Quotes About Behavior

Things went so well for him so often that no one ever needed to worry about how he behaved when they didn't go well.

Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment." The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean

No single intervention would stop a flu-like disease in its tracks, just as no single safety measure would prevent a doctor from replacing the right hip when it was the left hip that hurt. The trick was to mix and match strategies in response to the nature of the disease and the behavior of the population. Each strategy was like another slice of Swiss cheese; enough slices, properly aligned, would hide the holes.

They were "risk averse." But what was this thing that everyone had been calling "risk aversion?" It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.

For some reason human beings did not see it that way. "People's intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well," Danny and Amos wrote.

Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn't as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself.

We know what the virus will do," she liked to say. "We don't know what the humans will do.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm.

when each infected person infected more than three others, or when the society's rate of compliance fell below 30 percent.

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

Hitler's doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him.

The RBC trading floor had what the staff liked to refer to as a "no-asshole rule"; if someone came in the door looking for a job and sounding like a typical Wall Street asshole, they wouldn't hire him, no matter how much money he said he could make the firm. There was even an expression used to describe the culture: "RBC nice.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

What struck Redelmeier wasn't the idea that people made mistakes. Of course people made mistakes! What was so compelling is that the mistakes were predictable and systematic. They seemed ingrained in human nature.

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

He's not tactically rude," his wife explains. "He's sincerely rude. He knows everyone thinks of him as a character but he doesn't think of himself that way. Steven lives inside his head." When

The Centers for Disease Control, the apex authority, wasn't of much practical use to her. The distance they had put between themselves and her when she closed Thomashefsky's clinic was of a piece with their general behavior. She'd repeatedly seen the tendency to flee when conflict arose.

He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.

Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.

The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too.

The one shot America had at behaving well, and thus saving itself, was to remove the feeling that "the government" was imposing restrictions on people and re-instill the idea that people

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population...people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.

She's got manners, but what has she got in the way of morals?" "Oh," said Luker blithely, "she and I don't have any morals. We have to get along with a scruple or two." "I