Quotes About Behavior

These incidents might seem trivial, but they are not. Actions speak louder than words.

Punishers don't win. Thus, when repetition is taken into account, punishment by people who like to take the law into their own hands is ineffective.

Cooperation in about half of the participant pools remained at the initial level, and the higher the level of antisocial punishment in a participant pool, the lower was the rate of increase in cooperation. At best, "altruistic punishment" did not help people to cooperate very much. This seemed to me to capture something of the flavor of real life.

If punishment is typically used in the context of repeated dealings where people know who has punished whom, then it is difficult to draw conclusions from an experiment where punishment occurs anonymously. If we want to understand human behavior and the interplay between cooperation and punishment, we need to study situations where the players encounter each other again and again.

Like most thin-skinned people who have been snubbed, he could not leave the snubbers alone.

How odd that people could be so ugly, not particularly because of appearence, but because of the atmosphere of judgemental bad temper and discontent they carried around with them.

Behavior we celebrate grows ever stronger.

Good people do good things and bad people do bad things," I was told, "but for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.

Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.

Stop thinking like a madman, or you will end up acting like an ass.

It is now clear, however, that children of privilege are exhibiting unexpectedly high rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school and accelerating throughout adolescence.

If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them.

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

Bold action and bold manner are not the same.

universal laws prescribe how things will behave not, like human laws, how they ought to behave.

I leaned over and slapped his face sideways and backhanded it back to center position. Manners, I said.

In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.

The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob.

People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter.

He's such a male little male.

That old honorary Cuban had simplified the question all to hell when he'd said that a moral act is something you feel good after. Conversely, you feel bad after an immoral act. But what about the act that is neither moral nor immoral, Papa? How are you supposed to feel then?

Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought.

None are so busy as the fool and knave.

Many feelings and behaviors are no doubt left over from childhood. Children feel weak and vulnerable; they are dependent, and they feel that dependency strongly; they don't think much of themselves; they have a constant need for approval; they are very prone to anxiety and quick to anger. They have no patience. To a degree, we all continue to generate some of those feelings unconsciously right on into adulthood. What varies from person