Monday 26 August 2013

Awareness: Acknowledging the Various Factors that Influence Behavior

     Though it has been a while since I have been able to return to write here, I have been staying busy via work towards completing a Master's degree in Social Psychology. This two year gauntlet of courses has been playing a significant role as to what I see when I look out into the social world of human interaction, human development, personality, and how experiences relate to behavior. Some themes have come up with regularity and they clearly have a significant role to play in the lives of all people whether we are aware of them or not. With any luck, I will be able to refine some of the seemingly more important ideas that have been presented to me over the last period and share them with you. It would be excellent to use this platform as a launch pad into other topics and ideas as they arise. Please feel free to contact me and share your ideas if you ever feel so inclined.

     One seemingly important theme that has come up throughout the course of my studies is how our behavior is affected by a huge range of factors. It is very common, especially for people form Western civilizations, to attribute the causes of different behaviors to personal qualities. That is, we are generally inclined to believe that people behave a certain way because of characteristics that they possess, i.e. "that's just the way they are". However, there is a very strong case to be made that in many instances, situational factors play an equal if not larger role than personal qualities. Here are three classic social psychological experiments that exemplify the role of factors outside of a person that can influence behavior: What is most striking regarding these examples is that behavior such as helping another in desperate need; obeying commands that clearly contradict moral reasoning; and inhumanely treating subordinates are all actions that we generally attribute to personal qualities. The point of these is not to demonstrate how everyone would necessarily act in the same situation, but rather to demonstrate how environmental factors can and do influence all of our behavior, often unconsciously.

Bystander Intervention - http://psychology.about.com/od/socialpsychology/a/bystandereffect.htm

Milgram's study of obedience - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCVlI-_4GZQ

The Stanford Prison Experiment - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0 (Some people may find parts of this video difficult to view)

     Consider, if you will, the various types of factors that influence our behavior and how we understand the world. The universe is compiled of different items from the unimaginably small to the unimaginably large. We tend to see distinct levels of organization. This is partly based on our size in relation to everything else. We are middle beings and this influences how we see the world. That is to say we exist at a certain range of sizes, and we are equipped to perceive things of similar size. However, when considering material objects, it is more like a sliding scale, a spectrum of gradual shifting changes. Classifying different items at different levels is like placing flags in the sand. This gives us points of reference so we can all agree as to what we are talking about. Generally speaking they could be moved one way or the other.

    This type of gradual shift is an underlying trait that applies to many aspects of life and the universe. For example, it can be compared to age. We arbitrarily assign the age ticker to the length of time it takes the Earth to circle the sun. Each year we add to our age is like one of the flags in the sand, but the actual changes in our age occur moment to moment in increments that are imperceptibly small. One revolution around the sun satisfies our sense of logic and reason for counting time, and maybe it even 'makes the most sense' in terms of being an easy system that everyone can understand. However, it is still just one potential option, and could be replaced by any other system that we deemed adequate such as moon cycles, seasons, or anything else.

     That being said, especially as items get larger, it becomes increasingly easy to distinguish levels that we can all agree are qualitatively different. The important thing to note is that all levels of organization influence all other levels to varying degrees. That is to say the small influences the large, and the large influences the small. This can be clearly seen in the different types of psychology and holds key information as to the environmental factors that shape our behavior as well as the ways our behaviors alter our environments. This cyclical relationship tends to lead to feedback loops that generally sustain themselves, and these feedback loops ultimately become our lives.

     Over the last 100 years or so, psychology has developed and refined a number of tools that can help us to understand why we think and behave the way we do. This search has led to a number of different schools of psychology that all focus on factors at different parts of the size spectrum. Technically speaking, psychology really only deals with a limited range of factors that influence our behavior and other sciences and fields of study pick up where psychology leaves off.

Moving from small to large, you get the following.

1. Neurobiology - How neural connections affect our behaviors.

2. Cognitive psychology - How aspects of the mind, ie. thinking, affect our perceptions and subsequent behavior.

3. Developmental psychology - How both our physical brain and how we make meaning changes over time. Note -Though the brain makes slower physical changes once we enter adulthood, the types of cognition we are capable of continue to increase and change all the way through adulthood.

4. Clinical psychology - Incorporates aspects from both the larger and smaller ends of the spectrum to specifically help people handle individual emotional/psychological distress.

5. Social psychology - How groups and situational factors influence an individual's behavior, cognition, and beliefs.

6. Sociology - How social structures, groups, neighborhoods, and institutions affect each other at the group level.

(This table of analysis comes from Susan T. Fiske's book "Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology" - http://www.amazon.com/Social-Beings-Core-Motives-Psychology/dp/0470129115)


     It is important to realized that this is just a small spectrum of the variables that directly affect how we think and behave, but they are the levels that affect us most directly and most powerfully. For example, this scale could be extended on the smaller end of the scale and we could consider how the laws of chemistry and physics comprise the infrastructure of our brains and how these directly set physical limits as to how our brains can operate. Equally, we can look at the large end of the spectrum and consider the influence of anthropology and culture throughout history. We can even considering influences from the cosmic level or how various planetary bodies including the sun and moon affect our biological systems. Overall, things closer to each other on the scale generally exert a larger influence over each other.

     The main point here is that we exist on a continuous scale comprised of items of varying sizes. Items of every size affect our personal psychology in terms of how we perceive the universe, events, and the behavior of ourselves and others. Some levels of organization are more immediately significant than others since they are closer in size to us and what we can readily perceive.

No comments:

Post a Comment