Quotes About Behavior

Irrationality didn't atrophy with disuse. On the contrary, left unattended, the irrational side of man had grown in power and scope.

Pierce himself later said, It is the demeanor which is respected among these people. They know the look of fear, and likewise its absence, and any man who is not afraid makes them afraid in turn.

was reinforced by her education, and many well-bred women probably were the simpering, tittering, pathologically delicate fools that populate the pages of Victorian novels.

I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice.

This, after all, is the king who passed the law about putting trousers on cats and dogs, who made too-loud laughter a punishable crime. According to rumor, he was abused by his father, the last king. But that's the story people always tell, isn't it, when they want to explain inexplicable behavior?

It is—first, last, and always—about how you act.

YOU-reka! When you keep your hands and brain occupied—whether with video games, gardening, or removing a spleen—it means you're putting your brain into the state you want: not thinking about eating and not automatically reaching for something to put in your mouth.

science tells us that when you are under the age of six, your genes determine what happens, but by the time you are 55, 80 percent of your health outcomes are determined by your choices, which dictate which of your genes are on and which are off.2 So while your genetic component at birth certainly has some influence on your ultimate health and longevity, life outcomes are much more about engineering via your behaviors, choices, and decisions than they are about genes.

Andrei Shleifer writes in his excellent book Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance:

Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself—not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people's behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

attention deficit disorder in his own son. "I had worked in an ADHD clinic during my residency, and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed," he said. "That it was a 'savior' diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids' bad behavior.

And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000." Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

Myers-Briggs–type personality test.

Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason.

Charles Kindleberger's 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes.

stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.