April 10, 2014

April 10, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Instead of being caused by an inner agent, speech, like any other behavior, is caused by an outer agent, by another human being. Public speech doesn't make sense if it was caused by an inner self. To the extent that speech doesn’t make any sense, this is caused by our belief that we cause our own behavior. In the light of this huge social problem, it is useful to think of what is known as the fundamental attribution error, our common tendency to overestimate the causal influence of someone else’s internal characteristics on behavior, while overestimating the causal influence of the situation, when considering our own behavior. When explain the actions of others, we tend to think of what kind of a person he or she is, but when we explain our own behavior, we come up with all sorts of outside causes, such as social influences or situations.

By giving this phenomenon a name, however, social psychologists have NOT explained why we judge actions of others fundamentally differently than our own. The term actor-observer bias seems to refer to what Skinner spoke of as events that occur inside or outside of our skin. It is this distinction between what occurs inside and outside of our skin, which explains our behavior, because it describes the continuum of behavior, which comprises public as well as private events. The ubiquity and persistence of this unexplained fundamental attribution error should give us pause, because it is believed to have revealed something  troubling about human nature. When we hear about the Milgram Experiment, in which teachers are instructed to give electro shocks to learners, we believe there must be something wrong with these teachers instead of explaining their behavior within the circumstances of a coercive situation.

What is left out in the discussion of this experiment, which clearly illustrates that the situation causes our behavior, is the conclusion that human beings are NOT responsible for their own behavior. In other words, the shock that we experience upon finding out that ordinary people are willing to give shocks to these learners, is that we believe that we are responsible for our own behavior, in spite of the fact that this experiment proves us wrong. Even though these experiments have been replicated over and over again, we still don’t want to believe that we would do EXACTLY THE SAME under such circumstances. The conclusions of the Milgram Experiment, shocking as they may be, emphasize the effects of obedience to authority, but leave the issue of causation of our behavior by an inner agent untouched.

It is no surprise that researchers who looked for high levels of obedience as being associated with particular personality traits weren’t able to find anything. Given the known fact that situations cause behavior, it could have been predicted that most people, who are caught in a situation in which they are intimidated, oppressed and controlled by the powerful influence of others, go all the way and would administer the maximum amount of shock-level. Although participants didn’t report having negative psychological consequences and were glad they took part in the study, serious questions have been raised about the ethical issues involved in this experiment. How far should researchers be allowed to go to get an answer to their questions of interest? Even though this study made clear that behavior is caused by our environment in EXACTLY THE SAME way today as it was fifty years ago, the conclusion that this study should never be allowed to happen still stands. Apparently, people in power have a stake in preventing others from knowing that behavior is caused by environments. In a follow-up study participants stated they were happy to find out it was their environment which had caused them to behave the way they did.

Nobody talks about the fact that if 80% of the participants in the Milgram Experiment were actually happy to find out that their behavior had been caused by the situation, then such an explanation must have great importance for us. To call it bias is completely wrong. Why are we happy to know that we are not responsible for the bad actions we did? Many other explanations than behavior being caused by our environment can be given, but they obfuscate the cause of our behavior. We are always happy to know that we are not responsible for what we did, because we were made to do many things which we didn’t want to do. Nobody ever asked us if we wanted to do them. We were told, forced and threatened to do many horrible things.

The analogy of the Milgram Experiment with life itself is very compelling. Our tendency to defer to an authority figure is as strong as it ever was because this innate, involuntary behavior made us survive. This part of our behavior is explained by our phylogenetic history. Voluntary behavior, on the other hand, has to be learned during our life-time. Our ontogenetic history sets the stage for our ability to speak. When we are no longer allowed to speak, we revert back to biological mechanisms which predate the arrival of speech.

Those who don’t want others to know that behavior is caused by the environment basically don’t want them to know that their behavior is caused by them. Like magicians, they make it look as if things just disappear. What disappears when environmental causation of behavior disappears is our ability to see who is  controlling our environment. What disappears is that we don’t see that others, who are manipulating and exploiting us, are orchestrating and causing our behavior. The biggest trick being played on us is that we, not they, deal with the consequences of our behavior. In our struggle to free ourselves from this conundrum, we don't realize one behavior is causing another. The harder we try to shake our responsibility, the worse our situation gets. 

All human behavior is caused by others. The oppressed cause the behavior of the oppressor in the same way as the oppressor causes the behavior of the oppressed. We don’t see it that way because the oppressor and the oppressed agree on the causation of behavior. Although based on make-belief, we agree that our behavior is caused by each of us individually. And, we think we are not responsible for each other’s behavior. Our behavior is based on the ludicrous assumption that we are only responsible for ourselves. When we think of being responsible for others, we still don’t think of being responsible for their behaviors. Yet, even a little boy knows that when he has to be responsible for his little sister, he will have to deal with her behavior. Likewise, all who are entrusted with the care of others know that they are not dealing with individuals who cause their own behavior, but that they, as best as they can, cause the behavior of those who are in their care. 

Those who experience friendship, relationship or collaboration, feel responsible for each other’s behavior. Responsibility for each other’s behavior makes us happy, but responsibility for our own behavior makes us depressed. The reason for this is that with the former we are successful, but with the latter, we fail. Responsibility for the behavior of others doesn’t mean we will enable abuse, addiction or unhealthy behaviors, to the contrary, we will be enriched by it in multiple ways. However, this will not and cannot happen as long as we think that we are responsible for ourselves. Responsibility for each other’s behavior will create a better society than the one in which supposedly we are responsible only for our own behavior. In such a society, we simply keep passing the bucket. Societies have come and gone, but one thing has stayed the same: we talk as if we are not influenced by what other people are saying, as if it doesn’t matter. The earth is round and not flat. We must come to terms with the fact that how we think about the world is influenced by how others have talked with us.