concepts; determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism, each with their strengths and weaknesses and we all have the freedom to choose which we believe in or whether or not we believe in any of their views. Beginning with determinism, the idea of determinism is that every event, including human actions, is brought about by previous events in accordance with universal casual laws that govern the world and that human freedom is just an illusion. At its most extreme form, “hard determinism”, believers
Free Will vs. Determinism What determines and influences human behavior? Humans have been looking the answer for this question during several eras, thus they developed various theories attempting to explain human behavior. Determinism is the belief that one event is the consequence of a previous action, similar to a chain. According to some philosophers who support determinism, the will of an agent follows physical laws, and every action is explicable and predictable by physical conditions. By this
rains, or when a plane crashes, or when a business succeeds, there might be no cause for it? Surely, human behavior is caused. It doesn't just happen for any reason at all. The types of human behavior for which people are held morally accountable are usually said to be caused by the people who engaged in that behavior. People typically cause their own behavior by making choices; thus, this type of behavior might be thought to be caused by your own choice-makings. This freedom to make your own choices
Determinism in behavioral psychology, for example, can take the form of environmental determinism, where the source influencing someone’s behavior is external to them — like when Bandura (1961), suggested that violent parents produce violent children (McLeod, 2013). Additionally, deterministic factors can be internal to the person, ...
You need not oppose or deconstruct the idea of behavioral determinism in order to make people engage more positively with the prospect that their behavior can be predictable. Instead, I suggest that people may benefit from the heuristic findings of an area of recreational Mathematics, known as John Conway’s Game of Life.
In addition, the notion of situational determinism in economics claims that the behavior of actors is influenced by the “logic of the situation” (Gustafsson, Knudsen & Mäki, 2003: p17), or that different internal preferences at different times lead actors to pursue a set course of action (Mäki, 2003). By observing these patterns, researchers can predict when people are most likely to behave in certain ways, and what changes in an environment can promote the actions most desired by interested groups.
Behavioral science, put simply, is the study of human behavior. The discipline scrutinises human movement scientifically, as a means of approximating the stimuli that determine patterns of individual and group activity (Banerjee, 1995). A core tenant of its scientific rigor therefore is its focus on causality, in that different behaviors are ...
We make 35,000 decisions each day, often in environments that aren’t conducive to making sound choices.
Similarly, just because behavioral science teaches us that we can expect individuals to behave in a certain way given a certain environment, it is not then to say that we can anticipate the extent of the ensuing behaviors and how they will change and adapt when met with others adhering to a similar deterministic logic.
Simkins, L. (1969). The basis of psychology as a behavioral science. Boston: Blaisdell Pub. Co, .p15.
Human behavior is the product of millions of years of biological evolution, as well as the product of millions of years of social evolution . The regular day-to-day behavior is the outcome of sociological processes produced by a specific culture and society in which the individual is born or reared in, as well as the product of the interaction between socialization processes and his/her biological composition (Alland, 1973; Cartwright, 2000).
Behavior follows a determinist structure, both biologically and socially. On a larger temporal scale, every individual’s actions are accounted for and even briefly foreseen. Every event represents a ‘bottle-neck’ event towards other events. These are all very determined events on a universal scale. However, inability to globally assess individual forces resulted in an interpretation of ‘free will’, which, in turn, is explained as the cause of unpredictable behavior. Other interpretation could be that the narrow and locally circumscribed human perspective reflects upon a regional level only. This narrow human perception is merely an adaptation towards better chances of survival (Cartwright, 2000; Moran, 2006).