Quotes About Behavior

With the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren't used to this combination, the results can be expensive.

Zimbardo's Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness "felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.

As it turns out, what makes a dog adoptable has very little to do with dogs, a great deal to do with humans.

Sow an action and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny.

As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines.

Given that seven of the top twenty most-visited sites on the Web are porn sites, and that nearly 33 percent of all Internet searches are for terms related to sex, it's safe to say that we're sinking a ton of time and money into digital voyeurism.

People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictor manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences." ??SuperFreakonomics??

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.

Behavioral genetics confirms that aggressive tendencies can be inherited, and that gives natural selection material to work with in shifting the average violent tendencies of a population.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

Existen buenas razones evolutivas para que los miembros de una especie inteligente intenten vivir en paz.

Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.

In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. [...] People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are - not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so.

Kahneman and Tversky conclude that people are not risk-averse across the board, though they are loss-averse: they seek risk if it may avoid a loss.29