Quotes About Behavior

Our argument is that it is not contact with the police per se that is problematic. In fact, the results of the study suggest that when the police deal with people in ways that they experience as being fair, contact promotes trust and a variety of types of desirable public behavior. Rather, it is contact that communicates suspicion and mistrust that undermines the relationship between the public and the police.

Aber sie tun es doch, sie sprechen von der Ohnmacht und praktizieren Macht, sie bekennen Demut und demütigen andere!

Culture is nothing but a set of successful patterns of behaviour grounded in our struggle to survive.

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.

we must renounce reading the Bible to find arguments to justify our behavior or that of our group.

Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

If you treat people right they will treat you right ... ninety percent of the time.

You are what you eat. For example, if you eat garlic you're apt to be a hermit.

What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely.

Poor Cecil, consumed by a grande passion, only to be told to compress his love manifesto into a haiku. "I won't try to excuse my behavior," he said. "It was despicable." Or a limerick. There once was a rotter named Cecil, Whose Love Interest wished he could be still. Oh well. Unlike some, at least, I've never pretended to be a poet.

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.

Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.

Those who exclaim that "animals are not people" tend to forget that, while true, it is equally true that people are animals. To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier.

It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.

Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves.

Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.

One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.

Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.

if two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior.

At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of facial expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another's perspective.32 The same differences have been found in self-report studies of human adults.