Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior. Instinctual actions have no learning curve. They are hard-wired and ready to use without learning. Some instinctual behaviors depend on maturational processes to appear.

Immediate instinct, also known as imprinting, causes geese to follow around the first moving object that they encounter, as it tends to be their mother. A favorable trait, such as an instinct, can improve survival rate of life forms possessing the instinct.

Many scientists consider that it is instinctual in children to put everything in their mouths, because this is how they tell their immune system about the environment and the surroundings, and what the immune system should adapt to.

A displacement activity is a behavior that is the result of two contradicting instincts in a particular situation. A human may scratch its head when it does not know which of two options to choose. Similarly, a bird may peck at grass when uncertain whether to attack or flee from an opponent.

The Asch experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked groups of students to participate in a “vision test.” In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the others’ behavior.

The participants, the real subjects and the confederates, were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about lines printed on cards, such as how long is line A compared to the an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud.

The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.

Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions. Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many confederates were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just 1 confederate and as many as 15 confederates. Results indicate that 1 confederate has virtually no influence and 2 confederates have only a small influence. When 3 or more confederates are present, the tendency to conform is relatively stable.

Honesty refers to a facet of moral character and denotes positive, virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, and straightforwardness along with the absence of lying, cheating, or theft.

While there are a great many moral systems, honesty is considered moral and dishonesty is considered immoral. There are several exceptions, such as hedonism, which values honesty only insofar as it improves ones own sense of pleasure, and moral nihilism, which denies the existence of objective morality outright. Honesty may also be challenged in various social systems with ideological stakes in self-preservation. Many religious and national formations might be so characterized, along with many family structures and other small social collectives.

In these cases honesty is frequently encouraged publicly, but may be forbidden if those invested in preserving the system perceive it as a threat. Depending on the social system, these breaches might be characterized as heresy, treason, or impoliteness. Even in moral systems which approve in general of honesty over dishonesty, some people think there are situations in which dishonesty may be preferable.

Others would not define preferable behaviors as dishonest by reasoning that they are not intended to deceive others for personal gain, but the intent is noble in character, for example sparing people of opinions that will upset them. Rather than dishonesty, the behavior is often viewed as self sacrifice or giving up one’s voice for the happiness of others. In many circumstances, withholding one’s opinions can legitimately be viewed as cowardly, dishonest and a betrayal to those who will be hurt. For this reason, many people insist that an objective approach to the truth is a necessary component of honesty as opposed to an ideological or idealistic approach.

Social capital is a sociological concept used to refer to connections within and between social networks. Though there are a variety of related definitions, they tend to share the core idea that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.

Early attempts to define social capital focused on the degree to which social capital as a resource should be used for public good or for the benefit of individuals. It has been suggested that social capital can facilitate co-operation and mutually supportive relations in communities and would therefore be a valuable means of combating many of the social disorders inherent in modern societies.

Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital and the continued presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education. In areas where there is a high social capital, there is also a high education performance. When there is more parental participation in a child’s community and education, teachers have reported lower levels of student misbehavior.

It has been argued that one of the reasons social capital is so difficult to measure is that it is neither an individual nor a group level phenomenon, but one that emerges across discreet levels as individuals participate in groups. They argue that the metaphor of social capital may be misleading because unlike financial capital, which is a resource held by an individual, the benefits of forms of social organization are result of the participation of individuals in advantageously organized groups.

Gratitude, thankfulness, or appreciation is a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. The systematic study of gratitude within psychology only began around the year 2000, possibly because psychology has traditionally been focused more on understanding distress rather than understanding positive emotions. However, with the advent of the positive psychology movement, gratitude has become a mainstream focus of psychological research. The study of gratitude within psychology has focused on the understanding of the short term experience of the emotion, individual differences in how frequently people feel gratitude, and the relationship between these two aspects.

Gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment of compensation for the aid. The emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness motivates the recipient of the aid to avoid the person who has helped them, whereas gratitude motivates the recipient to seek out their benefactor and to improve their relationship with them.

Gratitude may also serve to reinforce future prosocial behavior in benefactors. For example, one experiment found that customers of a jewelry store who were called and thanked showed a subsequent 70% increase in purchases. In comparison, customers who were thanked and told about a sale showed only a 30% increase in purchases, and customers who were not called at all did not show any increase. In another study, regular patrons of a restaurant gave bigger tips when servers wrote “Thank you” on their checks.

A large body of recent work has suggested that people who are more grateful have higher levels of well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships. Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environments, personal growth, purpose in life, and self acceptance. Grateful people also have less negative coping strategies, being less likely to try to avoid a problem, or deny there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope through substance use. Grateful people sleep better, and this seems to be because they think less negative and more positive thoughts just before going to sleep.

Neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology. It can be defined as an enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than the average to experience such feelings as anxiety, anger, guilt, and clinical depression. They respond more poorly to environmental stress, and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening, and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult.

Neuroticism appears to be related to physiological differences in the brain. Hans Eysenck theorized that neuroticism is a function of activity in the limbic system, and research suggests that people who score highly on measures of neuroticism have a more reactive sympathetic nervous system, and are more sensitive to environmental stimulation. Behavioral genetics researchers have found that a substantial portion of the variability on measures of neuroticism can be attributed to genetic factors.

A study with positron emission tomography has found that healthy subjects that score high on neuroticism tests tend to have high altanserin binding in the frontolimbic region of the brain, an indication that these subjects tend to have more of the 5-HT2A receptor in that location. Another study has found that healthy subjects with a high neuroticism score tend to have higher DASB binding in the thalamus, with DASB being a ligand that binds to the serotonin transporter protein.

Neuroticism, along with other personality traits, has been mapped across states in the USA. People in eastern states such as New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Mississippi tend to score high on neuroticism, whereas people in many western states, such as Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, and Arizona score lower on average. People in states that are higher in neuroticism also tend to have higher rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy.

Trust is a mental state, which cannot be measured directly. Confidence in the results of trusting may be measured through behavior. Placement of trust allows actions that otherwise are not possible. If the person in whom trust is placed is trustworthy, then the trustor will be better off than if he or she had not trusted. Conversely, if the trustee is not trustworthy, then the trustor will be worse off than if he or she had not trusted.

Trust is a mental state, which cannot be measured directly. Confidence in the results of trusting may be measured through behavior, or alternatively, one can measure self-reported trust, with all the caveat surrounding that method. Trust may be considered a moral choice, as in the legend of Damon and Pythias, or at least a heuristic, allowing the human to deal with complexities that outgo rationalistic reasoning. In this case, machine-human trust is meaningless, because computers have no moral sense and rely on rational computations.

In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. In sociology and psychology the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, benevolence and competence of the other party. Based on the most recent research, a failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty.

The substantive conflict in the social sciences is whether trust is entirely internal, and only confidence is observable, or whether trust behaviors, and self reported levels of trust, can meaningfully measure trust in the absence of coercion. Note however that many languages (e.g. Dutch or German) do not distinguish between the words trust and confidence, which complicates the issue. The distinction between trust and confidence is an unsolved issue in current trust and confidence research.

Personology is a field of study which relies on physiology and facial features to analyze and predict character traits and behavior. It was developed in the 1930s by Edward Vincent Jones, a Los Angeles Circuit Court judge, who took notes on the behavioral patterns of those who appeared in his courtroom, and eventually surmised that he could predict people’s behavior by observing their facial features and other physical attributes.

Fascinated by his discovery, Jones abandoned his judicial career to begin researching subjects and is said to have compiled a list of 200 distinct facial features. After Jones performed a cold reading on the wife of Robert L. Whiteside, a newspaper editor, Whiteside became an ardent supporter of personology, and is claimed to have proved personology’s validity in an experiment that used 1,068 subjects and found the accuracy to be better than 90%.

Whiteside and other personologists used scientific methodology to validate personological traits during three different times over the course of 20 years in the latter portion of the 20th century. Examples of supposed personology correlations include:

• Wide jaw: authoritative in speech and action; linked to high testosterone levels, affecting both bone development and personality in both males and females
• Square chin: can be combative; also linked to high testosterone levels in males and females
• Narrow jaw or chin: tends to be passive; linked to low testosterone levels in males and females, nurturing behavior in females, affecting both bone development and personality in males and females
• Coarse hair: less sensitive
• Fine hair: extremely sensitive
• Curly, frizzy, wild hair: ‘mad scientist’ stereotype; thinks outside or ahead of the norm

The Personology Research & Development Center in the U.S. claims that personology can aid in customer relations, hiring and personal development, and can be beneficial in areas such as career counseling, conflict resolution, marriage partner compatibility, and stress management.