Quotes About Behavior

that aversives stop behavior, they don't start it; and that fear and pain produce completely unpredictable and usually highly undesirable side effects, including being both exciting and reinforcing to the punisher. (p.15)

To people schooled in the humanistic tradition, the manipulation of human behavior by some sort of conscious technique seems incorrigibly wicked, in spite of the obvious fact that we all go around trying to manipulate one another's behavior all the time, by whatever means come to hand.

Nancy taught two hens to help her sort flowers to make leis. She set them down by a basket of three colors of plastic flowers. One hen quickly pulled out all the red flowers, and another the white ones, leaving the pink flowers in the basket.

reinforcement-based technology is that at least as far as animals and children go, we now have a realistic way to keep them and take care of them and teach them without automatically using fear.

that aversives stop behavior, they don't start it; and

Why is this important for school success? To get along in kindergarten, your child should know information like colors, shapes, seasons, holidays, farm animals, types of transportation, fruits, and vegetables—all the basics that children are exposed to through picture books, preschool, and life itself. He will be expected to demonstrate age-appropriate social standards and behavior. If he knocks over someone's art project, he should know to apologize and help pick it up.

If you're not prepared to do something in public, don't do it at all.

I was starting to realize how much the presence of a child could make adults act more like adults.

As long as adults make mistakes and as long as parents abuse, they will create new abusers.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

Problem behaviors potentially are obstacles in both school and labor market, especially for the African American urban disadvantaged. White men, of both lower and higher SES, evidence problem behavior profiles much like those of African Americans, but less often suffer adverse consequences.

Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet.

Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.

In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop one's growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.

What's done to children, they will do to society.

Tip 3: Watch out for teasing.

Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were 'natural'.

Morality, Schlick was convinced, is not tied to self-denial: "It does not come dressed in a nun's habit." Quite the contrary: "Moral behavior springs from pleasure and pain; if one acts nobly, it is because one enjoys doing so…. Values are not dictated from above, but lie within; it is human nature to be good.

That took the view that every misbehavior, every cruelty perpetuated by one kid on another should be let slide in the name of letting kids be kids? (Let them be kids, really let them, and you will end up with a tribe of bulimic eugenicists with huge amounts of credit card debt.)

Without our emotions, we can't make decisions; we can't decipher our dreams and visions; we can't set proper boundaries or behave skillfully in relationships; we can't identify our hopes or support the hopes of others; and we can't connect to, or even find, our dearest loves.

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meaning built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience.

There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.

As our emerging self-portrait makes clear, we are motivated by far more than cost and price. So instead of turning first to markets to mediate our social and ecological relationships, the twenty-first-century economist would be wise to start by asking what social dynamics are already in play. What are the values, heuristics, norms and networks that currently shape human behaviour—and how could they be nurtured or nudged, rather than ignored and eroded?

The few cases of research carried out in other countries and cultures reveal that those convenient-to-study university undergraduates actually behave quite differently from most people.