Quotes About Behavior

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3

by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.

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 explanations may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting, but they say nothing about the other parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the community would respond to it. [...] Why should we discard our lever on the system for inhibition just because we are coming to understand the system for temptation?

Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

in which I argued that human beings are fitted by evolution with a number of destructive motives such as greed, lust, dominance, vengeance, and self-deception.

Steven Pinker

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.

Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves.

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.

The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out.

As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel.

government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for "society," or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.

Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man's willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.

Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime.

Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs.

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.