Experience Shapes Behaviour - Essay Example

The problem of experience and its influence on human behaviour is probably the most crucial for the entire psychology, because psychology is the discipline that studies human behaviour, so it is important to find out what are the roots of human behaviour in the first place. Hence, claiming that human behavior is the result of some intrinsic personal features that all people have a priori would make psychology a doubtful discipline, as it would be impossible to systematize the knowledge about human behavioral patterns. However, as far as psychology indeed finds a lot of similarities in human behaviour and can explain the reasons for human actions, it means that human behaviour is based on some experience and knowledge that people obtain living together in the same society and multiple studies have proved this theory. Experience is the knowledge that people gain getting involved in different activities and developing their understanding of multiple aspects of the life. Hence, the claim that human behaviour is based on the experience that a person have gained means that the person may change one’s attitudes and therefore one’s behaviour concerning those aspects of life and the situations that one has learned through experience how to deal with in the most appropriate way. The very first claim concerning the connection between experience and human behaviour was stated by Sigmund Freud, who divided personality into two parts: the conscious and unconscious, which contain all the human experience, collected from the earliest childhood (as cited in McAvoy 2012). The unconscious remembers both traumatic and positive experiences which a person perceives from childhood and throughout the entire life, suppressing memories and traumas which later affect the person’s conduct by sending unconscious impulses to the conscious. Hence, the very first experience (which appears to be the post influential) a person gets from one’s family, as dependence on parents’ attitude to the person forms the entire adult personality, according to Freud (as cited in McAvoy 2012). The theory indeed proves that the fears and inner traumas that often control people’s actions come from that early childhood experience that people gain from their parents. Post-Freudian studies conducted by Theodor Adorno et al. also proved the Freudian assertion about the link between human experience and behaviour. Adorno et al. (as cited in McAvoy 2012) were exploring the authoritarian personality, which supposedly was characterized by certain personal features that made the person to join such extreme massive movements as fascism. The study reveals that people with such kind of personality occur all around the world regardless of the presence of fascism or other extreme movements in their country. Hence, the people from Adorno’s et al.’s study were suggested to accomplish some quizzes, one of which was called an F-scale, which examined them on the matter of fascist inclinations. Thus the entire study has revealed that it is not really inherent personal features that make a person more or less inclined to fascism, but the inclination is the result of the person’s family environments and the way that one was raised by one’s parents. For example, those who had been raised in strict atmosphere appeared to be more inclined to extreme conservatism and were more likely to take part in fascist movements (McAvoy 2012). The point stated by Adorno et al. correlates with Freud’s psychoanalysis, as it turns out that authoritarian personality is the result of certain traumas and early childhood experience suppressed into unconscious and turned into the deep stimuli that make people’s thoughts and behaviour more strict and even aggressive towards others, as they were taught to act like this by their parents. However, Adorno’s et al.’s study caused a lot of discussions regarding the methods and objectives of research and the next stage of the research of authoritarian personality made even greater impact to the establishing of the relation between experience and behaviour. Thus Altemeyer’s idea of “social learning” (as cited in McAvoy 2012) is less contradictory than the one of Freud and Adorno, as his approach is more engaged with cognitive theory. Altemeyer denies the role of unconscious in human gaining of experience and claims that a person’s behaviour results from what the person learns in the environment one has been raised in. It turns out that cognitive approach is just another perspective of looking at experience and its connection with behaviour, as it claims that with another change of experience a person updates one’s knowledge and processes information throughout another lens of the brand new experience. This explains why people’s behaviour might be changed with age and new experience gained; moreover, people can change their habits and behavioural patterns using cognitive approach to reset their experience and views. Hence, an authoritarian personality might be changed by the person oneself if the person gains some experience that makes authoritarian personality irrelevant. However, the experiments concerning such concepts as love and attachment conducted by Harry Harlow have revealed that there are indeed some inherent features of personality, instinctive ones, which influence human behaviour. In Harlow’s experiment eight newborn monkeys were provided with two kinds of surrogate mothers: one was made of wires although it supplied the monkeys with food; another surrogate mother was a terry-cloth but didn’t provide monkeys with anything except warmth and gentleness (as cited in Custance 2012). It turned out that the terry-cloth mother was more important for monkeys as it made them feel secure and probably even beloved, which created certain attachment of the monkeys to the mother, unlike to the feeding wire mother that hadn’t caused any attachment in the monkeys. Hence, if comfort is more important for monkeys and the bond they had with the terry-cloth mother was very strong, then the experiment proves that there is such thing as attachment which is inherent to a personality. Moreover, further experiments conducted by Schaffer and Emerson proved the point asserted by Harlow regarding humans’ babies. Thus human infant attachment appeared not to be based upon cupboard love but was inherent to babies’ personality (as cited in Custance 2012). The experiments have revealed that those people who were lack of attention and love in childhood become less adaptive, insecure, and more anti-social, because their social development is on a very low level as well as their feeling of security. The point is that Ainsworth’s studies have denoted: parents’ attention and support determine the entire path of their child’s development; children whose parents have been responsive to their signals become more secure and open-minded than those whose parents were detached and unresponsive, because they always feel that they have some background that provides them with security and constant support (as cited in Custance 2012). Although that the experiments seem to support the claim that it is inherent personality and intrinsic stimuli that form human conduct, the experiments vice versa confirm the fact that it is experience what makes humans act this or that way. Even though human beings are determined to feel a need for love and attachment, the response they gain from the objects of their attachments form the experience that leads them to certain behavioural patterns. For instance, all infants are determined to need their mothers’ (or another caregivers’) love and comfort, however if they don’t get enough of comfort and attachment, it forms negative experience which they remember, so they base their further behaviour according to the experience of lack of love and start interpreting the world as loveless and hostile. Despite multiple theories that prove the connection between real experience and a persons further behaviour, the studies conducted on the matter of human memory contradict the fact that it is experience what shapes peoples conduct. The point is that not all the memories that people have about their previous experience are truthful. The experiments conducted by Loftus and Pickrell (as cited in Pike & Brace 2012) have denoted that under certain circumstances human brain is capable of constructing false memories, which results in remembering of the experience that has never happened to the person. Hence, the lost in the mall study has shown that when people had been convinced that some event had happened to them, they started reflecting on the event and created false memories about it. Thus basically they believed in what had never happened. The further studies on the matter have revealed that even though the memories about the false events are less clear and precise, vaguer, still these memories influence peoples preferences and behaviour. Hence, the study on the connection between false memories and food preferences has proven that false memories about getting sick because of some food make people stop preferring this food, even though in fact they have never had any bad experience with it (as cited in Pike & Brace 2012). The issue of false memories makes it more difficult to argue that it is experience that shapes human behavioral patterns, as it appears to be a certain mindset that influences a persons behavioural choices. However, if to take into consideration the fact that memory itself is a kind of storage of experience, then memory indeed affects human behaviour, especially the truthful and accurate memories. The most certain thing in the discussion concerning memories is that they may occur regardless of personality. Moreover, as far as children are more inclined to creation of false memories than adults are (according to the same studies cited in Pike & Brace 2012) it means that it is experience and development of mind what makes adults more resistant to false memories’ construction. Thus multiple researches and experiments prove that indeed human behaviour is the result of personal experience of every human being. In fact those theories that claim that it is a unique personality that shapes behaviour might be also true, however personality and its impact doesnt contradict the point about experience, because it would be wrong to decline the fact that people are gaining experience and improving throughout the entire lives and they tend to make less mistakes in future actions once they experience something new. References McAvoy,J. (2012) Exposing the authoritarian personality in Brace, N. and Byford, J. (eds) Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University. Custance, D. (2012) Determined to love? in Brace, N. and Byford, J. (eds) Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University. Pike, G. and Edgar, G. (2012) Witnessing and remembering in Brace, N. and Byford, J. (eds) Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University. Read More