At a uniformly comfortable termperature In America our tendency has been to get away from thermal conditions as a determinant of behavior. Instead, we have used our technology to keep entire living and working complexes at a uniformly comfortable temperature. As a result, our spatial habits have become diffused, and activities that were once localized by thermal conditions have spread out over a whole house or building. We forget, unless a system breaks down, that such wide-ranging use of space is extremely dependent upon the available heating and cooling equipment. Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture Controlled environments spacebehavior
Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies behavior
Architectural sequences Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City Architectural screenplays architecturebehaviorux
Contrafreeloading A Definition en.wikipedia.org Contrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort. workbehavior
The Law of Triviality You’ve likely heard of Parkinson’s Law, which states that tasks expand to fill the amount of time allocated to them. But you might not have heard of the lesser-known Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also coined by British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in the 1950s. The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things. Major, complex issues get the least discussion while simple, minor ones get the most discussion.
The observer effect In biology, when researchers want to observe animals in their natural habitat, it is paramount that they find a way to do so without disturbing those animals. Otherwise, the behavior they see is unlikely to be natural, because most animals (including humans) change their behavior when they are being observed. The Spoken and the Unspoken uxethnography