The Operant Determinants of Human Behavior: Implications for Public Education
All human
behavior is determined by the way in which a person’s neural processes assess
experiences as positively reinforcing, punishing (aversive), or negatively
reinforcing (termination of aversive circumstance).
People
vary greatly as to the precise nature of their neural processes, which are
determined by intelligence, behavioral inclinations associated with natural
selection, features acquired from one’s specific familial heredity, and the
nature of the experiences that one has had at the juncture in which an
additional experience occurs.
People
also have unique arrays of experience that, however similar, nevertheless are
singular as to sequence and specificity.
Each
experience for a particular person is received as positively reinforcing,
punishing, or negatively reinforcing and recorded in the parts of the brain
associated with the intellectual, emotional, and physical components of the
experience.
At this
point the precise state of the particular person’s neural processes is
critical, determined by the amount of knowledge accumulated through reading,
research, and experience as the person’s biological constitution interacts with
the environment:
The
individual’s neural assessment of those interactions constitutes the process of
cognition.
Cognition,
then, is the process of neural evaluation of experiences that activate neurons
in the parts the brain stimulated by visual, emotional, physical, and
intellectual components of experience. Experience is neurally evaluated
and stored in the hippocampus, amygdala, and other memory centers for recall of
factual detail and categorization as positively reinforcing, punishing, or
negatively reinforcing.
The larger
the information base a person has established, resulting from experience but
also, critically, from breadth and depth of reading, research, and accumulation
of factual knowledge, the better positioned one is cognitively to make
decisions most likely to be maximally beneficial for the person at the upper
levels of human aesthetic, intellectual, physical, and emotional sensibility.
Human
beings do not have free will.
Human
behavior is determined by experiences neurally evaluated as positively
reinforcing, punishing, or negatively reinforcing.
But,
though lacking free will, people do make decisions according to cognitive
processes seeking reward and avoiding punishment. The quality of decisions made
and outcomes experienced are determined by a person’s knowledge base and by
both genetically acquired and experientially developed personal attributes.
We have,
then, the paradox that the better a person understands the determinants of
human behavior, including the absence of free will; and the stronger a
person’s knowledge base and personal aptitude for making qualitatively
beneficial decisions; that person then acts with an informed
assertiveness that we associate with free will.
Such a
person may be said to be acting with a level of self-awareness that we call
consciousness.
The higher
the level of consciousness, the more productively interactive a person can be
with the environmental determinants of human behavior:
The best
ship captain can never determine the motion of the seas; but knowledge
and developed ability give the captain opportunity to steer the ship in such a
way as to produce the best possible experience for that captain and for all of
those aboard.
The above
analysis follows the best information available from behaviorist, neural, and
cognitive psychology in assessing the determinants of human behavior.
Philosophers,
theologians, artists, novelists, and other creative human beings produce much
of metaphorical value that may be recorded as experience for neural
evaluation; such intellectually and artistically creative people are not
as well positioned to explain human behavior as are behaviorist psychologists
and neuroscientists, but their creations inspire and inform those who more
precisely assess why people do what they do.
...........................................................................
People are
only as good as their environment induces them to be.
Education
is a critical component of every person’s environment.
In the
perfect society of many years hence, homelife, subnational regions, national
conditions, and international circumstances are all conducive to ideal human
behavior. And all of these favorable
conditions result largely from the quality of education that has been received,
as describe in Article #3 in this edition of Journal of the K-12
Revolution: Essays and Research from
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Having
received such an education, citizens of the United States will be knowledgeable
across many subject areas of the liberal arts:
mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history (including governments
and economies of the past), high-quality literature, and the visual and musical
arts. People will also have gained
training a vocation or profession, ready to contribute their talents for the
common good. In vigorous classroom
discussions people will have considered the great issues that vexed people in
past centuries, reviewed the constituent components of their perfect society,
and speculated as to what changes might be necessary to maintain
perfection. And in those energetic
discussions, students on their way to becoming superior citizens will have
considered the highest ethical responses
to a multitude of life situations.
Such a
public education will produce citizens who sustain and ensure the continuance
of the perfect society, which in turn will perpetuate ideal in people who, as
is the case for all human beings, act not according to free will but rather
make decisions that they perceive correctly as being the most positively
reinforcing.
Ironically,
therefore, in clearly realizing that they as individuals they have no free
will, people will have moved collectively toward an understanding of the
drivers of human behavior that allow them to interact more powerfully with
their environment in the creation of societal perfection than if they had clung
to the illusion of free will.
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