Behaviorism And It’s Impact In Our Relationship

“Behaviorism emphasizes the role of environmental factors in influencing behavior, to the near exclusion of innate or inherited factors”.

Let’s break this down to simple English.

When people act in a certain way, it exposes a lot about them. The kind of environment they come from and how their mind works.

Let’s say you narrate a story to someone and all the person could do was to cry. That is a show of sympathy.

Behaviorism is only concerned with observable stimulus-response behaviors, as they can be studied in systematic and observable manner.

Internal events, such as thinking should be explained through behavioral terms or completely eliminated. Therefore, behaviorist often accept the existence of cognitions and emotions.

They prefer not to study them as only observable (external) behavior can be objectively and scientifically measured.

Therefore, behaviorists see action as the only relevant factor when attempting to understand the nature of mind. But, how about a situation whereby we try resisting such behaviors (that is, we hide them completely).

Someone might feel pain or emotionally touched, but does not have the capacity to act in this regards.

Let’s consider a situation where some individuals claim to be in pain or touched by an event whereas, they are not.

The best way to determine if an individual is really in pain is not to assume they are, rather to ask them and trust they tell us exactly the truth.

Intelligence and the Nature of Mind

Knowing someone’s intellectual ability is the best proven way to determine their state of mind.

You will be able to know their thinking capability which can greatly assist you in ascertaining how exactly they can feel over a particular issue because you already know their intellectual performance.

Character, emotional intelligence and personality can be used on the other hand to determine the nature of one’s mind.

The way and manner one responds to effusive set up exposes the nature of their inner life.
The only way to have a greater and reliable insight into the general nature of people’s mind is to only see them in action frequently.

 

The question here is, how can you know when someone is real or faking it?

In a case where an individual gets deeply emotional by just listening to someone narrate their story and other similar things.

Over time says a lot about their nature of mind.

On the other hand, someone else might be listening to the same story and end up not showing any emotional or physical response.

This shows that the two individuals have distinct nature of mind and can never respond similarly over a given situation and most times, this kind of emotionally insensitive set of people get disgusted over listening to things that has to do with emotions.

In short, intellectual intelligence does not give us all the details we need when it comes to the nature of mind rather it narrows down the general nature of human minds.

That individual who has shown a lot of compassion and sympathy might actually be faking it or simply think their partner is weak minded and should just stop crying, but the emotionally callous person is just real to the core.

Except when similar incidents occur over and over again, then we can correctly predict how composed or not composed their minds can be.

Behaviorism and how it’s affecting our relationship

Behaviorism has experimental support: Pavlov shows that classical conditioning leads to learning by association.

Watson and Rayner showed that phobias can be learnt through classical conditioning in the “Little Albert” experiment. However, behaviorism only provides a partial account of human behavior which can be objectively viewed.

Behavior like emotions, expectations and high-level motivation; are not considered or explained. On the other hand, we could equally say that people who are emotionally ignorant are not always correctly explainable.

They could actually be emotional inside, but does not really know how to express it. This proves that people’s way of thinking sometimes varies from their actions and reactions over certain situations.

So, in my own view, trying to know the exact composure of someone’s mind cannot be totally accurate. This is because, some people act contrary to their real feelings.

Written by Jeremiah