Quotes About Behavior

Galef and Tomasello come from a null-hypothesis-testing, experimental psychology background. The null hypothesis is something like "chimpanzees do not possess culture," with culture being defined by something like "traditional behavior transmitted by imitation or teaching." They could not show in their own or others' experimental studies that captive chimpanzees could imitate or teach, so did not reject the null hypothesis. No culture.

The hadith states that the second sign of wretchedness is a lack of modesty or shame. Among the words revealed to humanity are, "If you feel no shame, do what you will.

Some anthropologists divide cultures into shame cultures and guilt cultures. According to this perspective, shame is an outward mechanism, and guilt is an inward one which alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of remorse when someone has done something wrong, to the point that he or she needs to rectify the matter.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could have been.

Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.

We generally describe the most repulsive examples of man's cruelty as brutal or bestial, implying that such behavior is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In fact, however, the extremes of brutal behavior are confined to us: there exists no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other. The unmistakable truth is that man is the most vicious and cruel species that ever walked the earth.

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.

The first concern must, then, not be to speak as others speak, but to conceive of the word of truth with understanding and exactitude. . . . It is not a matter of refuting the opinions of others, but of presenting one's own; not a matter of contesting some aspect of the teaching or behavior of others that seems not to be good, but of writing on behalf of truth.59

Kids don't do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?

Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.

No important institution is ever merely what the law makes it. It accumulates about itself traditions, conventions, ways of behaviour, which are not less formidable in their influence.

Wrong behavior carries with it the seeds of its own retribution.

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

Lewis Petrinovich, The Cannibal Within (New York: Aldine de Gruyter

There are two very different types of "psychos": psychopaths and psychotics. Most serial killers fall into the first category, though some belong to the latter.

The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology as old as the species itself.

In my psychological studies," Jones explained, "I have observed that religion is not restraining in a moral see. Religion is not the same as ethics. Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.

Next to Krafft-Ebing, the psychiatrist who made the most detailed study of sadistic behavior was one of Freud's former colleagues, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel's two-volume, 1929 work, Sadism and Masochism, contains dozens of extraordinary case histories: men and women in thrall to the most extreme, and often appalling, sexual aberrations.

Holding on to conditional beliefs about how people should behave toward you because of all you do for them will only set you up to feel disappointment, anger, and resentment to people in particular as well as disillusionment about others in general

When women equate requesting a behavioral change with trying to teach the proverbial pig to sing, we don't strengthen our voice. Instead, we get sucked in by the latest research findings about how male and female brains are different, so men can't really be expected to pick up their socks. It feels easier to give up and adapt to unfair circumstances, despite the enormous long-term toll of making such accommodations.

You can't control the natures of other people, but you can control how you'll deal with them. And you can also control the extent and manner in which you'll be involved with them.

No man does right by a woman at a party.

It is very hard to be a hypocrite if you aren't trained for it.

You can accomplish anything with students if you set high expectations for behavior and performance by which you yourself abide.