Quotes About Behavior

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

Those driven by emotion (children, the mentally ill, hormonal men and women alike) don't freak out when they get their way; they freak out when they're not getting their way.

1 In this book, I evaluate both American and Russian leaders—their ideas, decisions, and behavior—by how well they succeeded in achieving what in my view were desirable and attainable objectives.

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

Look, Malia, I know your theory. But you can't go round putting people's backs up!' 'I certainly wouldn't wish to do that!' said Dr Malia. 'Well, it annoys people, you know.' 'I'm sorry about that. I try not to get in the way.' 'Well, maybe, but – It's just that you're always creeping around.

There were cats lying in the way but they did not move. Cats rarely moved for people in Egypt. They had to step round them. The cats merely lay there and watched them.

Before he can DECIDE to do good, his parents must CONDITION him to do good.

A newborn soon needs training. Parents who put off training until their child is old enough to discuss issues or receive explanations will find he has become a terror long before he can tie his shoes.

Si los padres comienzan en la infancia, frustrando las primeras exigencias gritadas, el niño nunca desarrollará el hábito. En nuestra casa los berrinches eran totalmente desconocidos porque desde la primera vez que se intentaban hacíamos que fuera contraproducente.

Except where the very smallest children are concerned, training at home almost entirely eliminates the need for public discipline. Yet, should the need arise in public, be discreet with your discipline, and then go home and re-train in that area of behavior so that you and the child will not be placed in that difficult situation again.

One father proudly told of how he fearlessly overcame by promising the child ice cream if he would only wait until they left the store. Such compromises will only affirm the child in his commitment to terrorist tactics. You are not gaining control of the child; he is gaining control of you. All children are trained, some carelessly or negligently, and some with varied degrees of forethought. All parental responses are conditioning the child's behavior, and are therefore training.

a cat was observed in a veterinarian's waiting area sitting patiently on a leash, held by a human. Whoever you are, you had better cut it out.

I try to explain how people react when overwhelmed by confusion and negative emotions. Some drink too much. Others overeat or beat their wives or kick the cat. And a surprising number hold their hands against a hot plate or slice open their skin with a razor blade. It's an extreme coping mechanism. They talk about their inner pain being turned outward. By giving it a physical manifestation they find it easier to deal with. (35)

You try to understand human behavior. You try to explain it. Not me. I know we're smaller than gorillas, bigger than chimps, worse than both of them and, for all our rationality, our rules and laws, our baser drives are still straight out of the jungle.

As a forensic psychologist, I have met killers and psychopaths and sociopaths, but I refuse to define people as being good or evil. Wrongdoing is an absence of something good rather than something fated, or written in our DNA, or forced upon us by shitty parents, or careless teachers, or cruel friendships. Evil is not a state, it is a 'property', and when a person is in possession of enough 'property', it sometimes begins to define them.

is so fundamental to our existence; it is wired into our DNA. That's why babies learn to fake cry before they're a year old and to bluff by the age of two. By four a child is an accomplished liar, and by five, he or she realises that truly outrageous lies are less likely to be believed.

The social food researcher Harry Balzer noted without prompting that Americans are not cooking more, they're simply eating more meals at home.

The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures.

chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.

Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness."4

Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined "to hit back" if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.

The release of dopamine is a form of information, a message that tells the organism "Do that again." Dopamine produces the sensation of pleasure that accompanies mastering a task or accomplishing a goal, which makes the organism want to repeat the behavior, whether it is pressing a bar, pecking a key, or pulling a slot machine lever. You get a hit (a reinforcement) and your brain gets a hit of dopamine. Behavior—Reinforcement—Behavior. Repeat sequence.