct. In that case, 60 percent said no and returned the extra money. Being asked directly removes plausible deniability; it would take a direct lie to keep the money. As a result, people are three times more likely to be honest.

But as a psychologist studying morality, I can say that multilevel selection would go a long way toward explaining why people are simultaneously so selfish and so groupish.91

I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.

human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

Maybe we're just prisoners of our biology.

Social norms are the cement that holds societies together.

If you ask me, psychopaths are more talented than the rest of us... but they're still fucking psychopaths.

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

They all behaved as if they were absolutely disgusted by this, and amid the ribbing and hilarity that this elaborate performance of disgust and envy produced they were able to hide their true feelings of disgust and envy.

And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they're too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they've become habituated to them.

Here's the truth: people, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

An Ivy League teacher told me, "I've found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it.

A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,

the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

Wrangham estimated that around thirty per cent of adult male chimpanzees had died as the result of violence by another member of their own species.