metonymy4u

Have you noticed lately, our culture has some really strange ideas about human behavior? For example, parents often talk to me about their teens “making bad choices” and needing to “learn responsibility and respect for others.” Likewise, our criminal justice system is based on the notion that human behavior is determined by something called “free will.” The irony of a “deterministic free will” model notwithstanding, what these two approaches to human behavior have in common is the belief in rational free will as perhaps the salient feature of the human landscape. As if “responsibility” were something that we build up inside of ourselves, independent of any actually observable behaviors, as if this internal “thing,” once acquired will guarantee the “rightness” of behaviors in the future. This approach to human affairs holds that our actions are caused by something called our “choices” or our sense of “duty” or “responsibility” and these choices are the product of a rational, mind based will imposing itself upon the behaviors of the body. And in cases in which this is not the case, such as an impulsive violent act, the criminal justice system still holds that the person “should” have exercised their free will, and that the absence of this choosing behavior was in itself a choice for which the individual is justly “held responsible” and punished.

The problem with these approaches is that they cleave to a model of human behavior which modern psychology tells us is just invalid. Modern psychology teaches us that human behavior, far from being a deterministic phenomenon that follows from readily identifiable individual “choices” is in fact a probabilistic phenomenon multiply determined by a whole range of factors, many of which are completely unrelated to the internal architecture of the individual. We now know that the most salient variables impacting human behavior are the genetic inheritance and the particular learning history of the individual. For example, take someone exposed to early childhood trauma and just try to teach them to “trust” others. Even in the most objectively safe environment, free from any hint of the past traumas, free from any possible cues associated with the traumatic memories, the individual’s nervous system has been conditioned to be in such a heightened and perpetual state of fight or flight that I guarantee you for a significant number of these people their heart rates will remain persistently elevated for hours on end. Recovery from trauma is a time consuming, energy requiring process of replacing old learning with new learning.

Our behaviors are the result of our genes and our environments, and are often very hard to predict with 100% certainty. There’s just nothing you can do to activate some hypothetical internal “will” to overcome the facts of our biology! We can, though learn to pay closer attention to the factors which influence the frequency of any given behavior, whether we call that behavior “bad” “immoral” or “irresponsible,” by way of just indicating “I would like to decrease the probability of this behavior in the future.” Likewise, we can also target behaviors for reinforcement, which means their probability increases moving forward, and thus give rise to overall patterns that we might enjoy calling “trustworthy,” “responsible.” However, it is important to realize that things like “trust” and “responsibility” are the result of behaviors, not the cause of them. So the notion that people act responsibly from some sense of “duty” which causes them to “make the right choices” (there’s that whole strange idea of a free will forcing us to do the “right” thing again….) is simply outmoded thinking. Isn’t it time we moved beyond the use of freedom and responsibility as models of human behavior?