Robert Sapolsky Quotes

I'm really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult to work collaboratively together with other people in societies.

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.'

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

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

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

Society is held together by trust.

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

the more our societies grow, the more important trust becomes and the harder it is to build. And that is a paradox of modern societies.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.

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.

I take "We, the People" seriously because I don't know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.

One might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis.

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'

At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can't do individually.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

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

Man has been adjudged a social animal.

Man is a competitive creature, and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude.

As states we act, in general, and in most cases, exactly like the individuals of whom our society is composed.

It is ... difficult to induce a number of free beings to co-operate for their mutual benefit.