Explanation Of Human Behavior Research Articles

The New Biology of Violence: New Geneticisms for Old?

Nowhere is current controversy over biological explanations for human behaviour more striking than in debates over violence. New theories are being formulated, and biological markers are being identified in new ways. The terms of discourse and debate are being changed. Violence may be represented as a pathological biological syndrome, or as natural, especially for men. Why the growing interest now in biological explanations of violence? Is the biology of violence suggestive of a new brand of biological determinism? This latter, broader question poses a challenge to the argument that current biological theories of behaviour are different and better than faulty, often racist and eugenicist, theories which have gone before. New theories do not reduce to linear cause-and-effect explanations, and there are no `genes for crime'. Nevertheless, there is a question of geneticism, `the doctrine of the primacy of the genetic make-up in determining every aspect of the human mind, constitution and social behaviour...' (Medawar, 1984: 255).

Rules are Laws: an Argument against Holism

In this paper I argue against the holistic claim that the description and explanation of human behaviour is irreducibly social in nature. I focus on the more specific thesis that human behaviour is rule-guided and that ‘rule’ is an irreducibly social notion. Against this claim I defend a teleofunctional and reductionist view. Following Millikan (1990), who argues that ‘rule’ can be explicated in functional terms, I extend her argument to cover social rules as well, and argue that rules are laws. I conclude that human rule-guided behaviour can be described and explained in functional, and in the end causal, i.e. causal-historical, terms.

Communication apprehension as temperamental expression: A Communibiological paradigm

Over the past two decades, a large amount of research focusing on correlates and consequences of communication apprehension has accumulated. Despite this massive research effort, few viable models of the development of the trait have been proffered. Also during the past twenty years, psychobiologists have made impressive strides toward the explanation of human behavior by identifying underlying neurological processes, especially in affective domains. In this essay, we propose a theory of communication apprehension, anchored in the trait‐oriented work of psychobiology as articulated in the temperament literature. Drawing from the extensive work of both psychobiologists and communication apprehension, researchers in our field, we contend that communication apprehension represents individuals’ expression of inborn, biological functioning, which has been shown to be antecedent to social experience and, therefore, independent of social learning processes. In formulating our theoretical framework, we (1) present a temperament‐based conceptualization of communication apprehension, (2) integrate neurologically‐based temperament functions into three fundamental propositions based on communication apprehension research, and (3) discuss the implications of our theoretical position.

The role of cognition in complex human behavior: A contextualistic perspective

Cognitive and behavioral psychology have long debated the merits of cognitive causality in the explanation of human behavior. We argue, however, that cognitive causality must be understood in the context of the pre-analytic philosophical assumptions of the scientist, not merely as an empirical matter. Many of the issues that seemingly separate cognitive from behavioral positions cannot be answered by research. We briefly present Relational Frame Theory, which is a behavioral approach to language and cognition. RFT is not subject to the same criticisms made by Bandura of behavior analytic thinking. Finally, we describe some aspects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as an example of the applied implications of this contextual analysis of cognition.

Belief in and use of a questionable technique, facilitated communication, for children with autism.

23 educators and therapists of children with autism were surveyed about their beliefs and use of Facilitated Communication, a technique previously shown to have questionable scientific validity. 65.2% or 15 use the procedure often or very often in their work with children. Some factors that appeared related to this choice were beliefs consistent with those of proponents of Facilitated Communication, less education, belief in the notion that individuals with autism were more intelligent than their behavior indicated, and lack of belief in science as a source of explanation of human behavior. It was concluded that supervisors need to be more informing about the scientific validity of techniques used by their employees.

PROACTA: an integrative model for prediction and explanation of human behavior in risk situations

PROACTA: an integrative model for prediction and explanation of human behavior in risk situations

Subjectivism, indeterminacy and the structure of economic analysis

Subjectivists tend to reject the use of mechanistic laws in the explanation of human behaviour. There is a widespread belief, even in Austrian circles, that this rejection has destructive implications for all theory. The aim of this paper is to show that this belief is mistaken and that deterministic laws of behaviour need not play an essential role in economic theory. Behaviour can still be analysed and understood without using such laws. In addition, economics is not only about the explanation of behaviour, but also about the identification of which behaviour, by whom, is responsible for certain economic phenomena. The relevant methodology for these kinds of analyses is worked out and topical controversies in subjectivist economics, such as the role of the economics of knowledge, the possibility for dynamic theory and the relation between subjectivism and Keynes's method, are addressed.

Lonergan's Cognitional Theory and Method in Psychology

It is proposed that the thought of Bernard Lonergan has a great deal to contribute to the long-standing questions of what is the right method of inquiry in psychology; of how far, and in what sense, psychology should aspire to be a science; and of to what degree it should pursue the methods of such sciences as physics and chemistry. Lonergan shows that any attempt to eliminate `mentalism' from the explanation of human behavior is self-destructive, since this implies that the theory which purports to eliminate it can itself never be accepted for good reasons. To illustrate the point, B.F. Skinner's account of psychology as a science is summarized, and subjected to criticism in the light of Lonergan's principles. Finally, the moral is applied to some other conceptions of psychology.

Evolving, aging, and making culture*

In a recent polemic, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby offer new proposals to bridge the gulf between biological and cultural explanations of human behaviour. By focussing on the evolved architecture of the human mind, they seek specific psychological mechanisms by which genes may influence human social institutions. A major challenge for this approach is how to trace precisely which psychological endowments, formed by the Pleistocene age, have shaped which aspect of our contemporary cultures. Here it is suggested that the temporal framework of individual human lives may provide one means of establishing clearer connections between brain structure and social institutions. For biologists this will involve extending conventional views of human ontogeny to include the phases of aging and death, which have been so important for the genesis of culture. This image of the lifespan may in turn help anthropologists come to terms with the physical bases of intergenerational transfers on which the perpetuation of culture...

Information in nature, human behavior, and social life

The notion of information seems to be growing into one of the central, unifying concepts of modern science, natural as well as social or behavioral. Conceived basically as the degree of order or organization of a system, any system, it originated in the discipline of thermodynamics in which, briefly, it turned out to underlie a system's capacity for converting energy, i.e., for doing 'work' of some kind. Now, the fact that humans, too, are physical systems, does not automatically imply that this notion of information or order should also be relevant to the explanation of human behavior or social life. Yet, this is precisely what the autonomous development of theory in this area reveals. In this contribution we explore, briefly and informally, the meaning and role of the notion in scientific theory, in the attitudes underlying individual behavior, and in the structure of social systems as a prime determinant of their power, cultural and economic development, and of the quality of life therein.

Free will and the Genome Project.

...I want to argue that the Human Genome Project itself poses no special problem for human freedom, understood in relation to the philosophical issue of free will versus determinism. It seems to pose a problem only if one muddles the interpretation of the issue or of the project that is supposed to bear on it. There is a need for conceptual clarification to point this out, perhaps, but I see no need for "research" in the sense that implies original investigation. However, I also want to probe a bit deeper to identify a distinct set of philosophical worries about freedom that seem to have been misplaced onto the standard issue, the issue of freedom versus determinism, in this discussion and elsewhere. After arguing that the genome project has no real bearing on free will versus determinism, I shall attempt to identify the threat it poses to freedom partly by detaching it from this standard version of the free will question. I shall argue that the worrisome forms of genetic influence that the project might uncover do not really presuppose determinism. But what they do presuppose -- some form of internal or psychological constraint on behavior -- suggests an alternative version of the free will question as the source of popular fears about scientific explanation of human behavior. What is under threat on this version of the question is the Aristotelian notion of character formation and self-control.

The Relationship of Self-Efficacy Appraisals to Subsequent Health Related Outcomes

During the 1980's social cognitive theory has evolved as an explanation of human behavior. One of this theory's component constructs, self-efficacy, has received increasing attention as an antecedent to health related outcomes. The results of a meta-analysis examining studies which employed the construct of self-efficacy as a predictor of health related outcomes is presented. In the literature examined, subject ratings of self-efficacy were found to consistently predict subsequent health related outcomes.

Ethical judgment and brain function: An interpretation of Paul D. MacLean's hypothesis

This essay explains and interprets the ethical significance of the neurobiological research of Paul D. MacLean M.D. (Senior Research Scientist, National Institute of Mental Health), best known for identifying the “limbic system” in 1952. MacLean hypothesizes that the human brain has maintained the previous stages of its evolutionary development. The resulting “triune” brain produces three distinct, but interrelated, mentalities. Each makes ethically positive and negative contributions to human behavior. The former lead to “rational” (beneficial) and the latter to “irrational” (destructive) behavior. The reptilian stage (“R-complex” or “striatal complex”) is the earliest. Its positive effects on human beings include order, hypostatizing beliefs, a certain type of mannerliness, etc. Its negative effects include human elaboration on the need for power, deception, egotism, and intolerance. The paleomammalian brain (“limbic system”) produces certain affective currents that need to be regulated. Ethically positive emotions also arise from it, including guilt, altruism, and conviction that beliefs are important. The neomammalian brain makes rationally motivated behavior possible. On the one hand, it stands guard over certain primitive brain functions and can override them. On the other hand, the paleomammalian brain contributes altruistic qualities to the neocortex, including empathy, foresight, and conscience. These can affect the nature of neocortical override. As a result, rationally motivated behavior arises partly from sub-neocortical structures. MacLean suggests that choice cannot be explained without reference to these structures. His hypothesis can account for rationally motivated behavior and also for the irrationality or malaise (“schizophysiology”) of the human condition. The secondary literature presents conflicting interpretations of MacLean's hypothesis, ranging from fixation on the misery of the human predicament to the capability of rationally motivated behavior. The present interpretation describes the larger pattern out of which these two extremes arise, and which is often neglected in commentaries on MacLean's evolutionary research. MacLean and the author both argue that the biological origin of the mind does not invalidate its contents. MacLean's hypothesis strikes a balance between genetic predisposition and learning as explanations of human behavior. Furthermore, it allows for a significant degree of indeterminism.

Practical Computing

Anthropologists now have a substantial collection of data that can be used to test hypotheses about humankind's diversity over space and time and can provide the basis for more refined and sophisticated theoretical explanations of human behavior. Advances in microcomputer technology have made it increasingly feasible to use such cross-cultural data sets for teaching and learning anthropological principles. Some data sets, such as those from World Cultures electronic journal or the new cd-Rom data sets from the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., can double as both research and instructional resources. In this article James Hamill and Linda Marchant of Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) review four programs that can enhance our capacity to teach archaeological and sociocultural anthropology. These programs can be effective not only in traditional college classrooms, but also in workshops and presentations designed to introduce non-anthropologists to the usefulness of anthropological perspectives.

Humor in group psychotherapy

It is interesting that something as omnipresent in human behavior as humor has been so neglected in the therapeutic literature. It may be that when a parallel is drawn between adult forms of humor and children's play a red flag goes up in technological-industrial cultures, where is held in high esteem and play appears to be its antithesis. As the industrial revolution gained momentum, explanations of human behavior (both biological and psychological) tended to be sober and pragmatic. Darwinian theory underlies much scholarly thinking. Behavior is understood in terms of its direct value for the organism's survival in a given context. Since there is no apparent value of play to human survival, investigators of play or humor risk having their seen as nonsubstantive. An additional complication for investigators is the existing mythology that shapes our views of childhood. Despite considerable economic and sexual exploitation of children (particularly virulent during the early days of the industrial revolution), childhood maintains its aura as a time of innocence and ease. Freud (1960), a man both ahead of his time and in it, paints this picture of the idyllic nature of childhood: Jokes and humor then provide the adult with an euphoria which is nothing other than the mood of a period of in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical in general with a small expenditure of energy the mood of our childhood, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life (p. 236). Freud felt that play was largely confined to childhood, because, as the faculty of reasonableness strengthened, it destroyed the premise for play. He hypothesized that jokes serve the clandestine purpose of continuing pleasurable play because they are protections against the criticism of reason and serve to inhibit critical judgment. Play and humor enter the dialectic between the pleasure and reality principles as rebels against the compulsions of reality. Perhaps the implication is that humor, a form of play, helps us to bear the great weight of the real world. But Freud did not honor humor along with work and love as the things which give human meaning.

Culture, biology, and human behavior

Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionistic bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reificationist thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists.

Developmental differences in the nature of self-representations: Implications for the understanding, assessment, and treatment of maladaptive behavior

The self has only recently emerged as a viable construct for theorists and practitioners of a behavioral persuasion. In this article, the reason for the self's late entry into the field of explanatory constructs is first examined. Critical changes in our models for predicting, understanding, and altering human behavior are explored, with special attention to the emerging role of self-representations as functional mediators of behavior. A developmental perspective is adopted, arguing that is is necessary to appreciate normative, age-related changes in the very nature of self-representations, as a backdrop against which individual differences in self-representatitons can be understood. Developmental differences in the nature of self-description, the dimensions of which self-judgements are based, the degree of differentiation and integration within the self-system, the construction of multipleselves, the emergence of a sense of global self-esteem, and the awareness of, interest in, and ability to reflect on the self are discussed in terms of their implications for the prediction and explanation of human behavior, as well as for therapeutic intervention. Finally, the importance of clearly defining and operationalizing self constructs is emphasized, highlighting those methodological issues that are particularly critical when one adopts developmental perspective.

Evolutionary controversy and psychobiology

Abstract Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not believe the debate among evolutionary biologists regarding punctuated equilibria theory can have any major impact on the various disciplines of behavioural science. The ramifications of punctuated equilibria are esoteric to this area due to the time frame involved and the lack of any empirical evidence for biological punctuational evolutionary impacts on human behaviour. Any tested hypothesis still standing will stand until subsequent research, not theorizing, knocks it down. Psychobiologists need not worry about their findings floating about with no theoretical base upon which to rest from time to time. As one of my mentors periodically reminded me whenever I would get overly excited about some new and enticing explanation for results: ‘data stand, theories fall’. Repeatable observations shape and stabilize the theories upon which they stand. But a theory with no observations tips easily. Scholars and scientists in pursuit of predictable explanations of human behaviour will go about their business as usual, perhaps with a bit more vigour knowing that the field has a bigger spotlight shining on it. Punctuated equilibrium or gradualism, whichever scheme best explains an expanding collection of data from the fossil record, will have no direct altering impact on advances in the area of ‘real-time’ proximal psychobiology, the ‘how’ aspects of explaining the biological mechanisms impacting human behaviour. And even in those theoretical areas in which evolutionary mechanisms/explanations are necessarily invoked, the outcome of whether a given idea is correct or not will ultimately depend upon supportive evidence collected from here on out, not from some Devonian fossils. In the meantime, we have a lot of ‘real-time’ proximal explaining to do.

Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior

Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior

Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behaviour

Folk psychology, insist some, is just like folk mechanics, folk thermodynamics, folk meteorology, folk chemistry, and folk biology. It is a framework of concepts, roughly adequate to the demands of everyday life, with which the humble adept comprehends, explains, predicts, and manipulates a certain domain of phenomena. It is, in short, a folk theory. As with any theory, it may be evaluated for its virtues or vices in all of the dimensions listed. And as with any theory, it may be rejected in its entirety if it fails the measure of such evaluation. Call this the theoretical view of our self understanding. Folk psychology, insist others, is radically unlike the examples cited. It does not consist of laws. It does not support causal explanations. It does not evolve over time. Its central purpose is normative rather than descriptive. And thus it is not the sort of framework that might be shown to be radically defective by sheerly empirical findings. Its assimilation to theories is just a mistake. It has nothing to fear, therefore, from advances in cognitive theory or the neurosciences. Call this the anti-theoretical view of our self understanding. Somebody here is deeply mistaken. The first burden of this paper is to argue that it is the anti-theoretical view that harbors most, though not all, of those mistakes. In the thirty years since the theoretical view was introduced (see esp. Sellars 1956, Feyerabend 1963, Rorty 1965, Churchland 1970, 1979, 1981), a variety of objections have been levelled against it. The more interesting of those will be addressed shortly. My current view is that these objections motivate no changes whatever in the theoretical view.