Alexandra Lee✝️ > Alexandra's Quotes

“Thus, they were asking: do higher intelligence test scores from about age 20 predict better educational outcomes, higher social position, and arguably more pro-social behaviours in the thirties? The answer was: they did. They then asked if this was due to (confounded by) parental socio-economic status; it mostly wasn’t.”
― Ian J. Deary, Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction

“executive and nonexecutive, every day. Yet few people are even aware of it. When asked whether making decisions would deplete their willpower and make them vulnerable to temptation, most people say no. They don’t realize that decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can’t resist the car dealer’s offer to rustproof their new sedan.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is unhelpfully named, since it is not particularly closely related to the better known obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It does not tend to co-occur with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even run in the same families. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder, in which the sufferer feels compelled to repeat particular thoughts or actions, such as checking or hand-washing. As an anxious condition, it belongs to the same family as depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and thus is related to high Neuroticism and responds to some extent to serotonergic antidepressant medications. Some people have even seen obsessive-compulsive disorder as a low Conscientiousness problem, since the affected individual cannot inhibit the checking or washing response in rather the same manner as the alcoholic cannot inhibit his desire to drink. Whether this is the right characterization or not, it is clear that OCPD is a very different type of problem.16 What, then, does OCPD entail? Psychiatrists define it as ‘a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts’.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Genetics is the major reason why people differ in personality, mental health and illness, and learning and cognitive abilities. In essence, the most important thing that parents give to their children is their genes. Your parents' systematic influence on who you are lies within the genes they gave you.”
― Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are

“In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.” Psychologists call this the visual dominance ratio. Imagine yourself out to lunch with a coworker. When it’s your turn to talk, you spend some fraction of the time looking into your coworker’s eyes (and the rest of the time looking away). Similarly, when it’s your turn to listen, you spend some fraction of the time making eye contact. If you make eye contact for the same fraction of time while speaking and listening, your visual dominance ratio will be 1.0, indicative of high dominance. If you make less eye contact while speaking, however, your ratio will be less than 1.0 (typically hovering around 0.6), indicative of low dominance.53”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“The sex difference in Agreeableness puts the debate about sex discrimination in society into an interesting light. The media tends to decry the fact that the prevalence of women chief executives of large corporations is very much lower than 50 per cent. But is this really evidence that discrimination is operating? It could equally well be the case that there is no discrimination, but that fewer women want to emphasize status gain at the expense of social connectedness. Given the known relationships between Agreeableness and career success, and the known sex differences in Agreeableness, you could actually work out the expected number of women in top positions if the market is blind to sex. It would not be zero, but it would be not be 50 per cent either.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“For example, the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.). And if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well. If there were a way to fast-forward all the learning (and retention) that actually takes place in school—for example, by giving students a magic pill that taught them everything in an instant—we would still need to subject them to boring lectures and nitpicky tests in order to credential them.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“In short, a diamond bracelet is a much more honest instrument of courtship than a perforated stomach. She has the option of throwing the jewelry back at him, but she cannot decently walk out on the ulcer. ("Look How Hard I've Been Trying")”
― Eric Berne, Games People Play

“Children strengthen marital bonds, reducing the probability of divorce, by creating a powerful commonality of genetic interest between a man and a woman.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Men's banter, when it does not center on sports or work, often revolves around the appearance and sexual availability of women in their social circles.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. Men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize youth and appearance. Women who make more money than their husbands tend to leave them.”
― David m. buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“fact, the vast majority of weekly churchgoers are socially well-adjusted and successful across a broad range of outcomes. Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less,16 donate and volunteer more,17 have more social connections,18 get and stay married more,19 and have more kids.20 They also live longer,21 earn more money,22 experience less depression,23 and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.24”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“Women of striking beauty are desired by many men, but only a few men prosper in attracting them. The qualities of kindness, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, looks, and economic prospects are all present rarely in the same person.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“And so it’s this quality—honesty—that makes body language an ideal medium for coordinating some of our most important activities. It’s simply too easy, too tempting, to lie with words. So in matters of life, death, and finding mates, we're often wise to shut up and let our bodies do the talking.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“More desirable women have more bargaining power and they can elevate their standards. They want higher levels of resources, education, and intelligence; higher social status; good parenting skills; and raft of other traits. Men with resources are more likely to marry physically attractive women. Most men can get a much more desirable woman if they are willing to commit to a long-term relationship because women typically desire lasting commitment, and highly desirable women are in the best position to get what they want.”
― David M. Buss

“Surveys of many cultures around the world consistently show that, in looking for a long-term partner, women prefer men who have, or have the potential of, wealth, status, stability and durability.”
― Robin Baker, Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles

“Social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“Many fathers who don’t have daily hands-on contact may fail to form the strong daddy brain circuits required for parent-child synchrony. The environment for eventually establishing such a close interaction may start before birth. During the last months of my pregnancy, my son’s father would play a tapping game with him. His dad would tap tap tap on my belly, and he’d tap tap tap back—kicking seemingly with the same rhythm. The father-son relationship had begun.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think

“When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“...others' ability to influence us depends on how central they are to our lives.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“Research shows that you don’t actually need to know more to be seen as a leader. Merely by speaking first and speaking often—very extroverted behavior—people come to be seen as El Jefe.”
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive effect", then on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first. How good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread those small effects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news. The same is property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period, rather than have it spread out over a long time.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Men attempt to deceive women by feigning an interest in commitment to achieve a quick sexual score. They also feign confidence, status, kindness, and resources that they lack. Men try to abscond with the sexual benefit without paying the cost of commitment. In the human mating dance, the costs of being deceived about a potential mate's resources and commitment are carried more heavily by women. Historically, a woman who made a poor choice of a casual mate, allowing herself to be deceived about the man's long-term intentions, risked enduring pregnancy, childbirth, and child care unaided and being less able to attract an alternative mate, since existing children are seen as costs by potential mates on the mating market.”
― David M. Buss

“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“All modern women are the fruit of feminine caution. The result of this whittling away of the impulsive branches of our ancestral maternal tree is a female brain equipped with the most sophisticated neural software on Earth. A system designed to uncover, scrutinize, and evaluate a dazzling range of informative clues.”
― Ogi Ogas

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche