Top 180 Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “And behavior is altered by “situational labels” – call the game the “Wall Street Game,” and people become less cooperative. Calling it the “Community Game” does the opposite.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

152. “Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

153. “And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual – how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group? – what ecological factors helped shape that culture – expanding and expanding.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

154. “While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low – genes don’t explain individual differences much.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

155. “Remarkably, the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult. Why? During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being the ones that migrate to the correct location and maximize synaptic connections to other neurons. And neurons that don’t make the grade? They undergo “programmed cell death” – genes are activated that cause them to shrivel and die, their materials then recycled.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

156. “The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

157. “What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

158. “By ages four through six, kids in cultures from around the world respond negatively when they are the ones being shortchanged. It isn’t until ages eight through ten that kids respond negatively to someone else being treated unfairly.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

159. “This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and – aha! – the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

160. “For starters, circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, the more long-lasting the relationship, and the happier interviewers rate couples to be.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

161. “The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

162. “If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.25.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

163. “A critical realization roared through the research community: the physiological stress-response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived, can be appraised differently, and the whole show changes from there.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

164. “Secure-attachment 7Rs show more generosity than average. Thus 7R has something to do with generosity – but its effect is entirely context dependent.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

165. “What’s a heritability score? “What does a gene do?” is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait?”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

166. “What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically protective can take the form of marriage, contact with friends and extended family, church membership, or other group affiliations.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

167. “As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it – cognitively distorting how the world works.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

168. “This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

169. “I once received a lesson in kids’ private world of rule making from my then-four-year-old son. We had gone to a public bathroom together; we stood side by side at two urinals, and I finished a bit earlier than he did. “I wish we had finished at the same time,” he said. Why? “We get more points that way.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

170. “The people running a corporation are occasionally criminally responsible when the corporation has done something illegal; however, they are not when the corporation does something legal yet immoral -it is outside the realm of guilt.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

171. “When a rat wins a fight, the number of testosterone receptors increases in the ventral tegmentum and accumbens, increasing sensitivity to the hormone’s feel-good effects.10.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

172. “University of Cambridge.68 When compared with non-CAH girls, CAH girls do more rough-and-tumble play, fighting, and physical aggression. Moreover, they prefer “masculine” toys over dolls. As adults they score lower on measures of tenderness and higher in aggressiveness and self-report more aggression and less interest in infants. In addition, CAH women are more likely to be gay or bisexual or have a transgender sexual identity.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

173. “The authors first replicated this effect, showing that watching a short film clip of something physically disgusting made subjects more morally judgmental – unless they had washed their hands after watching the film. Another study suggests that the washing decreases emotional arousal, as it decreased the diameter of subjects’ pupils.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

174. “Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome – the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA – destined to be duplicated in every cell in that future person’s body? What role did those genes play in causing that behavior?”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

175. “Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Adler Foundation.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

176. “If they’re told, “The drug has a 95 percent survival rate,” people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, “The drug has a 5 percent death rate.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

177. “Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

178. “Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability.65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

179. “Suppose a major traumatic stressor occurs, of a sufficient magnitude to disrupt hippocampal function while enhancing amygdaloid function. At some later point, in a similar setting, you have an anxious, autonomic state, agitated and fearful, and you haven’t a clue why – this is because you never consolidated memories of the event via your hippocampus while your amygdala-mediated autonomic pathways sure as hell remember. This is a version of free-floating anxiety.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

180. “Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile.5 This is boggling.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

181. “So oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

182. “The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat’s brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

183. “The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we’ll see.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

184. “A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

185. “If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

186. “THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

187. “Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

188. “Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

189. “It’s not until the non-NMDA has been stimulated over and over by a long train of glutamate release, allowing enough sodium to flow in, that this activates the NMDA receptor. It suddenly responds to all that glutamate, opening its channels, allowing an explosion of excitation. This is the essence of learning.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

190. “So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates.10 But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the “cognitive” dlPFC then activate and inhibit the amygdala. It’s the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker amygdaloid response.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky