Mark Pagel Quotes

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

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.

It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life.

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

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

We are what make up society.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

Science of Society

Society is one word, but many things.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

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.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.

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.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.