Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.

All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb...

By what criteria can one decide which of a person’s countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person’s primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about...

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new...

One can’t live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.

When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.

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

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It’s as if I’m standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float...

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

It was the security man’s nightmare scenario. In the face of death, why wouldn’t there be riots? Why wouldn’t there be killing and theft and rape? If there were no consequences – or if all...

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one’s ability to learn something new that...

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.

The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.