Behavior Archives - Page 2 of 2

Character or Circumstances: Which Factor Is Stronger?

August 14, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

When it comes to determining how a person is likely to act or react at any given time, which factor plays a bigger role: personal character or the situation the person is in?

Research can be found that supports both sides, but I think we intuitively believe character plays the bigger role. We’re pretty sure we know how we would react even in situations we’ve never experienced because we believe we know who we are. And we behave consistently often enough that this belief isn’t usually tested or threatened. Feeling certain we know what we would do leads to many of the critical judgments we make about other people’s behavior.

On the other hand, classic experiments like Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments indicate that in some situations, ordinary people who would not otherwise do so are capable of behaving very badly toward their fellow humans. There has also been quite a bit of research on the effect of our environment on what we think and feel and the way we act. So before passing judgment on others, it has been suggested, we should try to “walk a mile in their shoes.”

This fascinating topic is addressed in one chapter of philosopher Julian Baggini’s book, The Ego Trick, which is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The answer to the question of which plays a bigger role, character or situation is, not surprisingly, it depends.

When someone’s character is variable, the situation plays a bigger role in determining action. But when someone’s character is consistent, the situation plays a lesser role.

It’s more interesting than that, however.

Passive or Active

Some of our character traits are passive: they are “the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and experience, without any particular effort on our own part.”

And some of our character traits are active: they are “the set of dispositions that we have because we’ve worked on developing them. To use a philosophical term of art, dispositions are active if they are the result of an individual’s attempts at self-constitution, to build who they are.”

As Baggini states, you can’t tell from the trait whether it’s passive or active. Someone who behaves in an extraverted manner may have had that tendency all along, which would make the trait passive. Or a person with a tendency toward introversion may have decided to try to become more extraverted, in which case their extraversion would be considered an active trait. He also says that “in real life, traits are never purely active or passive. Rather, they tend to greater activeness the more they reflect deliberate efforts to mould our own behaviours.”

Variable or Consistent

He further distinguishes passive traits as either variable or constant across situations, and he does the same with active traits. This leads to four trait categories:

passive and variable
passive and constant
active and variable
active and constant

All of us have traits in each of those categories. All of us are affected to one degree or another by the situations we’re in. However, the more our traits lean toward the passive and the variable, the more likely we are to be affected by situations. And the more our traits lean toward the active and the constant, the less likely we are to be affected by situations.

Results of behavior studies indicate that the majority of people behave differently across different situations and only a minority behaves consistently.

The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is something to be created; it does not arise organically.

As philosopher Christine Korsgaard says:

Beliefs and desires you have actively arrived at are more truly your own than those which have simply arisen in you.

The Takeaway

If you want to be less at the effect of your circumstances, one way to do that is to make a deliberate effort to cultivate those character traits you value.

Don’t be entirely surprised when your behavior is “out of character.”

And don’t be so sure you would behave differently in a given situation than other people who are in it are behaving.

Feedback Loops: Use Them or Be Used by Them

July 17, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that feedback loops make the world go round. Among other things, feedback loops keep machinery—both digital and analog—running smoothly, moderate our weather, and maintain homeostasis in our bodies. Feedback loops also function to either maintain or disrupt the status quo within businesses and other organizations, in politics, in the economy, in interpersonal relationships, and even in regard to our own behavior.

David DiSalvo calls feedback loops “the engines of your adaptive brain.” He says research across multiple disciplines—psychology, sociology, economics, engineering, epidemiology, and business strategy, for example—has validated feedback loops as a solid governing principle.

Day in and day out, we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops that run in our minds without our noticing. None of us stops to think through each stage of the loop—how the data we’ve gathered is being processed to lead us to our next action. And yet, even without our conscious monitoring, the loops just keep moving.

Decision-making requires conscious thought. So it may be more accurate to say we react based on feedback loops rather than that we make decisions. In the same way that our brain has criteria for evaluating the data provided by physiological feedback loops (in order to, say, maintain our body temperature and signal when we need to eat or drink—or stop eating or drinking), it also has criteria for evaluating the data provided by our mental, emotional, and behavioral feedback loops. The problem is that these criteria are part of our mental model of the world, much of which is unconscious, which means we’re not aware of it.

If we don’t stop to think through “how the data we’ve gathered is being processed,” we’re more likely to maintain the very habits of thinking and behaving we’re trying to change.

What Exactly Is a Feedback Loop?

The four stages of a feedback loop as described by science writer Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine are:

Evidence
Relevance
Consequence
Action

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage.

Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage.

But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead.

And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

When it comes to behavior-related feedback loops, such as changing an old habit or starting a new one, the sequence looks more like this:

Action
Evidence
Relevance
Consequence
New Action (or Reaction)

Just about any activity generates feedback of some sort. The result of an action can be large or infinitesimal, desirable or undesirable. Ideally, you notice what happens and use the feedback to determine what to do next. If you’re driving your car along a snowy road and it begins to skid, the skid is evidence that road conditions require you to make some type of adjustment to your driving. The evidence is relevant to you because you want to avoid an accident, which is a potential consequence of not paying attention to the evidence. Your reaction might be to slow down.

That’s a fairly straightforward example. Another driving-related example, one you may have encountered and which Goetz wrote about in Wired, involves “dynamic speed displays,” also called driver feedback signs. These speed limit signs include radar sensors attached to digital readouts that flash your vehicle’s speed once you get in range. Driver feedback signs have been so successful in decreasing speeding they’re springing up in more and more locations.

The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction.

The Premise May Be Simple, But the Process Isn’t.

The apparent result of an action we’ve taken—the evidence—must first be interpreted before we can proceed through the steps of the feedback loop to determine how to react. A roadside sign that tells you both the speed limit and your current speed provides you with straightforward, unambiguous evidence. If all the evidence we were faced with was similarly unambiguous, our lives would be much less complex and our decisions would be much easier to make. Alas, such is not the case.

As stated above, DiSalvo says we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops, but even in cases where we’re making decisions rather than simply reacting, it would be more accurate to say we make decisions based on our interpretation of the results of feedback loops.

Because we perceive the world through our particular mental model, we’re predisposed to interpret the results of our actions in certain ways. This can be problematic in general, but it’s especially so when we’re presented with negative evidence. Things didn’t work out the way we planned; we did something other than what we intended or wanted to do; or we’re faced with unexpected obstacles. The most useful way to respond to such information is to look at it objectively. We tried something and it didn’t work. We can then try to figure out why it didn’t work and decide whether to try it again or to try something else.

Instead of viewing the negative results of our actions objectively, however, we’re prone to interpreting them as evidence of failure. Once we interpret the results as evidence of failure, we’re much less likely to try to figure out what didn’t work and what to do next, and we’re much more likely to give up. At that point, the habit or behavior we were trying to change becomes even more entrenched than it was before we attempted to do something about it. And the goal we were trying to achieve seems even more distant.

A student in one of my classes reported struggling for several years with a particular issue of having to document, in detail, time spent caretaking a family member. Every time she tried and failed to find a system that worked, she interpreted it as evidence of personal failure. One day in class, she outlined something new to try. When she returned the following week, she was very excited, but not because the new system had worked. It hadn’t. What she was excited about was that when she realized that particular system didn’t work, rather than viewing it as more evidence of failure she was able to view it objectively. Because she was able to view it objectively, she didn’t waste time beating herself up over it. Instead, she immediately decided to try something else and that new system did work.

Confirmation bias is very powerful. If we believe we’re lazy or incapable or don’t follow through on anything, we’re likely to view the negative results of our actions as confirmation of our preexisting belief and then behave as though that belief is reality. So it’s important to remember that our automatic interpretations can’t always be trusted; sometimes we need to slow down long enough to question them.

Not everything you try is going to go smoothly or work out the way you hoped it would. Sometimes the road is slippery, under construction, or takes a detour. Noticing that what you tried simply didn’t work will allow you to use the information as feedback to help you determine the best way to correct your course—or to chart a brand new one.

How Many of these Myths Do You Believe?

March 12, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

These six beliefs are so pervasive they seem to be embedded in our culture. Most of them are meant to be motivational, but because they aren’t true, belief in these myths can have unintended consequences that harm rather than help. Ultimately, we need less external motivation and more straightforward education about how the brain and the mind actually work. Then we’ll be able to generate our own motivation—from inside.

Myth #1: We always have a choice.

The reality is that we rarely have a choice. The majority of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the result of automatic brain processes. We operate on autopilot most of the time because that’s how our brain is wired. Contrary to popular belief, there’s not much we can do about that. But that’s neither an excuse nor a reason to give up. What we can do is reprogram some of our automatic behavior so it reflects what’s important to us and what we really want.

Myth #2: Anything is possible.

Sure there are lots of things we have the ability to change. But the reality is that we all have limits and constraints; we all face obstacles; and randomness plays a much greater role in our lives than we’d like to admit. No matter how many hours I put into practicing the violin, for example, if I have no musical talent (and I don’t), I will not be the next Jascha Heifetz or Joshua Bell. However, the more I practice the violin, the better a violinist I will become because although I may not be good, I can always get better.

Myth #3: To live a satisfying life, we need to identify our life purpose or passion.

The reality is that no matter how hard we search, we won’t find our life purpose because we don’t have one. In fact searching for a particular life purpose seems to lead more people to a state of paralyzing anxiety than it does to a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. Giving up on the life-purpose myth can open the door to living with passion—which means identifying what we really want and then creating a big, juicy, satisfying life on our own terms.

Myth #4: It takes will power to achieve anything significant.

The reality is that will power is an unreliable resource that is easily exhausted. Will power and self-control are unequal to the task of changing habits or behavior or achieving big goals. We don’t need—and can’t get—more will power. What we do need is perseverance. Perseverance is what keeps us steadily moving toward the desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as we go. I call perseverance magic because it is.

Myth #5: If we focus our attention on the result we want, we’re more likely to get it.

The research has been in on this one for quite a while. The reality is that focusing on the end result (or outcome) of something we want actually decreases the likelihood we will get it. On the other hand, focusing our attention on the process—the individual steps or actions we need to take—increases the likelihood we’ll be successful.

Myth #6: We should always trust our gut.

The reality is that our gut instinct—otherwise known as intuition—is situation-specific and therefore fallible. Our unconscious (System 1) regularly makes suggestions to the conscious part of our brain (System 2). That’s what intuition is. If we know a lot about something or have a lot of experience in a particular area, we can probably rely on those suggestions. But intuition is not magic. In areas where we have no knowledge, skill, or experience, relying on intuition is a mistake. When intuition isn’t based on anything, it’s no better than a wild guess.

Letting go of these myths is one giant step toward creating a more deeply satisfying and meaningful life.

Habits of Behavior vs. Habits of Attention

July 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Last week poetdonald responded to my post What Do Your Habits Say About You? with this comment:

The following came to me as I was reading this post as well as your post on Mindfulness vs. Habits.

Let’s call this thinking out loud, Joycelyn. I’m going to pose 2 questions. I’m not ready to answer them, and I’m not sure if you are able to comment at this stage, but I feel it is important I ask and begin to explore them now.

For my Writing in Nature project, I am repeatedly going to sites and learning how to really see and thus write haiku. Eventually, I want to use what I learn to help others write haiku and connect with nature (for many, many reasons). Mindfulness is very important, as I need to pay attention—and at the same time be open—to my surroundings.

My two questions relating to this project…

1. Should I try to create habits to help with this process?

2. If I am not consciously creating habits, will I unconsciously be developing habits that will affect my seeing and writing?

These are such great questions! They got me thinking, first, about the distinction between habits of behavior and habits of attention. After that, I gravitated to looking at when we can best “use” habits to our advantage and when to avoid habits by focusing our attention intentionally. I hope this response will shed some additional light on the subject of habits.

Habits Are Habits

When we think or talk about habits, we’re usually referring to habits of behavior. Those are the habits that are the most obvious for us to see in both ourselves and other people. In fact, most advice about habits seems to assume those are the only kinds of habits we’re interested in changing. But after having explored this subject in considerable depth, I’ve concluded that behavioral habits are actually the easiest ones to deal with. There’s not much doubt as to whether we’re doing something or not doing it. We may not like what we see, but we can keep track of our behavior, either in the moment or after the fact.

Habits of attention, however less apparent they may be to us, are no less habitual than are habits of behavior. In both cases the unconscious brain (System 1) rather than the conscious brain (System 2) is directing us. System 1 takes in about 11,000,000 bits of information at a time, of which System 2 can process about 40. System 1 decides what information is important for us to notice and attend or respond to. It does this at a speed System 2 couldn’t hope to keep up with or replicate. So unless we make a conscious decision ahead of time as to where to direct our attention, System 1 will be making that decision for us. It can do so all day long, without much intervention from System 2.

So in response to poetdonald’s questions, I have two thoughts.

First: Develop as much of a routine as possible for going out to the sites in nature. Focus on creating the habit of doing so. That means identifying a trigger or cue (time of day, for example), following the same routine (although that doesn’t mean always going to the exact same place), and rewarding yourself for doing so. If you turn going out to these sites into a habit, you won’t have to waste any System 2 attention on the mechanics, whereas if you attempt to be flexible or spontaneous about going out to sites, you’ll be expending System 2 attention unnecessarily. Also, creating the habit of doing this will actually get your brain ready to pay attention and to write haiku.

Second: The kinds of habits you might unconsciously develop in regard to this venture are habits of attention, which are not the kinds of habits you want here. Habits of attention train the brain to always pay attention to this but not to that. You want to be conscious (using System 2) rather than unconscious so you can determine what to pay attention to. We all have the ability to train ourselves to be able to focus our attention, rather than allowing it to go wherever System 1 takes it.

Here are some excerpts from a very fine book on the subject, Rapt, Attention and the Focused Life, by Winifred Gallagher:

Paying rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a do-it-yourself project or a prayer, increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that life is worth living.

Not only how you focus, but also what you focus on can have important neurophysiological and behavioral consequences.

Just thinking about paying attention affects your brain, revving it up for the actual experience.

Your neuron populations can represent pretty much anything, but not everything at once. You have to choose—or they do. (John Hopkins neuroscientist Steve Yantis)

New research…shows that what you pay attention to, and how, can actually change your brain and thus your behavior. This extraordinarily practical scientific breakthrough shows that like physical fitness, the mental sort that sustains the focused life can be cultivated.

To give yourself an opportunity to make the most out of your Writing in Nature venture, you might want to put System 1 to use to create the behavioral habit, which will then free up System 2 attention for you to focus intentionally. Recognizing the distinction between behavioral habits and habits of attention is important for any creative pursuit. It’s a waste of time and attention to have to think about and decide whether or not to perform an activity we’ve already determined we want to do. That attention is limited and could be put to much better use!

Poetdonald, thank you for asking such great questions. I’d really like to hear more about how this works out for you.

I’m also interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts on the subject.

What Do Your Habits Say About You?

July 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Riding a Bicycle

Once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is subsequently initiated by the unconscious, usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Our resulting behavior is no longer intentional or volitional. We’re operating on autopilot.

We think behavioral habits are just something we do, but in spite of what we think, our habits reveal more about us than our intentional acts do.

Why We Have Habits

The brain creates behavioral habits, with or without our conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so we don’t have to waste our precious and limited conscious attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

When we’re learning something new (or creating or changing a habit), we have to focus a lot of conscious attention on what we’re doing. Anything that requires conscious attention uses energy, and in any given day we have a limited amount of it. It’s not an easily renewable resource. But once a habit is in place, little or no conscious attention is needed.

Examples:

driving a car
playing an instrument, if you’re trained
raiding the refrigerator in the evening
brushing your teeth before going to bed
checking your email first thing in the morning

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to the brain. It doesn’t care about our opinions of our habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do something—anything—often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert will power, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

But Aren’t I in Charge?

The common assumption is that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. We decide what we’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition. We may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while our minds are somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if we’re familiar with the route. We don’t need to pay conscious attention to our driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. We can zone out and our unconscious can generally get us to our destination just fine.

But since we tend to identify only with our conscious brain and not with our unconscious, we identify with our wandering mind instead of with what we’re actually doing. And because we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions), we’re not aware of how pervasive habits are in our lives.

When we find ourselves doing something we’d rather not do (or not doing something we’d rather do), we’d prefer to believe we’ve willfully chosen the behavior just so we can maintain the illusion of being in control. But it’s not very satisfying to think that we’re intentionally and repeatedly doing something we have an intention not to do. We don’t understand why we can’t simply will ourselves (or, in some cases, beat our lazy selves into submission) to get the desired results. We end up feeling inadequate, ashamed, guilty, and possibly slightly crazy. The obvious and easy way out is to dis-identify with the behavior. That’s not the real me. That doesn’t reflect who I am. It’s just something I do.

Just as the brain has a habit of generating habits with no regard for our judgments and opinions about them, we have a habit of thinking less of our habits than we do of our intentional acts regardless of what that behavior actually amounts to. It’s not what we do that matters so much as whether we did it intentionally or as a result of a habit.

Not only do we think intentional acts define us more than habits do, we also think that what we think and wish and want is more important than what we actually do. (Rene Descartes would be proud.)

We think that what we think is of supreme importance. Next most important are our intentional acts. At the bottom of the list, getting extremely short shrift, are our habits.

But we have it backwards. It’s what we do that ultimately matters, not what we think or want. And what we do is primarily habitual (unconsciously generated) rather than intentional (consciously determined). Habits actually say more about us than intentional acts do.

Still Don’t Think Much of Habits?

In a study of habits vs. non-habits,” reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that participants thought habits weren’t as important as non-habits in reaching goals and were relatively uninformative about themselves and others.

Given the percentage of time each day we spend engaged in habitual behaviors, this is stunningly wrong-headed.

Another odd finding that came out of the studies on habits vs. non-habits was this:

Feelings of stress increased with the deliberation involved in a single non-habitual behavior rather than as a result of multitasking. According to Roy Baumeister (Professor of Psychology, Florida State University), the act of decision making about a single behavior can deplete self-control mechanisms and impair subsequent acts of self-regulation such as decision-making and performance.

Habits, however, do not drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits. Once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up our conscious attention

There is less emotion associated with habitual behaviors than with non-habitual ones. There is a decreased sense of volition, as well, but that is accompanied by less stress, burnout, and feeling out of control.

It’s a little confounding that we fail to recognize the many benefits habits confer.

We Are What We D0

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

This is actually a paraphrase of Aristotle by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy. One thing Aristotle did say, though, is “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions.”

It’s easy to see how this works—that is, the positive, productive role of habits—in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

If a musician’s sense of identity includes her musicianship, then her habit of practice says quite a lot about who she is—as opposed to who a non-musician might be. When she shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, for example, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Her habit of practicing certainly contributed to her reaching her musical goals. Without it, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Habits and routines make achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines can free our conscious minds for greater things, and they are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Habits Really ARE Us

Our conscious intentions are not reliable when it comes to predicting what we’ll do when well-entrenched habitual behaviors are involved. In such cases, environmental cues and triggers are much more influential and, therefore, much more reliable predictors. What we have done before is what we are likely to do again. (Intentions, however, are more predictive of future behavior in new or novel situations.)

Because habitual behaviors are cued by situations, events, or other people instead of by our conscious prodding, we feel somewhat disengaged from them. It seems that there’s a continuum between intention and habit. It doesn’t much matter whether the habit in question is one we intentionally set out to create or one that was created when we weren’t paying attention. A habit is a habit is a habit, and the further a behavior moves from the intention end of the continuum to the habit end, the lower our opinion of it becomes.

There is an important role for consciousness to play in regard to our habits. If we understand and accept the enormous usefulness of habits, we can use the conscious part of our brain to decide which habits we want to create or change. That’s where the “I” we identify with comes into play. It sets the agenda for which behaviors to chunk and turn into habits.

That requires paying attention to what we’re actually doing. (It turns out that one of the very few ways we can get some idea of what’s in our unconscious is by observing what we do—not by observing what we think, dream, or wish for.) We also need to have some idea about what we want and what it will take to get it.

In any case, we would do well to give more credit to the unconscious part of our brain and recognize that it is just as much a part of who we are as is the conscious part, probably even more so. Then we might be able to start using it instead of letting it use us, which it does in this case by chunking behaviors without our awareness and consent.

Here’s a Question

If you identified with your habits, as much as you do with your intentional acts, how might that change your sense of yourself? And how might changing your sense of yourself alter your relationship with your habits?