Behavioural Quotes & Sayings

Love isn't about predictions or behavioural markers. It just happens, and you have no control. — Jamie McGuire

It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological ...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. — Anthony Storr

Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes. — Jonathan Sacks

Research has shown that it takes 31 days of conscious effort to make or break a habit. That means, if one practices something consistently for 31 days, on the 32nd day it does become a habit. Information has been internalised into behavioural change, which is called transformation. — Shiv Khera

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption. — Evan Davis

What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: 'Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?
Mental Cramp. — Isaiah Berlin

Put simply, behavioural economics argues that human beings' decision-taking is guided by the evolutionary baggage which we bring with us to the present day. Evolution has made us rational to a point, but not perfectly so. It has given us emotions, for example, which programme us to override our rational brain and act more instinctively. — Evan Davis

We invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others ... we assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioural world that do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. — Julian Jaynes

There are several ways we can know what a dog, a bird or, indeed, any other organism can see, for example either by looking at the structure of the eye and comparing it with other species, or by behavioural tests. — Tim Birkhead

The point about positive thinking, and later cognitive behavioural therapy, was that you could choose how you thought about life, and that how you thought about it changed not only your interpretation of what happened, but also the actual course of events. — Jenny Alexander

GWEN is a superb system, in combination with cyclotron resonance, for producing behavioural alterations in the civilian population. The average strength of the steady geomagnetic field varies from place to place across the United States. Therefore, if one wished to resonate a specific ion in living things in a specific locality, one would require a specific frequency for that location. The spacing of GWEN transmitters 200 miles apart across the United States would allow such specific frequencies to be 'tailored' to the geomagnetic-field strength in each GWEN area. — Robert O. Becker

The virtues of character, behavioural patterns determine how great a nation and people are. — Sunday Adelaja

Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology. — Evan Davis

People tend to over react on situations to have a bigger and better story to tell, thus receiving more attention. — Johan Coetzer

Education turns an empty mind into an open mind. It turns information into behavioural transformation — Shiv Khera

There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex behavioural patterns can be triggered by a tiny concentration of moleculas coursing through the bloodstream, and that different animals of the same species generate different amounts of these hormones, is something worth thinking about when it's time to judge such matters as free will, individual responsibility, and law and order. — Carl Sagan

I have been in a youth hostel ... You are put in a kitchen with seventeen venture scouts with behavioural difficulties and made to wash swedes. — Victoria Wood

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds. — James Ladyman

Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioural consequences. — Daniel J. Siegel

People may chuckle appreciatively at a male turkey that tries to mate with a poor rendition of a female's [suspended] head, but if you then point out that many a human male regularly gets aroused after looking at two-dimensional representations of a nude woman, they don't see the connection. — Robert Wright

Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists ... least human of all creatures. — Lewis Thomas

The best way to detect the destructive element in someone is to watch closely their behavioural pattern when given authority over poverty. — Michael Bassey Johnson

The implementation of a set of interpersonal processes that lead to the coachee experiencing enhanced physical health (physiological), engagement in effective, purposeful actions (behavioural), the possession of sufficient attentional control to process information effectively (cognitive), an ability to encounter a wider range of emotional states with equanimity and poise (affective), and the conscious linking of personal goals and commitments to important beliefs, core values and/or developing interests (meaning)'. — Christian Van Nieuwerburgh

Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds. — Liz Murray

And that will be on my medical records for ever.
Everyone will always know I'm a nutter. Behavioural problems. I'm just a bloody label ...
A label written on a white board in a single room without a radio, in a place where everyone else was at least 20 years older than me. Can't think about it. It's anger that goes nowhere. — Rae Earl

A powerful portfolio of physiological and behavioural evidence now exists to support the case that fish feel pain and that this feeling matters. In the face of such evidence, any argument to the contrary based on the claim that fish 'do not have the right sort of brain' can no longer be called scientific. It is just obstinate. — John Webster

Economists are behavioural psychologists, but they think more is better; they want to make everyone richer. They should pause. More's not necessarily better — David Hemenway

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently. — David Eagleman

The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed. — Michael Lewis

The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers. — Niall Ferguson

Since the web is totally worldwide, we need a set of behavioural rules, laws they are commonly called, that are accepted worldwide. There is a big difference as to how things are treated in the U.S. and Europe and Asia. — Robert Cailliau

Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table? — Henry Markram

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running around inside wheels and conduction frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans. — Douglas Adams

I've had a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, and am having a family now. — Trisha Goddard

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. — Nick Harkaway

Well if manners maketh man make-up maketh woman.And we don't need a phalanx of behavioural scientists to explain why man judge women by their looks.Because the see bether than thay think. — Kathy Lette

The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There's no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you. — David Mellor

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there. — Kary Mullis

It's much harder to twist the charitable arm of a lottery winner compared to that of a man at his lowest ebb. It sounds like the wrong way round at first, but when you really put your nut to it, people are more frightened of losing the big shit than of having fuck all to begin with and losing a bit of that. — Carla H. Krueger

Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers. — Socrates

I think people take their behavioural tips from everyone else. So, if the director is calm and the lead actors are calm, no one wants to be the sore thumb. And I've remained friendly with everyone. — Robert B. Weide

Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I don't need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it surrounds and protects me. It's also stable, ever-available and something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to soothe it ... music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man's path to transcendence. — Gabor Mate

[M]aking a show was better cover than trying to stay inconspicuous; Western capitalism in particular allowed the rich just about the right amount of behavioural leeway to account for the oddities our alienness might produce. — Iain M. Banks

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework. — Frank Schatzing