Behavior Analysis Quotes

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Not having a contingency plan or never performing risk analysis and mitigation activities is like not having an insurance plan for yourself.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
What we need to know about loving is no great mystery. We all know what constitutes loving behavior; we need but act upon it, not continually question it. Over-analysis often confuses the issue and in the end brings us no closer to insight. We sometimes become too busy classifying, separating, and examining, to remember that love is easy. It's we who make it complicated.
Leo F. Buscaglia
In this era of fake news and paid news artificial intelligence is more and more used as a political tool to manipulate and dictate common people, through big data, biometric data, and AI analysis of online profiles and behaviors in social media and smart phones. But the days are not far when AI will also control the politicians and the media too.
Amit Ray
In current times, we have access to so much data. Having said that, data analysis can uncover so many hidden patterns about customer behavior and how they interact with various products.
Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.
Rudolf Carnap (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 11 (Library of Living Philosophers))
Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
Building habit-forming products is an iterative process and requires user behavior analysis and continuous experimentation.
Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
A person must find the courage to live a complete and full life. We learn to live when we stop being afraid and by engaging in critical analysis of our own thoughts, motives, emotions, and behavior. A tolerant person who lives without fear extends charity to the entire world. Courage always precedes an act of human grace, which expresses the luminosity of the human soul.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn’t true. If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument.
Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
Time and again, I have asked myself why therapy works for some people while others remain the prisoners of their symptoms despite years of analysis or therapeutic care. In each and every case I examined, I was able to establish that when people found the kind of therapeutic care and companionship that enabled them to discover their own story and give free expression to their indignation at their parents’ behavior, they were able to liberate themselves from the maltreated child’s destructive attachment. As adults they were able to take their lives into their own hands and did not need to hate their parents. The opposite was the case with people whose therapists enjoined them to forgive and forget, actually believing that such forgiveness could have a salutary, curative effect. They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless. I
Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate. You change the culture of the company by changing the behavior of its leaders. You measure the change in culture by measuring the change in the personal behavior of its leaders and the performance of the business.
BusinessNews Publishing (Summary: Execution: Review and Analysis of Bossidy and Charan's Book)
For every member of the White House senior staff this would be the lasting conundrum of dealing with President Trump: the “why” of his often baffling behavior. “The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
You have to take good care of yourself. If you don't, nobody will.
Cindrella
The result is a book that cannot be read easily. It requires study. We hope that some will have the patience and inclination to do so.
Russell L. Ackoff (On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events)
Despite the beliefs and opinions of some psychologists, nothing related to human psychology and behavior is absolutely quantifiable.
Chase Hughes (The Ellipsis Manual: analysis and engineering of human behavior)
History collects; history records; and history remembers. And it patiently waits for unsatisfied minds to discover it.
Brent E. Turvey (Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis)
only hope through this work to provoke the kind of sustained analysis, discourse, attitudes, and behaviors that will move all Black women and men closer to enjoying the fullness and uniqueness of their humanity.
Kelly Brown Douglas (Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective)
Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. This is why the world is in such a mess.
Stephen Hawking
Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.
Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS)
Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. Experience of any one of a number of kinds may be sufficiently telling to bring about personality changes. It may be the inspiring example of a truly great person; it may be a common tragedy which by bringing the neurotic in close touch with others takes him out of his egocentric isolation; it may be association with persons so congenial that manipulating or avoiding them appears less necessary. In other instances the consequences of neurotic behavior may be so drastic or of such frequent occurrence that they impress themselves on the neurotic's mind and make him less fearful and less rigid.
Karen Horney (Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis)
In an ever-more complex world, Mandelbrot argues, scientists need both tools: image as well as number, the geometric view as well as the analytic. The two should work together. Visual geometry is like an experienced doctor's savvy in reading a patient's complexion, charts, and X-rays. Precise analysis is like the medical test results-the raw numbers of blood pressure and chemistry. "A good doctor looks at both, the pictures and the numbers. Science needs to work that way too," he says.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
4. Reward appropriate behavior openly and generously If you want to persuade people to do the right thing, add some sort of public display which acknowledges the right kind of behavior. Even adding a simple smiley face to their bill whentheir account is in order, for example, will encourage people to keep doing the right thing. This kind of positive feedback can be proven scientifically to be more effective than complaining about bad behavior. Find something good to focus on and build on that. 5.
BusinessNews Publishing (Summary: Yes!: Review and Analysis of Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini's Book)
Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.
Stan Goff (Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century)
According to Becker’s logic, if we’re short on cash and happen to drive by a convenience store, we quickly estimate how much money is in the register, consider the likelihood that we might get caught, and imagine what punishment might be in store for us if we are caught (obviously deducting possible time off for good behavior). On the basis of this cost-benefit calculation, we then decide whether it is worth it to rob the place or not. The essence of Becker’s theory is that decisions about honesty, like most other decisions, are based on a cost-benefit analysis.
Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves)
Some of the algorithms that you have built in your life are deeply ingrained in your mind. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t change anything. Through the behavior-impact analysis, you can examine the results of your behavior. If you are unhappy with what you see, it’s time for change.
Gilbert Eijkelenboom (People Skills for Analytical Thinkers)
the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom-which cannot be taken away-that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
On my analysis, misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior. But systems of punishment and reward—and conviction and exoneration—tend to work together, holistically. So, the overall structural features of the account predict that misogyny as I’ve analyzed it is likely to work alongside other systems and mechanisms to enforce gender conformity. 7 And a little reflection on current social realities encourages pursuing this line of thinking, which would take the hostility women face to be the pointy, protruding tip of a larger patriarchal iceberg. We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who conform to gendered norms and expectations, enforce the “good” behavior of others, and engage in certain common forms of patriarchal virtue-signaling—by, for example, participating in slut-shaming, victim-blaming, or the Internet analog of witch-burning practices.
Kate Manne (Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny)
Echophenomena, such as autistic echoing of phrases, are largely considered involuntary, even if such echoing is done voluntarily. (Such are the paradoxes of compliance.) Conversely, imitation, such as complying with a behavioral analyst's demand to mirror her jumping body, is regarded as voluntary, even if it is coerced or scripted.
Melanie Yergeau (Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Thought in the Act))
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.
Eric Schmidt
So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions will have longer growing seasons, increasing the food supply and reducing tensions. Some people will eschew conflict, being preoccupied with saving their homes from the encroaching ocean or growing pineapples in the Arctic. But amid squabbling about the details in predictive models, the consensus is that global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up—in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. But global warming’s bad news is more global—desertification, loss of arable land due to rising seas, more droughts. One influential meta-analysis projected 16 percent and 50 percent increases in interpersonal and group violence, respectively, in some regions by 2050.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Governments are especially adept at using propaganda to induce fear among citizens to control their behavior. When people are frightened enough, they turn to governments for protection. Because we all fear the judgement of others to some degree, governments also use propaganda to manipulate our perception of the expectations of others. If propaganda creates the impression that all the other citizens expect us to be obedient, our default position will be obedience, and that can only be overcome with careful, rational analysis. Any time someone trying to control us can fill our heads with emotions, they can keep us from thinking clearly and lead us to believe in whatever bad ideas advance their agenda.
Adam Kokesh (Freedom!)
As noted earlier, behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
In the final analysis, the real issue is not so much why a target is chosen by a bully for abuse as it is whether the employer tolerated the abusive behavior. Once a target complains to an employer that s/he is being abused, the employer has a legal obligation to act immediately to stop the abuse. Failure to act can expose the employer to significantly greater liability in a lawsuit.
Patricia Barnes (Surviving Bullies, Queen Bees & Psychopaths in the Workplace)
My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again. . . . It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what? But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment. Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between.
John Lewis Gaddis (The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past)
Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.
Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants)
Recently a group of researchers conducted a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs. The researchers reported a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. In line with their hypothesis, they found a decrease in usages such as we and us and an increase in I and me. The researchers also reported a decline in words related to social connection and positive emotions, and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior, such as hate or kill.
Brené Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
The brain is a machine, and the mind is a ghost within it. The origins of self-awareness and how the mind is able to perceive, analyze, and imagine are supposedly explained by numerous schools of psychology, although in fact they study only behavior through the gathering and the analysis of statistics. The why of the mind’s existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason—especially its penchant for moral reasoning—will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.
Dean Koontz (Odd Interlude: A Special Odd Thomas Adventure)
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is, thickly— described. In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. The task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to take, as it were, the native's point of view, to get inside his head and see the world the way he does, to delineate the ethos of his culture as that ethos is manifested in actual behavior.
Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures)
The essence of Hilbert's program was to find a decision process that would operate on symbols in a purely mechanical fashion, without requiring any understanding of their meaning. Since mathematics was reduced to a collection of marks on paper, the decision process should concern itself only with the marks and not with the fallible human intuitions out of which the marks were reduced. In spite of the prolonged efforts of Hilbert and his disciples, the Entscheidungsproblem was never solved. Success was achieved only in highly restricted domains of mathematics, excluding all the deeper and more interesting concepts. Hilbert never gave up hope, but as the years went by his program became an exercise in formal logic having little connection with real mathematics. Finally, when Hilbert was seventy years old, Kurt Godel proved by a brilliant analysis that the Entscheindungsproblem as Hilbert formulated it cannot be solved. Godel proved that in any formulation of mathematics, including the rules of ordinary arithmetic, a formal process for separating statements into true and false cannot exist. He proved the stronger result which is now known as Godel's theorem, that in any formalization of mathematics including the rules of ordinary arithmetic there are meaningful arithmetical statements that cannot be proved true or false. Godel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas.
Freeman Dyson (The Scientist as Rebel)
It is well-known that a big percentage of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (about 39 percent, according to the latest data).[30] But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction. Popular culture would have you believe the secret to this satisfaction is romantic passion, but that is wrong. On the contrary, a lot of unhappiness can attend the early stages of romance. For example, researchers find that it is often accompanied by rumination, jealousy, and “surveillance behaviors”—not what we typically associate with happiness. Furthermore, “destiny beliefs” about soul mates or love being meant to be can predict low forgiveness when paired with attachment anxiety.[32] Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34] You might think “companionate love” sounds a little, well, disappointing. I certainly did the first time I heard it, on the heels of great efforts to win my future wife’s love. But over the past thirty years, it turns out that we don’t just love each other; we like each other, too. Once and always my romantic love, she is also my best friend.
Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.103
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)
In his book, originally titled If I Did It, subsequently published as I Did It when the Goldman family won the rights based on their civil suit, O. J. Simpson recounts the killings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman as if O.J. had actually committed the crimes. From my perspective of forty-plus years in law enforcement and behavioral analysis, this book, written years after O.J.’s acquittal for the murders, was just another display of Mr. Simpson’s contempt for moral standards, his sense of power over and remaining anger at Nicole. In other words: the actions of a sociopathic narcissist.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
Feminist “theory,” as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role. By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse). Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of“primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. (…) The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men—a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.”She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy. And perhaps even more than she envies the male role itself, the feminist covets the external rewards attached to its successful performance: social status, recognition, power, wealth, and the chance to control wealth directly (rather than be supported).
F. Roger Devlin (Sexual Utopia in Power: The Feminist Revolt Against Civilization)
The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop. For example, if you were given the task of describing an interaction between a cat and a dog, you might make entries like: "Cat spits, ... dog bares teeth, ... cat arches back,... dog barks,... cat—" At least as important as the particular actions described is the sequence in which they occur. And to some extent, any particular behavior by the cat becomes understandable only in the context of the dog's behavior. If for some reason your observations were restricted to just the cat, you would be challenged by the task of reconstructing what the cat was interacting with. The cat's behavior is much more difficult to appreciate and understand in isolation.
Richard Bandler & John Grinder
We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. We tend to think other people's mistakes are caused by character flaws while our mistakes are due to situational factors. "I had a headache on the day of the examine, but he's not very smart." Then we have the opposite. Our good behavior is attributable to fundamental traits while other people's is temporary and situational. "I'm returning this wallet to lost and found because I'm a moral and ethical person. Others do so only if they're seen picking it up." Thus we own our strengths and disavow our weaknesses. This is a big obstetrical to overcoming self-destruction behavior, it justifies all our attempts to deny or put off our need to change and rationalizes the consequences of our actions.
Richard O'Connor
The human brain is by far the most complex object known to exist in the entire universe, containing more neurons than there are billions of stars in the Milky Way. The brain and the mind are very different things, and the latter is as mysterious as the former is complex. The brain is a machine, and the mind is a ghost within it. The origins of self-awareness and how the mind is able to perceive, analyze, and imagine are supposedly explained by numerous schools of psychology, although in fact they study only behavior through the gathering and the analysis of statistics. The why of the mind’s existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason—especially its penchant for moral reasoning—will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.
Dean Koontz (Odd Interlude #1 (An Odd Thomas Story))
Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
My own odyssey of therapy, over my forty-five-year career, is as follows: a 750-hour, five-time-a-week orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in my psychiatric residency (with a training analyst in the conservative Baltimore Washington School), a year’s analysis with Charles Rycroft (an analyst in the “middle school” of the British Psychoanalytic Institute), two years with Pat Baumgartner (a gestalt therapist), three years of psychotherapy with Rollo May (an interpersonally and existentially oriented analyst of the William Alanson White Institute), and numerous briefer stints with therapists from a variety of disciplines, including behavioral therapy, bioenergetics, Rolfing, marital-couples work, an ongoing ten-year (at this writing) leaderless support group of male therapists, and, in the 1960s, encounter groups of a whole rainbow of flavors, including a nude marathon group.
Irvin D. Yalom (The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients)
Awareness of our conscious thinking patterns and unconscious behavior predilections enables us to examine the defining question of how we began to take certain values for granted. Once we accept that we are a product of our culture, we can begin the act of deliberately redefining our sense of self. By engaging in an intensive cultural investigation and undertaking a studious period of reflective self-examination, and by exercising disciplined behavior, we can alter our character. Using American society as a looking glass allows me to see how a dominating culture sculpted my self-image. This societal mirror reflects me in a either a positive or a perverted manner. Looking both inward and outward, therefore, is an essential step in seeing oneself clearly. An interior and exterior analysis is the critical initiating act in taking charge of the ultimate configuration of our conscious self.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition. Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.
Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
I am perpetually—sometimes darkly—amused by the workings of my mind, which can often seem less rational than I would like to believe they are. The human brain is by far the most complex object known to exist in the entire universe, containing more neurons than there are billions of stars in the Milky Way. The brain and the mind are very different things, and the latter is as mysterious as the former is complex. The brain is a machine, and the mind is a ghost within it. The origins of self-awareness and how the mind is able to perceive, analyze, and imagine are supposedly explained by numerous schools of psychology, although in fact they study only behavior through the gathering and the analysis of statistics. The why of the mind’s existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason—especially its penchant for moral reasoning—will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.
Dean Koontz (Odd Interlude: A Special Odd Thomas Adventure)
The American novel claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions, and finally by acting as if men were entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human beings and of the world. It would seem that for these writers it is the inner life that deprives human actions of unity and that tears people away from one another. This is a partially legitimate suspicion. But rebellion, which is one of the sources of the art of fiction, can find satisfaction only in constructing unity on the basis of affirming this interior reality and not of denying it. To deny it totally is to refer oneself to an imaginary man.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
While poorhouses have been physically demolished, their legacy remains alive and well in the automated decision-making systems that encage and entrap today's poor. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management - automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analysis - retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.
Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
The developmental diaschisis hypothesis has important consequences for the treatment of autism. Developmental diaschisis opens the possibility that in early life, autism treatments may end op focusing on brain regions that were previously unsuspected to contribute to cognitive or social function, such as the cerebellum. For instance, failure of the cerebellum to predict the near future could make it hard for babies at risk for autism to learn properly from the world. Consistent with this, the most effective known treatment for autism is applied behavioral analysis, in which rewards and everyday events are paired with one another slowly and deliberately - as if compensating for a defect in some prediction process within the brain. Applied behavioral analysis works only on only about half of kids with autism. It might be possible to manipulate brain activity in the cerebellum to help applied behavioral analysis work better or for more kids.
David J. Linden (Think Tank: Forty Neuroscientists Explore the Biological Roots of Human Experience)
The issues of antidepressant-associated suicide has become front-page news, the result of an analysis suggesting a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, and adults up to age 24 in short term (4 to 16 weeks), placebo-controlled trials of nine newer antidepressant drugs. The data from trials involving more than 4.4(K) patients suggested that the average risk of suicidal thinking or behavior (suicidality) during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants was 4 percent, twice the placebo risk of 2 percent. No suicides occured in these trials. The analysis also showed no increase in suicide risk among the 25 to 65 age group. Antidepressants reduced suicidality among those over age 65. Following public hearings on the subject, in October 2004, the FDA requested the addition of “black box” warnings—the most serious warning placed on the labeling of a prescription medication—to all antidepressant drugs, old and new.
Benjamin James Sadock (Kaplan & Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry)
the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insuffcient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
point. We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps: 1. Evaluation of the criminal act itself. 2. Comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the crime scene or scenes. 3. Comprehensive analysis of the victim or victims. 4. Evaluation of preliminary police reports. 5. Evaluation of the medical examiner’s autopsy protocol. 6. Development of a profile with critical offender characteristics. 7. Investigative suggestions predicated on construction of the profile. As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand— to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place.
John E. Douglas (Journey Into Darkness (Mindhunter #2))
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.
Robert Locke
As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.
H. Samy Alim
Occam's Razor: The simplest theory that fits the facts corresponds most closely to reality. Fit this, Jillian--why do I treat you so horribly? He grimaced. The simplest theory that encompassed the full range of asinine behavior he exhibited around Jillian was that he was hopelessly in love with her, and if he wasn't careful she would figure it out. He had to be cold, perhaps cruel, for Jillian was an intelligent woman and unless he maintained a convincing facade she would see right through him. He drew a deep breath and steeled his will. "You were saying?" He arched a sardonic brow. Powerful men had withered into babbling idiots beneath the sarcasm and mockery of that deadly gaze. But not his Jillian, and it delighted him as much as it worried him. She held her ground, even leaned closer, ignoring the curious stares and perked ears of the onlookers. Close enough that her breath fanned his neck and made him want to seal his lips over hers and draw her breath into his lungs so deeply that she'd need him to breathe it back into her. She looked deep into his eyes, then a smile of delight curved her mouth. "You do remember," she whispered fiercely. "I wonder what else you lie to me about," she murmured, and he had the dreadful suspicion she was about to start applying a scientific analysis to his idiotic behavior. The she'd know, and he'd be exposed for the love-struck dolt he was.
Karen Marie Moning (To Tame a Highland Warrior (Highlander, #2))
Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology. Since sexual abuse enhanced photographic memory while decreasing critical analysis and free thought, there would ultimately be no free will soul expression controlling behavior. In which case, social engineering was underway to create apathy while stifling spiritual evolution. Nevertheless, to short sighted flat thinking individuals such as Bush, spiritual evolution was not a consideration anyway. Instead, controlling behavior in a population diminished by global genocide of ‘undesirables’ would result in Hitler’s ‘superior race’ surviving to claim the earth. Perceptual justifications such as these that were discussed at the Bohemian Grove certainly did not provide me with the complete big picture. It did, however, provide a view beyond the stereotyped child molester in a trench coat that helped in understanding the vast crimes and cover-ups being discussed at this seminar in Houston.
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, the tournament approach has offered striking evidence in favor of the robust success of the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other player did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It not only won the first round of the Computer Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament when facing entries submitted by professional game theorists, but it also won the second round which included over sixty entries designed by people who were able to take the results of the first round into account. It was also the winner in five of the six major variants of the second round (and second in the sixth variant). And most impressive, its success was not based only upon its ability to do well with strategies which scored poorly for themselves. This was shown by an ecological analysis of hypothetical future rounds of the tournament. In this simulation of hundreds of rounds of the tournament, TIT FOR TAT again was the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it.
Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition)
Absorbingly articulate and infinitely intelligent . . . There is nothing pop about Kahneman's psychology, no formulaic story arc, no beating you over the head with an artificial, buzzword -encrusted Big Idea. It's just the wisdom that comes from five decades of honest, rigorous scientific work, delivered humbly yet brilliantly, in a way that will forever change the way you think about thinking:' -MARIA POPOVA, The Atlantic "Kahneman's primer adds to recent challenges to economic orthodoxies about rational actors and efficient markets; more than that, it's a lucid, mar- velously readable guide to spotting-and correcting-our biased misunder- standings of the world:' -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "The ramifications of Kahneman's work are wide, extending into education, business, marketing, politics ... and even happiness research. Call his field 'psychonomics: the hidden reasoning behind our choices. Thinking, Fast and Slow is essential reading for anyone with a mind:' -KYLE SMITH,NewYorkPost "A stellar accomplishment, a book for everyone who likes to think and wants to do it better." - E. JAMES LIEBERMAN ,Libraryfournal "Daniel Kahneman demonstrates forcefully in his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, how easy it is for humans to swerve away from rationality:' -CHRISTOPHER SHEA , The Washington Post "A tour de force .. . Kahneman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in either human behavior or investing. He clearly shows that while we like to think of ourselves as rational in our decision making, the truth is we are subject to many biases. At least being aware of them will give you a better chance of avoiding them, or at least making fewer of them:' -LARRY SWEDROE, CBS News "Brilliant .. . It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahne- man's contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psycholo- gist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of hap pi- ness and well-being ... A magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused
Daniel Kahneman
The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation…as it is a form of representation in general.’ The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it.’ Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the ‘I’ correctly in the expression ‘I think’, or—if one also pays heed to including the ‘practical person’ when one speaks of ‘intelligence’—in the expression ‘I take action’. In Kant’s sense we must take saying “I” as saying “I think.” Kant tries to establish the phenomenal content of the “I” as *res cogitans*. If in doing so he calls this “I” a ‘logical subject’, that does not mean that the “I” in general is a concept obtained merely by way of logic. The “I” is rather the subject of logical behavior, of binding together. ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’. All binding together is an ‘*I* bind together’. In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον [hypokeimenon; subjectum; subject]. The *subjectum* is therefore ‘consciousness in itself’, not a representation but rather the ‘form’ of representation. That is to say, the “I think” is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. When we speak of the “form” of representation, we have in view neither a framework nor a universal concept, but that which, as εἶδος [eidos], makes every representing and everything represented be what it is. If the “I” is understood as the form of representation, this amounts to saying that it is the ‘logical subject’. Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject *characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” qua Self, but the self-sameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand*. To define the “I” ontologically as “*subject*” means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the *res cogitans*." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 366-367
Martin Heidegger
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.
B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
Hoarding, a passive form of cruelty, consists of individuals keeping excessive numbers of neglected animals in poor conditions, which lead to poor health, starvation, behavioral problems, and death. It is estimated that at least three-fourths of all hoarders are female—typically middle-aged or older, single, widowed or divorced, and often living alone (Patronek, 1996, 2008).
Clif Flynn (Understanding Animal Abuse: A Sociological Analysis)
In fact if a reasoned analysis of colonized society had been made, it would have shown them that the native peasantry lives against a back­ ground of tradition, where the traditional structure of society has remained intact, whereas in the industrialized countries it is just this traditional setting which has been broken up by the progress of industrialization. In the colo­ nies, it is at the very core of the embryonic working class that you find individualist behavior
Anonymous
No Some Yes G. Overall Performance Objective Is the performance objective: ___ ___ ___ 1. Clear (you/others can construct an assessment to test learners)? ___ ___ ___ 2. Feasible in the learning and performance contexts (time, resources, etc)? ___ ___ ___ 3. Meaningful in relation to goal and purpose for instruction (not insignificant)? H. (Other) ___ ___ ___ 1. Your complete list of performance objectives becomes the foundation for the next phase of the design process, developing criterion-referenced test items for each objective. The required information and procedures are described in Chapter 7. Judge the completeness of given performance objectives. Read each of the following objectives and judge whether it includes conditions, behaviors, and a criterion. If any element is missing, choose the part(s) omitted. 1. Given a list of activities carried on by the early settlers of North America, understand what goods they produced, what product resources they used, and what trading they did. a. important conditions and criterion b. observable behavior and important conditions c. observable behavior and criterion d. nothing 2. Given a mimeographed list of states and capitals, match at least 35 of the 50 states with their capitals without the use of maps, charts, or lists. a. observable response b. important conditions c. criterion performance d. nothing 3. During daily business transactions with customers, know company policies for delivering friendly, courteous service. a. observable behavior b. important conditions c. criterion performance d. a and b e. a and c 4. Students will be able to play the piano. a. important conditions b. important conditions and criterion performance c. observable behavior and criterion performance d. nothing 5. Given daily access to music in the office, choose to listen to classical music at least half the time. a. important conditions b. observable behavior c. criterion performance d. nothing Convert instructional goals and subordinate skills into terminal and subordinate objectives. It is important to remember that objectives are derived from the instructional goal and subordinate skills analyses. The following instructional goal and subordinate skills were taken from the writing composition goal in Appendix E. Demonstrate conversion of the goal and subordinate skills in the goal analysis by doing the following: 6. Create a terminal objective from the instructional goal: In written composition, (1) use a variety of sentence types and accompanying punctuation based on the purpose and mood of the sentence, and (2) use a variety of sentence types and accompanying punctuation based on the complexity or structure of the sentence. 7. Write performance objectives for the following subordinate skills: 5.6 State the purpose of a declarative sentence: to convey information 5.7 Classify a complete sentence as a declarative sentence 5.11 Write declarative sentences with correct closing punctuation. Evaluate performance objectives. Use the rubric as an aid to developing and evaluating your own objectives. 8. Indicate your perceptions of the quality of your objectives by inserting the number of the objective in either the Yes or No column of the checklist to reflect your judgment. Examine those objectives receiving No ratings and plan ways the objectives should be revised. Based on your analysis, revise your objectives to correct ambiguities and omissions. P
Walter Dick (The Systematic Design of Instruction)
of the growth of self-restraint. A starting point for Elias’s analysis was medieval treatises on polite manners such as the book On Civility in Children by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus. In the 16th century, Europeans’ everyday social behavior was beyond gross. It was a social world in which books on good etiquette had to advise people not to blow their noses on the tablecloth nor to snort or smack their lips while eating. People ate with their hands, the fork being a strange luxury. They blew their noses without the aid of a handkerchief or tissues. They performed many bodily functions in public. Their sensibility toward the pain of others was minimal. Public executions were common, often preceded by torture or dismemberment. People behaved with unthinking cruelty toward animals.
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
www.careerlab.com/99ways.htm
Albert J. Kearney (Understanding Applied Behavior Analysis: An Introduction to ABA for Parents, Teachers, and other Professionals (JKP Essentials))
and therefore is a reasonable basis for interpretations and conclusions. 4. BEA involves three different kinds of examinations as part of crime scene analysis. What are they? 5. All behavior has underlying causes and origins. The origins may be conscious or subconscious, however. This is related to the principle of ____________? 6. The forgetting curve is associated with which principle of BEA? 7. Explain why profilers should be responsible for requesting case materials in writing.
Brent E. Turvey (Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis)
1. What are three of the primary goals of BEA in the investigative phase? 2. Allport divides personality traits into three categories. What are they and how are the different? 3. True or False: Life experience results in wisdom
Brent E. Turvey (Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis)
Once you know how often users should use your product, dig into the numbers and identify how many and which type of users meet this threshold. As a best practice, use cohort analysis to measure changes in user behavior through future product iterations.
Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
Skepticism about comparisons between wolves and dogs is further warranted by the fact that, although DNA analysis indicates that dogs descended from Eurasian grey wolves, none of the wolves that have been studied over the past seventy years or so, American or European, can possibly be considered the ancestors of the domestic dog: The two certainly had a common ancestor many thousands of years ago, but there is no evidence to suggest that modern wolves closely resemble these common ancestors.
John Bradshaw (Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet)
Social conservatives do have a pretty decent predictive track record, including in many cases where their fears were dismissed as wild and apocalyptic, their projections as sky-is-falling nonsense, their theories of how society and human nature works as evidence-free fantasies. . . . If you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit. . . . In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to havesocial-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this. More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.
Ross Douthat
the AuThoRS Neal Lathia is a research associate in the Computer laboratory at the university of Cambridge. His research falls at the intersection of data mining, mobile systems, and personalization/recommender systems. lathia has a phD in computer science from the university College london. Contact him at neal.lathia@ cl.cam.ac.uk. Veljko Pejovic is a postdoctoral research fellow at the school of Computer science at the university of birmingham, uK. His research focuses on adaptive wireless technologies and their impact on society. pejovic received a phD in computer science from the university of California, santa barbara. Contact him at v.pejovic@cs.bham.ac.uk. Kiran K. Rachuri is a phD student in the Computer laboratory at the university of Cambridge. His research interests include smartphone sensing systems, energy efficient sensing, and sensor networks. rachuri received an ms in computer science from the Indian Institute of technology madras. Contact him at kiran.rachuri@cl.cam.ac.uk. Cecilia Mascolo is a reader in mobile systems in the Computer laboratory at the university of Cambridge. Her interests are in the area of mobility modeling, sensing, and social network analysis. mascolo has a phD in computer science from the university of bologna. Contact her at cecilia.mascolo@cl.cam.ac.uk. Mirco Musolesi is a senior lecturer in the school of Computer science at the university of birmingham, uK. His research interests include mobile sensing, large-scale data mining, and network science. musolesi has a phD in computer science from the university College london. Contact him at m.musolesi@ cs.bham.ac.uk. Peter J. Rentfrow is a senior lecturer in the psychology Department at the university of Cambridge. His research focuses on behavioral manifestations of personality and psychological processes. rentfrow earned a phD in psychology from the university of texas at Austin. Contact him at pjr39@cam.ac.uk.selected Cs articles and columns are also available for free at http
Anonymous
the behavior that arises from it, is the science of psychology. Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. That is why the world is in such a mess. The third question addresses the issue of whether the laws that
Anonymous
with a bias toward individualism that affects our conceptualization of the social. Smelser (1997: 29) says: “We live in the Western cultural tradition, which has exploited the cultural values of individualism. As children of that tradition, we are most comfortable taking the individual person as the starting point of analysis. Put another way, that cultural tradition ‘tilts’ us toward assuming that the natural unit for the behavioral and social sciences is the individual.
William C. Cockerham (Social Causes of Health and Disease)
Two points in particular must be mentioned. I have pointed out before that social legislation or, more generally, institutional change for the benefit of the masses is not simply something which has been forced upon capitalist society by an ineluctable necessity to alleviate the ever-deepening misery of the poor but that, besides raising the standard of living of the masses by virtue of its automatic effects, the capitalist process also provided for that legislation the means “and the will.” The words in quotes require further explanation that is to be found in the principle of spreading rationality. The capitalist process rationalizes behavior and ideas and by so doing chases from our minds, along with metaphysical belief, mystic and romantic ideas of all sorts. Thus it reshapes not only our methods of attaining our ends but also these ultimate ends themselves. “Free thinking” in the sense of materialistic monism, laicism and pragmatic acceptance of the world this side of the grave follow from this not indeed by logical necessity but nevertheless very naturally. On the one hand, our inherited sense of duty, deprived of its traditional basis, becomes focused in utilitarian ideas about the betterment of mankind which, quite illogically to be sure, seem to withstand rationalist criticism better than, say, the fear of God does. On the other hand, the same rationalization of the soul rubs off all the glamour of super-empirical sanction from every species of classwise rights. This then, together with the typically capitalist enthusiasm for Efficiency and Service—so completely different from the body of ideas which would have been associated with those terms by the typical knight of old—breeds that “will” within the bourgeoisie itself. Feminism, an essentially capitalist phenomenon, illustrates the point still more clearly. The reader will realize that these tendencies must be understood “objectively” and that therefore no amount of anti-feminist or anti-reformist talk or even of temporary opposition to any particular measure proves anything against this analysis. These things are the very symptoms of the tendencies they pretend to fight.
Joseph A. Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy)
He married military history with science, building his theory upon Gödel, Heisenberg, Popper, Kuhn, Piaget and Polanyi, who highlighted the unavoidable feature of uncertainty in any system of thought (as well as the limits of the Newtonian paradigm). Cybernetics and systems theory offered him the concept of feedback, the combination of analysis–synthesis as well as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, the distinction between open and closed systems, the importance of interactions and relations, and the need for a holistic approach. The cognitive revolution, combined with neo-Darwinist studies, showed him the role of schemata formed by genetics, culture and experience. Chaos theory highlighted non-linear behavior.
Frans P.B. Osinga (Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History))
(For a more thorough account of the scientific-theoretical approaches within behavior analysis, see Moore, 2008, and Wilson, 2001.)
Niklas Törneke (Learning RFT: An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory and Its Clinical Application)
The term “organization” thus suggests a certain bareness, a lean, no-nonsense system of consciously co-ordinated activities.[1] It refers to an expendable tool, a rational instrument engineered to do a job. An “institution,” on the other hand, is more nearly a natural product of social needs and pressures—a responsive, adaptive organism. This distinction is a matter of analysis, not of direct description. It does not {6} mean that any given enterprise must be either one or the other. While an extreme case may closely approach either an “ideal” organization or an “ideal” institution, most living associations resist so easy a classification. They are complex mixtures of both designed and responsive behavior.
Philip Selznick (Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation)
Dear Rebecca— You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two. Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended. 1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest. 2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date. 3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting. 4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident. Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference. I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Bradley
Dexter Palmer (Version Control)
Many have questioned how Lyndon Johnson could have put his closest protégé and right hand man John Connally in mortal danger by having him ride with JFK in the presidential limousine in the Dallas motorcade . Indeed, Johnson maneuvered desperately to get Connally moved to the vice-presidential car and substitute his archenemy Yarborough in the presidential vehicle. Senator George Smathers said in his memoirs that JFK complained to him prior to the trip about an effort by LBJ to get first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to ride in the vice presidential car, an idea JFK flatly rejected.39 Shortly before Kennedy’s death in the motorcade LBJ would visit the president’s hotel room and try again to convince him to have Connally and Yarborough swap places. Again, JFK refused, and Johnson stormed from the room after a shouting match.40 The outburst was so loud that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to her husband that Johnson “sounded mad.”41 Perhaps this explains LBJ’s taciturn behavior from the moment the presidential motorcade left Love Field for Dealey Plaza. An earlier rain had subsided, giving way to sunny skies. The crowds were large and friendly, yet LBJ stared straight ahead and never cracked a smile or waved to the crowds as did Lady Bird, Senator Yarborough, the Connallys, and the Kennedys. LBJ would actually tell Robert Kennedy, “of all things in life, this [campaigning] is what I enjoy most.”42 Normally, the gregarious Johnson would wave his hat, pose and wave to the crowd and shout “howdy,” but on this day he seemed non-expressive and focused. New 3-D imaging analysis and more sophisticated photographic analysis now show without question that LBJ ducked to the floor of his limousine before the first shots were fired.43
Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
Building a habit-forming product is an iterative process and requires user-behavior analysis and continuous experimentation. How
Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
Analysis of the history of any successful organization will show that it owed its success to a team of people whose styles, behavior, and needs were different but who could work together. Although organizational success is usually attributed to one person, behind that person is a team that enabled him to perform well.
Ichak Kalderon Adizes (How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis)
A Code of Nature must accommodate a mixture of individually different behavioral tendencies. The human race plays a mixed strategy in the game of life. People are not molecules, all alike and behaving differently only because of random interactions. People just differ, dancing to their own personal drummer. The merger of economic game theory with neuroscience promises more precise understanding of those individual differences and how they contribute to the totality of human social interactions. It's understanding those differences, Camerer says, that will make such a break with old schools of economic thought. "A lot of economic theory uses what is called the representative agent model," Camerer told me. In an economy with millions of people, everybody is clearly not going to be completely alike in behavior. Maybe 10 percent will be of some type, 14 percent another type, 6 percent something else. A real mix. "It's often really hard, mathematically, to add all that up," he said. "It's much easier to say that there's one kind of person and there's a million of them. And you can add things up rather easily." So for the sake of computational simplicity, economists would operate as though the world was populated by millions of one generic type of person, using assumptions about how that generic person would behave. "It's not that we don't think people are different—of course they are, but that wasn't the focus of analysis," Camerer said. "It was, well, let's just stick to one type of person. But I think the brain evidence, as well as genetics, is just going to force us to think about individual differences." And in a way, that is a very natural thing for economists to want to do.
Tom Siegfried (A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature (Mathematics))
That systematic approach was crystallizing in Phil’s mind. It was a work in progress, an amalgamation of the training he had received and the attention he gave to the behaviors he had observed in the course of conducting hundreds of interviews. He seemed to have a knack for assessing human behavior, and it was becoming more acute all the time. There was a gut feeling at work, yet it was more than that. There was a cognitive analysis going on, an almost imperceptible, subconscious cataloging of verbal and nonverbal behaviors exhibited in response to the questions Phil would ask. And those behaviors were beginning to coalesce into an approach to detecting deception that was proving to be extraordinarily effective. Phil was transforming his knack into a quantifiable, replicable set of skills. He had no way of knowing at the time that that transformation would ultimately lead to a methodology for distinguishing truth from deception that officers throughout intelligence and law enforcement communities, and ultimately people from all walks of life in the private sector, would be trained to use.
Philip Houston (Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception)
every major discussion of ethics these days begins with an analysis of the chaotic situation of modern culture. Even secular writers and thinkers are calling for some sort of basic agreement on ethical behavior. Humanity’s “margin of error,” they say, is shrinking with each new day. Our survival is at stake. These “prophets of doom” point out that man’s destructive capability increased from 1945 to 1960 by the same ratio as it did from the primitive weapons of the Stone Age to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The thawing of the Cold War provided little comfort. Numerous nations have nuclear arms now or are close to having them. What, besides
R.C. Sproul (How Should I Live In This World? (Crucial Questions, #5))
Much science in many disciplines consists of a toolkit of very simple mathematical models. To many not familiar with the subtle art of the simple model, such formal exercises have two seemingly deadly flaws. First, they are not easy to follow. […] Second, motivation to follow the math is often wanting because the model is so cartoonishly simple relative to the real world being analyzed. Critics often level the charge ‘‘reductionism’’ with what they take to be devastating effect. The modeler’s reply is that these two criticisms actually point in opposite directions and sum to nothing. True, the model is quite simple relative to reality, but even so, the analysis is difficult. The real lesson is that complex phenomena like culture require a humble approach. We have to bite off tiny bits of reality to analyze and build up a more global knowledge step by patient step. […] Simple models, simple experiments, and simple observational programs are the best the human mind can do in the face of the awesome complexity of nature. The alternatives to simple models are either complex models or verbal descriptions and analysis. Complex models are sometimes useful for their predictive power, but they have the vice of being difficult or impossible to understand. The heuristic value of simple models in schooling our intuition about natural processes is exceedingly important, even when their predictive power is limited. […] Unaided verbal reasoning can be unreliable […] The lesson, we think, is that all serious students of human behavior need to know enough math to at least appreciate the contributions simple mathematical models make to the understanding of complex phenomena. The idea that social scientists need less math than biologists or other natural scientists is completely mistaken.
Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition))
The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained. “Emergence offers a way to believe in physical causality while simultaneously maintaining the impossibility of a reductionist explanation of thought,” wrote W. Daniel Hillis, a computer architect who believes that architecture and programming can only go so far, after which intelligence has to be allowed to evolve on its own. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”33 Although individual computers and individual computer programs are developing the elements of artificial intelligence, it is in the larger networks (or the network at large) that we are developing a more likely medium for the emergence of the Leviathan of artificial mind.
George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
For example, in October 2012, Barclaycard asked the Ring community if the company should change its late-fee policy. The existing policy allowed members a three-day grace period before charging a late-payment penalty. Barclaycard proposed eliminating the three-day grace period and allowing one late payment per year. From its analysis, Barclaycard estimated it would generate 15 percent more late-fee revenue, which would result in higher profits for the community. Members voted overwhelmingly to adopt the policy. They were willing to punish those members who were habitually late payers to generate more profit for the community. This behavior may seem counterintuitive, but because most members paid their bills on time, they wouldn’t be adversely affected.
Brian Burke (Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things)
There is in the world today a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people. It is called the stock market. There are people who claim to have special insights into this force. They are called stock analysts. Most of them have often been wrong about the market’s future behavior, and many of them have been wrong most of the time. In fact, it’s not clear that their advice is worth anything at all. Reputable economists have argued that you’re better off picking stocks randomly than seeking guidance from stock analysts; either way it’s the blind leading the blind, but in one case you don’t have to pay a commission. Nonetheless, stock analysis is a profitable line of work, even for some manifestly inept practitioners. Why? Because whenever people sense the presence of a puzzling and momentous force, they want to believe there is a way to comprehend it. If you can convince them that you’re the key to comprehension, you can reach great stature. This fact has deeply shaped the evolution of religion, and it seems to have done so since very near the beginning. Once there was belief in the supernatural, there was a demand for people who claimed to fathom it. And, judging by observed hunter-gatherer societies, there was a supply to meet the demand.
Robert Wright (The Evolution of God)
first case with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, and it took us to Salt Lick, Kentucky. The discovery was made this morning, and we were briefed and flown out from Quantico to the Louisville field office where we picked up a couple of SUVs. We drove from there and got here about four in the afternoon. We were in a bunker illuminated by portable lights brought in by the local investigative team. A series of four tunnels spread out as a root system beneath a house the size of a mobile trailer and extended under an abandoned cornfield. A doorway in the cellar of
Carolyn Arnold (Eleven (Brandon Fisher FBI, #1))
Special Agent Brent Meredith shut the thick manila envelope stuffed with photographs and written reports with a note of satisfied finality. Riley felt the same satisfaction, and she was sure that Bill and Flores did too. They were all seated at the table in the Behavioral Analysis Unit conference room. If only Riley weren’t bandaged up and hurting all over, the moment would have felt perfect. “So Dirk’s mother wanted a daughter instead of a son,” Meredith said. “She tried to turn him into a Southern belle. That was probably just the tip of the iceberg. God knows what else he went through as a kid.” Bill leaned back in his chair. “Let’s not give him too much sympathy,” he said. “Not everybody with a lousy childhood turns into a murderous sadist. He made his own choices.” Meredith and Flores nodded in agreement. “But does anybody know whatever happened to Dirk’s mother?” Riley asked. “Records show that she died five years ago,” Flores said. “His father disappeared long before that, when Dirk was still a baby.” A sober silence settled over the group. Riley understood exactly what it meant. She was in the presence of three people whose lives were devoted to destroying evil. Even in their satisfaction, the specter of more evil, and much more work to do, hung over all of them. It would never be over. Not
Blake Pierce (Once Gone (Riley Paige, #1))
Elicitation – A process designed to influence or persuade an individual to reveal information that he has reason to want to conceal. This process is characterized by use of a monologue rather than a dialogue. (Used synonymously with interrogation.) Equitable distribution – A term used to describe the legal process of dividing a married couple’s assets in a divorce proceeding. Exclusion qualifier – A verbal deceptive behavior used to enable a person who wants to withhold certain information to answer a question truthfully, but without releasing that information. Examples: “basically,” “for the most part,” “fundamentally,” “probably,” “most often.” Failure to answer – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person’s response does not answer the question that’s asked. Failure to understand a simple question – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person’s response is an expression of confusion over an easily comprehensible question. This strategy is typically used when a person feels trapped by the wording of the question and needs to shrink its scope. Fight-or-flight response – A triggering of the autonomic nervous system that reroutes circulation to the body’s major organs and muscle groups to prepare the body to deal with a threatening situation. Forer effect – A cognitive bias named for psychologist Bertram Forer, who found that people tend to rate as highly accurate a personality analysis that is presented as being individualized, when it is actually so general in nature that it could apply to almost anyone. (Also known as Barnum statements.)
Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)
Compound question – A question type that is to be avoided because it contains more than one question, making behavioral analysis of the response difficult due to potential confusion over what part of the question is causing the deceptive behavior. Example: “How frequently do you go running, and where do you typically run?” Confirmation bias – A cognitive bias in which people search for or interpret information in a way that supports an initial belief or a desired outcome. Convincing statement – A true or irrefutable statement made in an effort to convince the accuser and to influence his perception, rather than to convey information that addresses the facts of the case. Denial behavior – A category of verbal deceptive behavior in which a person appears to have a problem with denying an allegation. This can take the form of failing to deny the allegation altogether; providing a nonspecific denial (Example: “I would never do something like that”); or providing an isolated delivery of the denial by burying it in a long-winded answer. Direct observation of concern (DOC) – A transition statement that lies at the low end of the confidence spectrum. Direct observation of guilt (DOG) – A transition statement that lies at the high end of the confidence spectrum.
Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)