behavioral context Quotes

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

I can be pretty nasty. Not 'mean' nasty, but nasty by your parents' standards. But not by my parents' standards, because my parents were nasty for their day.

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.

There is hardly any deviancy, no matter how reprehensible in one context, which is not extolled as a virtue in another. There are no natural crimes, only legal ones.

It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.

If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.

Sick is a relative concept. We're all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symptoms of sickness. You have to look at the context within which these actions are performed.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.