#behavior

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance. ↗

— Dan Ariely

#human #human-behavior #mind #motivation #wok

Of course as children, we all, in all cultures and societies, learn behavior from observation, imitation, and encouragement of various kinds. So by the suggestion made, we all 'pretend' most of the time. ↗

— Gary Gygax

#children #course #cultures #encouragement #imitation

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.' ↗

— Nate Silver

#behavior #experiment #i #observing #participating

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do. ↗

— Ron Silver

#awful #behavioral #body #body language #going

For the president to resign now would be wrong. President Clinton may have debased himself with his behavior, but we shouldn't debase the office with an impulsive overreaction. ↗

— George Stephanopoulos

#clinton #debase #himself #his #impulsive

You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did. ↗

— Robert Creeley

#concepts #defined #did #his #i

To summarize, the particular song a male sings, and the behavioral responses of females to song and morphological signals, are not genetically inherited in a fixed manner but are determined by learning early in life. ↗

— Peter R. Grant

#determined #early #females #fixed #genetically

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#brain #conjecture #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genes #patterns #temperments #thought #life

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. ↗

— P.J. O'Rourke

#behavior #being-exceptional #humor #humor