Quotes About Behavior

Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.

Male nightingales need to influence the behaviour of female nightingales , and of other males. Some ornithologists have thought of song as conveying information: 'I am a male of the species Luscinia megarhynchos, in breeding condition, with a territory, hormonally primed to mate and build a nest.

Only human beings guide their behaviour by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on. P. B. and J. S. MEDAWAR, The Life Science (1977)

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him - all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation.

Men are a strange breed.

The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.

Your teen is probably trying—and trying hard—to do everything his or her peers are expected to do as they mature and face increasing responsibilities. But it's a daily struggle when the teen has a deficiency in what are called executive skills, the functions of our brains and thought processes that help us regulate our behavior, set goals and meet them, and balance demands and desires, wants, needs, and have-tos.

While motivation can play a significant role in teens' behavior, it's important to recognize that some behaviors reflect a skill weakness rather than a lack of motivation.

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.

First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.

you want to nudge people into socially desirable behavior, do not, by any means, let them know that their current actions are better than the social norm.

The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.

The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people's choices.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

An especially good way to gain weight is to have dinner with other people. On average, those who eat with one other person eat about 35 percent more than they do when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75 percent more; those in groups of seven or more eat 96 percent more.

The core premise of economic theory is that people choose by optimizing.

The causes of human deficiencies in intelligence—or parenting, or social behavior, or work behavior—lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in society.

There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.

Kültür, kirli hava gibidir. Fark?nda olmasan?z dahi etkilenirsiniz.

Conscious thought doesn't have much to do with this stuff. Doesn't have much to do with the way we live our lives, period, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalization, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct, and pheromones for the fine-tuning. Sad, but true.

But then that's humans for you—never can trust the stroppy fuckers to live up to the stereotypes you assign.

the crazymakers in your life share certain destructive patterns that make them poisonous for any sustained creative work.

All persons on my vessel of war being guilty of profane oaths, cursings or other scandalous actions are in good company with the author.