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Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave QUOTES

Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave QUOTES

1 " Each of us is an ongoing product of the world within us, the world between us, and the world around us—and their hidden capacity to shape our every thought, feeling, and behavior. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

2 " The Hannah study showed that people are suggestible, willing to view the world with the guidance of labels when faced with an otherwise unbreakable tie. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

3 " Both physical and social pain seem less painful when we’re cushioned by symbolic reminders of money, even when the money isn’t real or doesn’t belong to us. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

4 " As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we’re being watched, we start to notice how we’re behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

5 " Obviously the students preferred to assign themselves to the appealing task and their partners to the unappealing task, but they also recognized that it would be fairer to toss a coin to decide who would undertake each task. The laws of probability state that if the students were using the coins fairly, roughly half of them should have been assigned to the positive task, and the other half should have been assigned to the negative task. Though all of the students tossed the coin, the researchers found that 85 percent of the students assigned themselves to the positive task, suggesting that the coin was merely a prop that allowed them to defend the fairness of the desired outcome. Since they weren’t supervised, you can imagine how the students interpreted a negative outcome: if they lost the first toss, perhaps they decided that the outcome should rest on a best-of-three scenario. The researchers tried the task again, this time placing the students in front of a large mirror. Forced to stare at their reflections as they tossed the coin, the students were perfectly fair, assigning their phantom partner to the positive task exactly 50 percent of the time. Incredibly, the students claimed they reached their decision fairly in both situations, but only the students who sat in front of a mirror actually obeyed the outcome of the coin toss. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

6 " Vyacheslav and Marina chose a generic name designed to be devoid of meaning: BOHdVF260602. Although the name seems meaningless, BOHdVF260602 stands for “Biological Object Human descendant of the Voronins and Frolovas, born on June 26, 2002. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

7 " Apart from money, very few symbols have the power to start wars and terminate friendships. Two exceptions to that rule are symbols of nationalism and icons of religion. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

8 " The same researchers also wanted to know why red hampers academic performance. It turns out that the color red activates the right hemisphere of the frontal cortex, a pattern of brain activity that typically indicates avoidance motivation. Avoidance motivation is the technical term for a state in which you’re more concerned with avoiding failure than you are with achieving success. It’s a distracting state of mind that all but guarantees poorer performance when you’re trying to solve questions that require insight and mental effort. Psychologists have also shown that people literally recoil from the color red, leaning slightly farther backward in their seats when they’re about to begin a test with a red rather than green cover. None of these effects occurs consciously, but when they occur together it becomes clear why the color red can be so damaging in academic contexts. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

9 " This striking result suggests that our quest for safety, and our resulting fear of difference, has fostered a justice system that discriminates against black defendants. Put simply, under some circumstances a black man who looks “more black” is 33 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than is a black man who commits the same crime but looks less stereotypically black. Inequalities like these illuminate the sad truth that our hidden, unconscious attitudes toward minorities evolve far more slowly than our overt spoken attitudes. Many of those ugly views are so well hidden that we’re not even aware that we hold them. In "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

10 " the same researchers turned to a database of death penalty cases tried in Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999. In a provocative paper titled “Looking Deathworthy,” they showed that when the victim was white, black men who looked stereotypically black were dramatically more likely to receive a death sentence than were black men who looked less stereotypically black. Whereas stereotypically black men tended to receive a death sentence in 58 percent of all cases, black men who did not look stereotypically black received a death sentence in only 24 percent of all cases. These results held even when the researchers carefully removed the effects of other variables that may have inflated the difference, like the defendants’ and victims’ socioeconomic status. "

― Adam Alter , Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave