Michael Shermer Quotes

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

The associations inside the group become more important than those outside.

I've always been interested in social psychology and why certain groups of people do things while others don't.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can - music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.

Most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... [and] a body of sacred documents and heroes.

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Society becomes how we behave.

Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

Play seems to be one of the first activities inhibited by the presence of an observer until a group becomes well habituated. For this reason, I consider it more common than previously thought.

I was obsessed with learning about social behaviors. I remember explaining to my mom that kids on my soccer team were fighting because of dyads and triads.