situational influence Quotes

Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

Man, y'know, I'm a music guy. I like a lot of different things. It depends on the time of the day and the situation.

We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.

In one sense, the Stanford prison study is more like a Greek drama than a traditional experiment, in that we have humanity, represented by a bunch of good people, pitted against an evil-producing situation. The question is, does the goodness of the people overwhelm the bad situation, or does the bad situation overwhelm the good people?

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

People don't always behave the same way on different programmes. If you go to church you don't behave the same way you do at a party in the middle of the night.

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

Every situation has changed me as a person.

Politicians aren't any more wicked than other citizens but the situation in which they are placed warps their judgment.

If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.

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.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

I think there is limits to the assumption that wherever you are, the situation in a way tells you how to behave.

We don't act the same in every situation. Things bleed into all kinds of other things, from behavior to identity.