predicting behavior Quotes

Our expectations determine how we respond. Be careful what you expect.

Understanding a theory has, indeed, much in common with understanding a human personality. We may know or understand a man's system of dispositions pretty well; that is to say, we may be able to predict how he would act in a number of different situations. But since there are infinitely many possible situations, of infinite variety, a full understanding of a man's dispositions does not seem to be possible.

When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.

I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.

I begged her, 'Please don't leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.'" "What did she say?" "She hit me on the head with the rock again," Ford responded curtly. "I think i can confirm that was my daughter." "Sweet kid." "You have to get to know her," said Arthur. "She eases up, does she?" "No, but you get a better sense of when to duck.

I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game-theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game-theoretically.

Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.

If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

I used to make my living by understanding people. And the way I learned to understand them was by observing them. I would sit in a train station or a bus station or a restaurant. And I would watch people. I would watch how they related to one another. I would try to get some insight into them and make them as predictable as I could in my mind.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people.

We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.