essay about human behavior

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Essay on Human Behaviour

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Controversies in the Study of Human Behaviour

1. Essay on the Introduction to Human Behaviour:

After all, Homo sapiens has a science all its own, namely anthropology, and the other “social sciences” are almost exclusively concerned with this one species too. Nevertheless, many animal behaviour researchers, undaunted by all these specialists, have made Homo sapiens one of their study species, a choice justified by the fact that theories and methods developed by students of nonhuman animals can often illuminate human affairs in ways that escape scientists whose training and focus is exclusively anthropocentric.

The continuity of anatomy, physiology, brain, and human behaviour between people and other animals clearly implies that nonhuman research can shed light on human nature. Medical researchers rely on this continuity, using “animal models” whenever human research would be premature, too intrusive, or too risky. The same is true in basic behavioural research.

Consider, for example, the study of hormonal influences on human behaviour. The “activating” effects of circulating steroid hormones on sexual motivation aggression, persistence, and other behavioural phenomena were first established in other species and only then investigated in human beings.

Similarly, non-human research on the “organizing” (developmental) effects of these same gonadal hormones has motivated and guided human research on the behavioural consequences of endocrine disorders. In a more recent example, discoveries concerning the role of androgens in mediating tradeoffs between mating effort and male parental effort in animals with biparental care have inspired studies of the same phenomena in human fathers.

The situation is similar, but much more richly developed, in behavioural neuroscience, where virtually everything now known about the human brain was discovered with crucial inspiration and support from experimental research on homologous structures and processes that serve similar perceptual and cognitive functions in other species.

The fact that Homo sapiens is a member of the animal kingdom also means that it is both possible and enlightening to include our species in comparative analysis. A famous example is the association between testis size and mating systems. If a female mates polyandrously, i.e., with more than one male, and if she does so within a sufficiently short interval, then the different males ejaculates must “compete” for the paternity of her offspring.

Thus, although human testes are smaller than those of the most promiscuous primates, they are nevertheless larger than would be expected under monogamy; this observation has substantially bolstered the notion that ancestral women were not strictly monogamous in their sexual behaviour and hence that selection may have equipped the human female with facultative inclinations to cuckold their primary partners by clandestine adultery, or maintain multiple simultaneous sexual relationships, or both.

These ideas, which run contrary to the previous notion that only males would be expected to possess adaptive tendencies to mate polygamously, have had substantial impact on recent research into women’s sexuality.

2. Essay on the Research of Human Behaviour:

Getting involved in human research appears to be an occupational hazard for animal behaviour researchers. In his 1973 Nobel Prize autobiography, Niko Tinbergen revealed that he had long harbored a “dormant desire to make ethology apply its methods to human behaviour,” a desire that he acted upon, late in his research career, by studying autistic children.

Others made the move earlier in their careers, with greater impact. The British ethologist Nicholas Blurton Jones, one of the founders of “human ethology” and now a major figure in hunter-gatherer studies, did his PhD work on threat displays in the great tit (Parus major) but then began almost immediately to study human children.

He writes: “I studied at Oxford with Niko Tinbergen [who] shared the Nobel Prize with Konrad Lorenz for their demonstration that human behaviour should be studied in the same way as any other feature of an animal – as a product of evolution by natural selection.”

Just as they had done in their studies of other animals, Blurton Jones, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and others who had begun to call their field of research human ethology initially concentrated on categorizing overt motor patterns and counting how often each behavioural act was executed.

Indeed, other scientists without animal behaviour training were coming to similar views about the need for a more objective observational approach at about this time, and a few even turned to Darwin for inspiration. An interesting example is the work of Paul Ekman, an American psychologist who traveled to highland New Guinea and other remote places to prove that facial expressions of emotion and their interpretations by observers is cross- culturally universal rather than exhibiting arbitrary cultural variation from place to place, as many anthropologists had supposed.

This research program was akin to that of Eibl- Eibesfeldt in its questions, its theoretical foundations, and its results, but perhaps because Ekman was trained in psychology, he was less reluctant than the ethologist to use elicited verbal data as his test of universality.

Of course, one might say that the classical ethological approach has withered in nonhuman research too, with the ascendancy of behavioural ecology, but the hallmark of classical ethology, namely observational study of human behaviour in its natural context, has not been forsaken.

3. Essay on the Uniqueness of Human Behaviour:

Another reason why treating human beings as “just another animal” can be problematic is that in many ways we are very exceptional animals indeed. Although other creatures can learn from conspecifics and may even have local traditions, human cultural transmission and the diversity of practices that it has engendered are unique, and how we should approach the study of human behaviour from an evolutionary adaptationist perspective is therefore controversial.

One approach to the issue of cultural diversity is to attempt to make sense of the distinct practices of people in different parts of the world as representing facultative adaptation to the diversity in local ecological circumstances.

A nice example is provided by demonstrations that cross- cultural variation in the use of spices is partly to be understood as response to variation in local and foodstuff- specific rates at which unrefrigerated foods spoil and in the antimicrobial effectiveness of particular spices.

Presumably, such cultural adaptations are usually the product of an “evolutionary” process that does not entail cumulative change in gene pools but only in socially transmitted information and practices, although there are certainly some cases in which there has been gene-culture coevolution. The best-known example of the coevolution of human genes and human culture concerns the variable prevalence of genes that permit people to digest milk and milk products beyond early childhood.

In populations that lack dairying traditions, most adults are lactose-intolerant and suffer indigestion if they drink milk, because they no longer produce lactase, the enzyme that permits us to metabolize lactose. But in populations with a long history of dairying, genotypes that engender persistent lactase production into adulthood predominate, apparently as a result of natural selection favouring those able to derive nutrition from their herds.

Enlightening as such approaches may be, however, they can never make functional sense of every particular cultural phenomenon, for it is certain that a great deal of cultural variability is functionally arbitrary in its details, and at least a few culturally prescribed practices have disastrous fitness consequences.

A famous example, of such a disastrous cultural practice is the transmission of kuru, a fatal prion- induced brain disease akin to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, among the Fore people of highland New Guinea. Like other prion-induced diseases, kuru is not easily transmitted under most circumstances, but as a result of funerary practices that included intimate handling of corpses and ritual cannibalism of parts of deceased kinsmen, the Fore suffered an epidemic resulting in high levels of mortality.

4. Essay on the Measurement of Human Behaviour

It is true that over the decades psychology has moved towards becoming a quantitative science which tries to introduce measurements with precision and accuracy comparable to measurements in exact sciences such as physics, chemistry, etc. There is no doubt that the acceptance of model of the exact sciences has contributed very much to the growth and development of scientific psychology.

It must be stated that modern psychologists have gone far ahead of other social and behavioural sciences. In fact other social sciences such as sociology and political science have tried to adopt the tools and techniques of psychology for their own research and study.

However, the particular problem of quantifying and measuring behaviour still has its own peculiarities. While we may accept the standards and norms of accuracy and prediction set by the exact sciences, nevertheless, psychologists have had and will have to develop their own approaches to measurement and quantification of behaviour because of the very nature and characteristics of human behaviour.

Some of the peculiarities of human behaviour are given below:

Firstly all types of human behaviour are not explicit or visible. Only some aspects of behaviour are capable of being measured with instruments and gadgets directly. Thus, the inner needs and motives are difficult to measure directly.

Secondly, the individuals themselves would not be willing or ready to reveal certain aspects of human behaviour such as inner conflicts, problems of adjustments etc.

Thirdly the psycho-analytic school demonstrated the importance of unconscious processes which are not open to the awareness of the behaving individuals themselves. Such aspects have to be mostly inferred or measured through indirect methods. Thus, we may broadly categories measurements in psychology into indirect and direct measures.

Early attempts at measurement in psychology were simple and direct and were concerned with those aspects of human behaviour that could be directly measured. Later, with the enthusiasm of psychologists to measure other aspects of human behaviour, indirect approaches were developed.

By and large, sensations, learning, remembering, perception and similar variables are measured through direct means whereas indirect measures are largely used in studying motivational, personality and attitudinal variables.

Most intelligence tests are direct measures of intelligence while all the projective tests are indirect measures. Direct measures have the advantage in that they are simpler or more objective and are easy to handle, whereas indirect measures, to a large extent, depend on the interpretation of the individual’s behaviour and inference based on certain guidelines.

Yet another point that may be borne in mind is that direct measures are largely independent of specific theories of behaviour or personality. In fact, psychologists with different theoretical approaches and biases employed the same direct measures.

Indirect measures are largely associated with specific theories. Thus, projective tests such as the Rorschach test and TAT rest on certain basic assumptions about human behaviour and personality. Therefore, it can be said that direct measures give us measures of behaviour as they occur, while indirect measures give us scores which are arrived at on the basis of inferences and interpretations based on particular theories. Indirect measures are based on particular rationales.

It is also possible to consider psychological measures as empirical measures and rational measures. Empirical measures are based on the occurrence of certain behavioural patterns and are statistically arrived at. They are not based on any theory. Logical measures are based on certain theories. The best instance of convergence of the two traditions is found in the construction of attitude scales.

Errors in Measurement of Human Behaviour:

It is apparent that there are many instances where behavioural measures can be contaminated by errors. The requisites of accuracy, validity and reliability were explained. Naturally, when a number of errors creep in, the characteristics are affected adversely.

Errors in psychological measures are of two types; systematic errors and random errors. Systematic errors are those which occur repeatedly and are constant. For example, if while measuring the intelligence of a person, we employ a test which is too easy, then the individual’s intelligence is overestimated. Such an error is called a systematic error.

On the other hand, even if we employ a proper test and measure the individual’s intelligence on different occasions it is possible that the measured IQ on these different occasions will not be the same. Such variations are occasional examples of random errors which result from factors such as the subject’s mood, motivation, skills of the tests, etc.

Whenever we measure human behaviour we should be aware of the presence of such errors. Systematic errors are avoided by a very careful choice and usage of the test.

Random errors are taken care of by making repeated measurements and taking the average of all these scores. Errors in measurement, therefore, result from the defects in the measuring tools, defects in the measuring conditions and also certain factors in the subject as well as the experimenter.

5. Essay on the Controversies in the Study of Human Behaviour:

There are a number of current controversies in the study of human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, and most of them closely parallel ongoing controversies in animal behaviour more generally.

One perennial point of discussion is whether measures of reproductive success are essential for testing adaptationist hypotheses. Evolutionary anthropologists who reported that wealth and/or status is positively related to reproductive success in certain societies presented these correlations as testimony to the relevance of Darwinism for the human sciences, and this invited the rejoinder that a failure to find such a correlation in modern industrialized societies must then constitute evidence of Darwinism’s irrelevance.

Anthropologist Donald Symons then entered the fray with a forceful counterargument to the effect that measures of reproductive attainment are virtually useless for testing adaptationist hypotheses, which should instead be tested on the basis of “design” criteria.

These arguments are sometimes read as if the issue applies only to the cultural animal Homo sapiens but, as Thornhill has pointed out, the same debate can be found in the nonhuman literature, with writers like Wade and Reeve and Sherman arguing that fitness consequences provide the best test of adaptationist hypotheses, whereas Thornhill and Williams defend the opposing view.

A related point of contention concerns the characterization of the human behaviour “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). This concept is often invoked in attempts to understand the prevalence of some unhealthy or otherwise unfit practice in the modern world, such as damaging levels of consumption of refined sugar or psychoactive drugs.

The point is simply that these substances did not exist in the selective environment that shaped the human adaptations they now exploit, and that this is why we lack defenses against their harmful effects.

Essentially the same point can be made about more benign modern novelties, such as effective contraceptive devices, telephones, and erotica- there is little reason to expect that we will use these inventions in ways that promote our fitness, since they have, in a sense, been designed to “parasitize” our adaptations, and there has not been sufficient time for natural selection to have crafted countermeasures to their effects.

The EEA concept has become controversial because several writers believe that it entails untestable assumptions about the past; presupposes that human evolution stopped in the Pleistocene; and is invoked in a pseudo-explanatory post-hoc fashion to dispose of puzzling failures of adaptation.

Yet it is surely not controversial that a world with novel chemical pollutants, televised violence, internet pornography, and exogenous opiates is very different from that in which the characteristic features of human psychophysiology evolved.

Once again, these debates about the utility of the EEA concept are read as if the issue were peculiar to the human case. But in fact, any adaptation in any species has its “environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” and the notion that some adaptations are tuned to aspects of past environments which no longer exist is as relevant to the behaviour of other animals as it is to our own.

Byers, for example, has argued that various aspects of the human behaviour of the pronghorn, a social ungulate of North American grasslands, can only be understood as adaptations to predators that are now extinct.

Similarly, Coss et al. have demonstrated that California ground squirrels from different populations, none of which presently live in sympatry with rattlesnakes, may or may not exhibit adaptive anti-predator responses to introduced snakes and that the difference reflects how many millennia have passed since the squirrel populations lost contact with the rattlesnakes.

Yet another issue of current controversy concerns the reasons why there is so much genetic diversity affecting behavioural diversity within human populations. Personality dimensions in which there are stable individual differences consistently prove to have heritabilities of around 0.5, which means that about half the variability among individuals in things like extroversion, shyness, and willingness to take risks can be attributed to differences in genotype.

The puzzle is why selection “tolerates” this variability- if selection works by weeding out suboptimal variants and thereby optimizing quantitative traits, how can all this heritable diversity persist? One possibility is that the diversity is a functionless byproduct of the fact that selection on many traits is weak relative to mutation pressure; in finite populations, not all attributes can be optimized by selection simultaneously.

Another possibility is that heritable diversity in personality represents the expression of formerly neutral, variants in evolutionary novel environments. Still another view, argued by Tooby and Cosmides, is that heritable personality diversity is indeed functionless “noise” but is nevertheless maintained by frequency-dependent selection favouring rare genotypes in a never-ending “arms race” with polymorphic rapidly evolving pathogen strains.

Finally, Wilson has defended the possibility that there is a substantial prevalence of adaptive behavioural polymorphisms maintained by selection on the behavioural phenotypes themselves.

The “evolutionarily stable” state in game-theory models of social behaviour is often a mix of different types. If most individuals are honest reciprocators, for example, this creates a niche for exploitative “cheaters” whose success is maximal when they are extremely rare and declines as they become more prevalent.

Once again, this is obviously an issue of relevance in other species as well as human beings, and it is not an easy issue to resolve. However, the right answer will influence how we should look at matters ranging from sexual selection to psychopathology. Gangestad has argued that there is an evolutionarily stable mix of women with distinct sexualities such that some are inclined to long-term monogamy and others are not.

Lalumière et al. present evidence that “psychopaths,” socially exploitative people who are lacking in empathy for others, are not suffering from pathology but are instead a discrete type of person that is maintained at low frequencies by selection. How such ideas will fare in the light of future theorizing and research is an open question.

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Essay , Psychology , Human Behaviour , Essay on Human Behaviour

Essay on Human Behaviour

Students are often asked to write an essay on Human Behaviour in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Human Behaviour

Understanding human behavior.

Human behavior is the way people act and react. It can be influenced by many things like feelings, the environment, or past experiences. For example, someone might be very happy at a party but sad if they lose a game.

Influences on Behavior

What we do is often shaped by where we are and who we are with. If we are with friends, we might act differently than when we are alone. Also, rules at home or school guide how we behave.

Learning from Others

We learn how to act by watching others. If a child sees a sibling sharing toys, they may learn to share too. This is called learning by example. It’s a big part of growing up.

Choices and Behavior

Every day, we make choices that show our behavior. Choosing to help someone or saying ‘thank you’ are ways we can show kindness. Our choices help shape our behavior.

Changing Behavior

People can change how they act. If someone learns that being angry doesn’t solve problems, they might try to stay calm next time. Changing behavior can be hard, but it is possible.

250 Words Essay on Human Behaviour

Human behavior is the way people act and think. It’s what we do every day, like talking, playing, and even sleeping. Scientists who study how the mind works say that many things shape our actions. These include how we grow up, the friends we have, and the rules we follow.

Why We Act Differently

Each person is unique, which means we don’t all behave the same way. Imagine you have a twin. Even if you look the same, you might like different foods or games. This is because our choices often depend on our own personal experiences and feelings.

We learn a lot by watching other people. For example, if you see someone getting a reward for being kind, you might start being kinder too. This is called learning by example. Parents, teachers, and friends can all be examples that we learn from.

Feelings and Behavior

Our feelings play a big part in how we act. If you are happy, you might smile or laugh. But if you’re sad, you might not want to play. Understanding our emotions can help us know why we act in certain ways.

Choices and Consequences

Every action has a result, which can be good or bad. If you study hard, you might get good grades. This shows that making good choices can lead to good things happening.

In conclusion, human behavior is a mix of many things, including our surroundings, learning, and feelings. By understanding why we do things, we can make better choices and understand others better too.

500 Words Essay on Human Behaviour

Human behavior is the way people act and think in different situations. It’s like a code that tells us what someone might do next. Everyone is unique, so their actions can be very different from one another. Scientists and psychologists study human behavior to learn why we do the things we do.

Why We Act the Way We Do

A big part of our behavior comes from our brains. Our thoughts and feelings can push us to act in certain ways. For example, if you feel happy, you might smile or laugh. If you are scared, you might run away or hide. Our families, friends, and even the places we live also shape our actions. They teach us what is okay to do and what is not.

From the time we are babies, we watch and copy others. This is how we learn to walk, talk, and eat. As we grow older, we keep learning by watching others. We learn good habits, like saying “please” and “thank you,” and sometimes bad habits too. This copying is a powerful way we learn behavior.

Choices and Decisions

Every day, we make choices. Some are small, like what to wear, and some are big, like whom to be friends with. When we make a choice, we think about the good and bad things that could happen. This thinking helps us decide what to do. Our choices can affect not just us, but also other people around us.

Feelings play a huge role in our actions. When we are happy, we may do kind things. When we are angry, we might do things we later wish we hadn’t. Understanding our feelings can help us control our actions better. It’s like having a remote control for our behavior.

Group Behavior

When we are in a group, we might act differently than when we are alone. This is because we want to fit in with the group. Sometimes, being part of a group can make us braver and do things we wouldn’t do by ourselves. Other times, we might do something just because everyone else is doing it, even if we know it’s wrong.

Change Over Time

As we get older, our behavior changes. A little child might throw toys when angry, but as they grow, they learn new ways to show they are upset. We all learn and change as we have more experiences. It’s like getting updates on a computer; we get better at handling different situations.

Human behavior is a big and interesting subject. It’s about why we do things, how we learn from others, and how we change over time. By understanding behavior, we can get along better with others and make good choices. It’s important for us to think about why we act the way we do, so we can be the best versions of ourselves.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Human Cloning
• Essay on Human Body System
• Essay on How To Stay Healthy

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4 Human Behavior: Nature or Nurture?

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• Describe Galton’s contributions towards the Nature and Nurture theory.
• Differentiate between the influence of genes and environment, as well as a combination of both.
• Define and Describe Epigenetics.
• Explain the difference between Social Learning Theory and Genetic Inheritance Theory.
• Explain the findings of the Bobo doll experiment.
• Understand the Grizzly Bear article.
• Understand the Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies article.
• Understand key concepts and definitions pertaining to nature vs nurture.

Introduction: What Do We Mean By Nature Vs Nurture?

In this chapter it is discussed that nature vs nurture is the debate of whether we are a product of nature (genetics) or nurture (environment). There is evidence supporting both sides of the debate. By the end of this, you should be able to determine that both nature and nurture play a key role in humans and animal behaviour.

Memory Match

The memory match game allows you to identify keywords pertaining to nature and nurture. The goal is to click a card and match the word on the card, with another card that has the same word. Now that you know how to play, let’s see how many you can match!

When we refer to nature, we are talking about our genetics that we inherit from our parents.  A fairly recent study (Kamran, 2016) conducted in Pakistan suggests that the parallels drawn regarding the temperament of siblings are due to their genetics. The results of this study states that the genetic makeup of relatives of the family (even deceased) also influence how the child acts. These behaviours of the child are identifiable by the family members even though the deceased family member no longer is present.

Browse through Galton’s timeline and discover his story!

Pair the Pioneer

The following pioneers play a key role in what we know about nature and nurture today! The goal of the game is to pair the correct pioneer with the correct fact pertaining to the pioneer. If you place your mouse above the pioneer, there is a fun fact that has a clue to help. Be careful, there is a trick pioneer!

• Nature:  refers to all of the genes and hereditary factors that influence who we are- from our physical appearance to our personality characteristics (definition retrieved from verywellmind.com on November 17, 2019).
• Epigenetics : the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in DNA sequence (definition retrieved from MerriamWebster.com on November 17, 2019)

When we refer to nurture, we are talking about all the environmental factors that influence us. Environmental factors include but aren’t limited to parenting style, birth order, peers, family size, culture, language, education, etc. The main argument for nurture is that the environment is what makes us who we are. Those who are on the extreme side of nurture are empiricists. They believe humans are born as blank slates and acquire all information from their environment with their 5 senses.

Behaviorism, established by John Watson, is the theory that all behavior is a result of stimulation from the environment or a consequence of the individual’s previous conditioning. Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is on the side of nurture.

A study in 2019 performed an experiment on Bonobos (a species of chimpanzee) to observe social learning. The results of the experiment found supporting evidence that Bonobos are able to learn from observing others of their species just like humans.

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory states that people learn by observing, imitating, and modeling behavior. In 1961, Bandura’s famous Bobo doll experiment’s findings support the argument for nurture in that our environment influences our behavior.

Key Terms: 

• Nurture: Environmental factors that influence our growth and behaviour.
• Empiricism: The belief that people are born as a blank slate learn everything from their environment.

Nature or Nurture? Or Both?

Given what we have discussed so far, is it genes or environment that influences behaviour? It is actually both genetic and social influences that contributes to an individual’s behaviour. Below is a video that explains how both components contribute to an individual.

Now that you understand how genes and environment work together, is it possible for one component to influence an individual more than the other? Below is an article that explains how grizzly bears’ conflict behaviour may attribute to genetic inheritance or social learning… talk about beary bad behaviour!

 Beary Bad Behaviour

Grizzly bear den

Welcome to the Grizzly Bear den. Inside there are paws, click any paw to learn key concepts within the article! Don’t worry, the bears won’t bite!

A study done in Alberta, Canada analyzed the genetic and environmental relationship of grizzly bears, pertaining to their offspring’s conflict behaviour. The study predicts that aggression is determined genetically from either biological parents. If the cub’s conflict behaviour is inherited from the father’s genes, then necessary relocation of wildlife protection is necessary to avoid human-conflict interaction. If the cub’s behaviour is inherited from the mother’s genes, then relocation of female bears is much more difficult to do as there are legal wildlife implications.

The study genotyped 213 grizzly bears, most of which were males. The study described conflict-beahviour or “problem bear” as those that exemplified invasive or aggressive behaviour on private property, public property, or had an incident with an individual. The results of the study indicated that the offspring of the female parent displayed a negative interaction more so than the offspring from the male parent.

According to Morehouse et al., (2016), “ results support the social learning hypothesis, but not the genetic inheritance hypothesis as it relates to the acquisition of conflict behaviour. If human-bear conflict was an inherited behaviour, we would have expected to see a significant relationship between paternal conflict behaviour and offspring behaviour.  Social learning has the potential to perpetuate grizzly bear conflicts highlighting the importance of preventing initial conflicts, but also removing problem individuals once conflicts start” (p.7). 

 Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies

In this study, it talks about the general observations of 50 study samples regarding over 800,000 pairs of twins and how their behavior may have been impacted by genes or by their environment. Due to the ethical limitations of human experimentation, there can only be a conclusion that there are mild causal effects. Heritable estimations are quite frankly useless in these studies because the results purely depend on the environmental conditions of the study participants, and it only becomes applicable when all participants are in the same environment.

If a separated teen is brought up in a rich environment, their gene makeup has a higher likelihood of being a factor in their upbringing. If his or her counterpart twin, in contrast, is brought up in a poor environment, the influence of their genes will be insignificant because of a less nurturing surrounding. Another example is the first sexual encounter on separated twins; do their shared genetics influence them to take action around the same time? The answer is no, because such events are a result of the environmental influences of delinquency.

Psychologist Eric Turkheimer states that there are essentially Three Laws of Behaviour Genetics:

“First Law: All human behavioural traits are heritable.

Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.

Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioural traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.”

He explains that genes only make up ~50% of our behaviours while the rest is influenced by our environment.

“The omnipresence of genetic influences does not [mean] that behaviour is less psychological or more biologically determined”, but it’s the facilitation of the environmental conditions that allows people to bring out their full behaviouristic tendencies to light; and even then, our genes are only half the story.

The following video is a study that looked at the effects of nature and nurture on twins. In short, there are many coincidences that may seem that their actions come from genetic relations.

• To answer the question of whether we are a product of Nature or Nurture, we are both. We are a product of our genetics, and our environment. Through our genetics, we have a certain baseline personality, but that changes over time due to the influence of our surroundings: the people we hang out with and the overall level of nourishment in our growing environment.
•  In summary, based on several studies and research it can be concluded that human behaviour is both nature and nurture. In addition, evidence also supports that animal behaviour specifically (grizzly bears) is also due to nature and nurture. Many aspects of the nature vs. nurture theory argues that various behaviours in humans are based both on genetics and the environment of an individual. However, it is possible that one variable from the theory may contribute more of an effect on the individual.

Chapter References

ABC News (2018, Mar 10) 20/20 Mar 9 Part 2: Adopted twins were separated and then part of a secret study. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://youtu.be/0-2FFsuitO4

Benjamin, J. (2017, March 31). Cancer: Nature Vs. Nurture. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://marybird.org/blog/olol/cancer-nature-vs-nurture

Biography.com Editors. (2019, August 28). Charles Darwin Biography. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://www.biography.com/scientist/charles-darwin.

Cherry, K. (2019, July 1). The Age Old Debate of Nature vs. Nurture. Retrieved November 19, 2019, from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-nature-versus-nurture-2795392.

David L, “Social Learning Theory (Bandura),” in Learning Theories, February 7, 2019, https://www.learning-theories.com/social-learning-theory-bandura.html .

Det medisinke fakultet. (2016, January 26). Epigenetics: Nature vs nurture. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://youtu.be/k50yMwEOWGU

Everywhere Psychology. (2012, August 28). Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment. Retrieved November 19, 2019, from https://youtu.be/dmBqwWlJg8U .

FuseSchool-Global Education. (2019, August 27). Nature vs Nurture | Genetics | Biology | FuseSchool Retrieved November 18, 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmctxRcmloc

Gervais, M. (2017, August 31). Dr. Albert Bandura – The Theory of Agency. Retrieved November 19, 2019, from https://art19.com/shows/minutes-on-mastery/episodes/a1cef11d-e32c-4f03-ba4a-262a91268f4c.

Johnson W, Turkheimer E, Gottesman II, Bouchard TJ Jr. Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research.  Curr Dir Psychol Sci . 2010;18(4):217–220. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01639.x

Kamran, F., PhD. (2016). Are siblings different as ‘day and night’? parents’ perceptions of nature vs. nurture.  Journal of Behavioural Sciences, 26 (2), 95-115. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.kpu.ca:2443/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.kpu.ca:2443/docview/1864042019?accountid=35875

Merriam-Webster. (2019). Retrieved November 17, 2019 from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epigenetics

McLeod, S. A. (2016, Feb 05). Bandura – social learning theory . Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html

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• Published: 27 January 2022

The future of human behaviour research

• Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier 1 ,
• Jean Burgess 2 , 3 ,
• Maurizio Corbetta 4 , 5 ,
• Kate Crawford 6 , 7 , 8 ,
• Esther Duflo 9 ,
• Laurel Fogarty 10 ,
• Alison Gopnik 11 ,
• Sari Hanafi 12 ,
• Mario Herrero 13 ,
• Ying-yi Hong 14 ,
• Yasuko Kameyama 15 ,
• Tatia M. C. Lee 16 ,
• Gabriel M. Leung 17 , 18 ,
• Daniel S. Nagin 19 ,
• Anna C. Nobre 20 , 21 ,
• Merete Nordentoft 22 , 23 ,
• Aysu Okbay 24 ,
• Andrew Perfors 25 ,
• Laura M. Rival 26 ,
• Cassidy R. Sugimoto 27 ,
• Bertil Tungodden 28 &
• Claudia Wagner 29 , 30 , 31  

Nature Human Behaviour volume  6 ,  pages 15–24 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Human behaviour is complex and multifaceted, and is studied by a broad range of disciplines across the social and natural sciences. To mark our 5th anniversary, we asked leading scientists in some of the key disciplines that we cover to share their vision of the future of research in their disciplines. Our contributors underscore how important it is to broaden the scope of their disciplines to increase ecological validity and diversity of representation, in order to address pressing societal challenges that range from new technologies, modes of interaction and sociopolitical upheaval to disease, poverty, hunger, inequality and climate change. Taken together, these contributions highlight how achieving progress in each discipline will require incorporating insights and methods from others, breaking down disciplinary silos.

Genuine progress in understanding human behaviour can only be achieved through a multidisciplinary community effort. Five years after the launch of Nature Human Behaviour , twenty-two leading experts in some of the core disciplines within the journal’s scope share their views on pressing open questions and new directions in their disciplines. Their visions provide rich insight into the future of research on human behaviour.

Artificial intelligence

Kate Crawford

Much has changed in artificial intelligence since a small group of mathematicians and scientists gathered at Dartmouth in 1956 to brainstorm how machines could simulate cognition. Many of the domains that those men discussed — such as neural networks and natural language processing — remain core elements of the field today. But what they did not address was the far-reaching social, political, legal and ecological effects of building these systems into everyday life: it was outside their disciplinary view.

Since the mid-2000s, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly expanded as a field in academia and as an industry, and now a handful of powerful technology corporations deploy these systems at a planetary scale. There have been extraordinary technical innovations, from real-time language translation to predicting the 3D structures of proteins 1 , 2 . But the biggest challenges remain fundamentally social and political: how AI is widening power asymmetries and wealth inequality, and creating forms of harm that need to be prioritized, remedied and regulated.

The most urgent work facing the field today is to research and remediate the costs and consequences of AI. This requires a deeper sociotechnical approach that can contend with the complex effect of AI on societies and ecologies. Although there has been important work done on algorithmic fairness in recent years 3 , 4 , not enough has been done to address how training data fundamentally skew how AI models interpret the world from the outset. Second, we need to address the human costs of AI, which range from discrimination and misinformation to the widespread reliance on underpaid labourers (such as the crowd-workers who train AI systems for as little as US $2 per hour) 5 . Third, there must be a commitment to reversing the environmental costs of AI, including the exceptionally high energy consumption of the current large computational models, and the carbon footprint of building and operating modern tensor processing hardware 6 . Finally, we need strong regulatory and policy frameworks, expanding on the EU’s draft AI Act of 2021.

By building a more interdisciplinary and inclusive AI field, and developing a more rigorous account of the full impacts of AI, we give engineers and regulators alike the tools that they need to make these systems more sustainable, equitable and just.

Kate Crawford is Research Professor at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, New York, NY, USA; and the Inaugural Visiting Chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.

Anthropology

Laura M. Rival

The field of anthropology faces fundamental questions about its capacity to intervene more effectively in political debates. How can we use the knowledge that we already have to heal the imagined whole while keeping people in synchrony with each other and with the world they aspire to create for themselves and others?

The economic systems that sustain modern life have produced pernicious waste cultures. Globalization has accelerated planetary degradation and global warming through the continuous release of toxic waste. Every day, like millions of others, I dutifully clean and prepare my waste for recycling. I know it is no more than a transitory measure geared to grant manufacturers time to adjust and adapt. Reports that most waste will not be recycled, but dumped or burned, upset me deeply. How can anthropology remain a critical project in the face of such orchestrated cynicism, bad faith and indifference? How should anthropologists deploy their skills and bring a sense of shared responsibility to the task of replenishing the collective will?

To help to find answers to these questions, anthropologists need to radically rethink the ways in which we describe the processes and relations that tie communities to their environments. The extinction of experience (loss of direct contact with nature) that humankind currently suffers is massive, but not irreversible. New forms of storytelling have successfully challenged modernist myths, particularly their homophonic promises 7 . But there remain persistent challenges, such as the seductive and rampant power of one-size-fits-all progress, and the actions of elites, who thrive on emulation, and in doing so fuel run-away consumerism.

To combat these challenges, I simply reassert that ‘nature’ is far from having outlasted its historical utility. Anthropologists must join forces and reanimate their common exploration of the immense possibilities contained in human bodies and minds. No matter how overlooked or marginalized, these natural potentials hold the key to what keeps life going.

Laura M. Rival is Professor of Anthropology of Nature, Society and Development, ODID and SAME, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK .

Communication and media studies

Jean Burgess

The communication and media studies field has historically been animated by technological change. In the process, it has needed to navigate fundamental tensions: communication can be understood as both transmission (of information), and as (social) ritual 8 ; relatedly, media can be understood as both technology and as culture 9 .

The most important technological change over the past decade has been the ‘platformization’ 10 of the media environment. Large digital platforms owned by the world’s most powerful technology companies have come to have an outsized and transformative role in the transmission (distribution) of information, and in mediating social practices (whether major events or intimate daily routines). In response, digital methods have transformed the field. For example, advances in computational techniques enabled researchers to study patterns of communication on social media, leading to disciplinary trends such as the quantitative description of ‘hashtag publics’ in the mid-2010s 11 .

Platforms’ uses of data, algorithms and automation for personalization, content moderation and governance constitute a further major shift, giving rise to new methods (such as algorithmic audits) that go well beyond quantitative description 12 . But platform companies have had a patchy — at times hostile — relationship to independent research into their societal role, leading to data lockouts and even public attacks on researchers. It is important in the interests of public oversight and open science that we coordinate responses to such attempts to suppress research 13 , 14 .

As these processes of digital transformation continue, new connections between the humanities and technical disciplines will be necessary, giving rise to a new wave of methodological innovation. This next phase will also require more hybrid (qualitative and quantitative; computational and critical) methods 15 , not only to get around platform lockouts but also to ensure more careful attention is paid to how the new media technologies are used and experienced in everyday life. Here, innovative approaches such as the use of data donations can both aid the ‘platform observability’ 16 that is essential to accountability, and ensure that our research involves the perspectives of diverse audiences.

Jean Burgess is Professor of Digital Media at the School of Communication and Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland Australia; and Associate Director at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia .

Computational social science

Claudia Wagner

Computational social science has emerged as a discipline that leverages computational methods and new technologies to collect, model and analyse digital behavioural data in natural environments or in large-scale designed experiments, and combine them with other data sources (such as survey data).

While the community made critical progress in enhancing our understanding about empirical phenomena such as the spread of misinformation 17 and the role of algorithms in curating misinformation 18 , it has focused less on questions about the quality and accessibility of data, the validity, reliability and reusability of measurements, the potential consequences of measurements and the connection between data, measurement and theory.

I see the following opportunities to address these issues.

First, we need to establish privacy-preserving, shared data infrastructures that collect and triangulate survey data with scientifically motivated organic or designed observational data from diverse populations 19 . For example, longitudinal online panels in which participants allow researchers to track their web browsing behaviour and link these traces to their survey answers will not only facilitate substantive research on societal questions but also enable methodological research (for example, on the quality of different data sources and measurement models), and contribute to the reproducibility of computational social science research.

Second, best practices and scientific infrastructures are needed for supporting the development, evaluation and re-use of measurements and the critical reflection on potentially harmful consequences of measurements 20 . Social scientists have developed such best practices and infrastructural support for survey measurements to avoid using instruments for which the validity is unclear or even questionable, and to support the re-usability of survey scales. I believe that practices from survey methodology and other domains, such as the medical industry, can inform our thinking here.

Finally, the fusion of algorithmic and human behaviour invites us to rethink the various ways in which data, measurements and social theories can be connected 20 . For example, product recommendations that users receive are based on measurements of users’ interests and needs: however, users and measurements are not only influenced by those recommendations, but also influence them in turn. As a community we need to develop research designs and environments that help us to systematically enhance our understanding of those feedback loops.

Claudia Wagner is Head of Computational Social Science Department at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Köln, Germany; Professor for Applied Computational Social Sciences at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; and External Faculty Member of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria .

Criminology

Daniel S. Nagin

Disciplinary silos in path-breaking science are disappearing. Criminology has had a longstanding tradition of interdisciplinarity, but mostly in the form of an uneasy truce of research from different disciplines appearing side-by-side in leading journals — a scholarly form of parallel play. In the future, this must change because the big unsolved challenges in criminology will require cooperation among all of the social and behavioural sciences.

These challenges include formally merging the macro-level themes emphasized by sociologists with the micro-, individual-level themes emphasized by psychologists and economists. Initial steps have been made by economists who apply game theory to model crime-relevant social interactions, but much remains to be done in building models that explain the formation and destruction of social trust, collective efficacy and norms, as they relate to legal definitions of criminal behaviour.

A second opportunity concerns the longstanding focus of criminology on crimes involving the physical taking of property and interpersonal physical violence. These crimes are still with us, but — as the daily news regularly reports — the internet has opened up broad new frontiers for crime that allow for thefts of property and identities at a distance, forms of extortion and human trafficking at a massive scale (often involving untraceable transactions using financial vehicles such as bitcoin) and interpersonal violence without physical contact. This is a new and largely unexplored frontier for criminological research that criminologists should dive into in collaboration with computer scientists who already are beginning to troll these virgin scholarly waters.

The final opportunity I will note also involves drawing from computer science, the primary home of what has come to be called machine learning. It is important that new generations of criminologists become proficient with machine learning methods and also collaborate with its creators. Machine learning and related statistical methods have wide applicability in both the traditional domains of criminological research and new frontiers. These include the use of prediction tools in criminal justice decision-making, which can aid in crime detection, and the prevention and measuring of crime both online and offline, but also have important implications for equity and fairness due to their consequential nature.

Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA .

Behavioural economics

Bertil Tungodden

Behavioural and experimental economics have transformed the field of economics by integrating irrationality and nonselfish motivation in the study of human behaviour and social interaction. A richer foundation of human behaviour has opened many new exciting research avenues, and I here highlight three that I find particularly promising.

Economists have typically assumed that preferences are fixed and stable, but a growing literature, combining field and laboratory experimental approaches, has provided novel evidence on how the social environment shapes our moral and selfish preferences. It has been shown that prosocial role models make people less selfish 21 , that early-childhood education affects the fairness views of children 22 and that grit can be fostered in the correct classroom environment 23 . Such insights are important for understanding how exposure to different institutions and socialization processes influence the intergenerational transmission of preferences, but much more work is needed to gain systematic and robust evidence on the malleability of the many dimensions that shape human behaviour.

The moral mind is an important determinant of human behaviour, but our understanding of the complexity of moral motivation is still in its infancy. A growing literature, using an impartial spectator design in which study participants make consequential choices for others, has shown that people often disagree on what is morally acceptable. An important example is how people differ in their view of what is a fair inequality, ranging from the libertarian fairness view to the strict egalitarian fairness view 24 , 25 . An exciting question for future research is whether such moral differences reflect a concern for other moral values, such as freedom, or irrational considerations.

A third exciting development in behavioural and experimental economics is the growing set of global studies on the foundations of human behaviour 26 , 27 . It speaks to the major concern in the social sciences that our evidence is unrepresentative and largely based on studies with samples from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies 28 . The increased availability of infrastructure for implementing large-scale experimental data collections and methodological advances carry promise that behavioural and experimental economic research will broaden our understanding of the foundations of human behaviour in the coming years.

Bertil Tungodden is Professor and Scientific Director of the Centre of Excellence FAIR at NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway .

Development economics

Esther Duflo

The past three decades have been a wonderful time for development economics. The number of scholars, the number of publications and the visibility of the work has dramatically increased. Development economists think about education, health, firm growth, mental health, climate, democratic rules and much more. No topic seems off limits!

This progress is intimately connected with the explosion of the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and, more generally, with the embrace of careful causal identification. RCTs have markedly transformed development economics and made it the field that it is today.

The past three decades (until the COVID-19 crisis) have also been very good for improving the circumstances of low-income people around the world: poverty rates have fallen; school enrolment has increased; and maternal and infant mortality has been halved. Although I would not dare imply that the two trends are causally related, one of the reasons for these improvements in the quality of life — even in countries where economic growth has been slow — is the greater focus on pragmatic solutions to the fundamental problems faced by people with few resources. In many countries, development economics researchers (particularly those working with RCTs) have been closely involved with policy-makers, helping them to develop, implement and test these solutions. In turn, this involvement has been a fertile ground for new questions, which have enriched the field.

I imagine future change will, once again, come from an unexpected place. One possible driver of innovation will come from this meeting between the requirements of policy and the intellectual ambition of researchers. This means that the new challenges of our planet must (and will) become the new challenges of development economics. Those challenges are, I believe, quite clear: rethinking social protection to be better prepared to face risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic; mitigating, but unfortunately also adapting to, climate changes; curbing pollution; and addressing gender, racial and ethnic inequality.

To address these critical issues, I believe the field will continue to rely on RCTs, but also start using more creatively (descriptively or in combination with RCTs) the huge amount of data that is increasingly available as governments, even in poor countries, digitize their operations. I cannot wait to be surprised by what comes next.

Esther Duflo is The Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA, USA; and cofounder and codirector of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) .

Political science

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier

Political science remains one of the most pluralistic disciplines and we are on the move towards engaged pluralism. This takes us beyond mere tolerance to true, sincere engagement across methods, methodologies, theories and even disciplinary boundaries. Engaged pluralism means doing the hard work of understanding our own research from the multiple perspectives of others.

More data are being collected on human behaviour than ever before and our advances in methods better address the inherent interdependencies of the data across time, space and context. There are new ways to measure human behaviour via text, image and video. Data creation can even go back in time. All these advancements bode well for the potential to better understand and predict behaviour. This ‘data century’ and ‘golden age of methods’ also hold the promise to bridge, not divide, political science, provided that there is engaged methodological pluralism. Qualitative methods provide unique insights and perspectives when joined with quantitative methods, as does a broader conception of the methodologies underlying and launching our research.

I remain a strong proponent of leveraging dynamics and focusing on heterogeneity in our research questions to advance our disciplines. Doing so brings in an explicit perspective of comparison around similarity and difference. Our questions, hypotheses and theories are often made more compelling when considering the dynamics and heterogeneity that emerges when thinking about time and change.

Striving for a better understanding of gender, race and ethnicity is driving deeper and fuller understandings of central questions in the social sciences. The diversity of the research teams themselves across gender, sex, race, ethnicity, first-generation status, religion, ideology, partisanship and cultures also pushes advancement. One area that we need to better support is career diversity. Supporting careers in government, non-profit organizations and industry, as well as academia, for graduate students will enhance our disciplines and accelerate the production of knowledge that changes the world.

Engaged pluralism remains a foundational key to advancement in political science. Engaged pluralism supports critical diversity, equity and inclusion work, strengthens political scientists’ commitment to democratic principles, and encourages civic engagement more broadly. It is an exciting time to be a social scientist.

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier is Vernal Riffe Professor of Political Science, Professor of Sociology (courtesy) and Distinguished University Professor at the Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus OH, USA; and immediate past President of the American Political Science Association .

Cognitive psychology

Andrew Perfors

Cognitive psychology excels at understanding questions whose problem-space is well-defined, with precisely specified theories that transparently map onto thoroughly explored experimental paradigms. That means there is a vast gulf between the current state of the art and the richness and complexity of cognition in the real world. The most exciting open questions are about how to bridge that gap without sacrificing rigour and precision. This requires at least three changes.

First, we must move beyond typical experiments. Stimuli must become less artificial, with a naturalistic structure and distribution. Similarly, tasks must become more ecologically valid: less isolated, with more uncertainty, embedded in natural situations and over different time-scales.

Second, we must move beyond considering individuals in isolation. We live in a rich social world and an environment that is heavily shaped by other humans. How we think, learn and act is deeply affected by how other people think and interact with us; cognitive science needs to engage with this more.

Third, we must move beyond the metaphor of humans as computers. Our cognition is deeply intertwined with our emotions, motivations and senses. These are more than just parameters in our minds; they have a complexity and logic of their own, and interact in nontrivial ways with each other and more typical cognitive domains such as learning, reasoning and acting.

How do we make progress on these steps? We need reliable real-world data that are comparable across people and situations, reflect the cognitive processes involved and are not changed by measurement. Technology may help us with this, but challenges surrounding privacy and data quality are huge. Our models and analytic approaches must also grow in complexity — commensurate with the growth in problem and data complexity — without becoming intractable or losing their explanatory power.

Success in this endeavour calls for a different kind of science that is not centred around individual laboratories or small stand-alone projects. The biggest advances will be achieved on the basis of large, rich, real-world datasets from different populations, created and analysed in collaborative teams that span multiple domains, fields and approaches. This requires incentive structures that reward team-focused, slower science and prioritize the systematic construction of reliable knowledge over splashy findings.

Andrew Perfors is Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Complex Human Data Hub, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia .

Cultural and social psychology

Ying-yi Hong

I am writing this at an exceptional moment in human history. For two years, the world has faced the COVID-19 pandemic and there is no end in sight. Cultural and social psychology are uniquely equipped to understand the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically examining how people, communities and countries are dealing with this extreme global crisis — especially at a time when many parts of the world are already experiencing geopolitical upheaval.

During the pandemic, and across different nations and regions, a diverse set of strategies (and subsequent levels of effectiveness) were used to curb the spread of the disease. In the first year of the pandemic, research revealed that some cultural worldviews — such as collectivism (versus individualism) and tight (versus loose) norms — were positively associated with compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures as well as with fewer infections and deaths 29 , 30 . These worldview differences arguably stem from different perspectives on abiding to social norms and prioritizing the collective welfare over an individual’s autonomy and liberty. Although in the short term it seems that a collectivist or tight worldview has been advantageous, it is unclear whether this will remain the case in the long term. Cultural worldviews are ‘tools’ that individuals use to decipher the meaning of their environment, and are dynamic rather than static 31 . Future research can examine how cultural worldviews and global threats co-evolve.

The pandemic has also amplified the demarcation of national, political and other major social categories. On the one hand, identification with some groups (for example, national identity) was found to increase in-group care and thus a greater willingness to sacrifice personal autonomy to comply with COVID-19 measures 32 . On the other hand, identification with other groups (for example, political parties) widened the ideological divide between groups and drove opposing behaviours towards COVID-19 measures and health outcomes 33 . As we are facing climate change and other pressing global challenges, understanding the role of social identities and how they affect worldviews, cognition and behaviour will be vital. How can we foster more inclusive (versus exclusive) identities that can unite rather than divide people and nations?

Ying-yi Hong is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management and Associate Dean (Research) at the Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China .

Developmental psychology

Alison Gopnik

Developmental psychology is similar to the kind of book or band that, paradoxically, everyone agrees is underrated. On the one hand, children and the people who care for them are often undervalued and overlooked. On the other, since Piaget, developmental research has tackled some of the most profound philosophical questions about every kind of human behaviour. This will only continue into the future.

Psychologists increasingly recognize that the minds of children are not just a waystation or an incomplete version of adult minds. Instead, childhood is a distinct evolutionarily adaptive phase of an organism, with its own characteristic cognitions, emotions and motivations. These characteristics of childhood reflect a different agenda than those of the adult mind — a drive to explore rather than exploit. This drive comes with motivations such as curiosity, emotions such as wonder and surprise and remarkable cognitive learning capacities. A new flood of research on curiosity, for example, shows that children actively seek out the information that will help them to learn the most.

The example of curiosity also reflects the exciting prospects for interdisciplinary developmental science. Machine learning is increasingly using children’s learning as a model, and developmental psychologists are developing more precise models as a result. Curiosity-based AI can illuminate both human and machine intelligence. Collaborations with biology are also exciting: for example, in work on evolutionary ‘life history’ explanations of the effects of adverse experiences on later life, and new research on plasticity and sensitive periods in neuroscience. Finally, children are at the cutting edge of culture, and developmental psychologists increasingly conduct a much wider range of cross-cultural studies.

But perhaps the most important development is that policy-makers are finally starting to realize just how crucial children are to important social issues. Developmental science has shown that providing children with the care that they need can decrease poverty, inequality, disease and violence. But that care has been largely invisible to policy-makers and politicians. Understanding scientifically how caregiving works and how to support it more effectively will be the most important challenge for developmental psychology in the next century.

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA .

Science of science

Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Why study science? The goal of science is to advance knowledge to improve the human condition. It is, therefore, essential that we understand how science operates to maximize efficiency and social good. The metasciences are fields that are devoted to understanding the scientific enterprise. These fields are distinguished by differing epistemologies embedded in their names: the philosophy, history and sociology of science represent canonical metasciences that use theories and methods from their mother disciplines. The ‘science of science’ uses empirical approaches to understand the mechanisms of science. As mid-twentieth-century science historian Derek de Solla Price observed, science of science allows us to “turn the tools of science on science itself” 34 .

Contemporary questions in the science of science investigate, inter alia, catalysts of discovery and innovation, consequences of increased access to scientific information, role of teams in knowledge creation and the implications of social stratification on the scientific enterprise. Investigation of these issues require triangulation of data and integration across the metasciences, to generate robust theories, model on valid assumptions and interpret results appropriately. Community-owned infrastructure and collective venues for communication are essential to achieve these goals. The construction of large-scale science observatories, for example, would provide an opportunity to capture the rapidly expanding dataverse, collaborate and share data, and provide nimble translations of data into information for policy-makers and the scientific community.

The topical foci of the field are also undergoing rapid transformation. The expansion of datasets enables researchers to analyse a fuller population, rather than a narrow sample that favours particular communities. The field has moved from an elitist focus on ‘success’ and ‘impact’ to a more-inclusive and prosopographical perspective. Conversations have shifted from citations, impact factors and h -indices towards responsible indicators, diversity and broader impacts. Instead of asking ‘how can we predict the next Nobel prize winner?’, we can ask ‘what are the consequences of attrition in the scientific workforce?’. The turn towards contextualized measurements that use more inclusive datasets to understand the entire system of science places the science of science in a ripe position to inform policy and propel us towards a more innovative and equitable future.

Cassidy R. Sugimoto is Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA .

Sari Hanafi

In the past few years, we have been living through times in which reasonable debate has become impossible. Demagogical times are driven by the vertiginous rise of populism and authoritarianism, which we saw in the triumph of Donald Trump in the USA and numerous other populist or authoritarian leaders in many places around the globe. There are some pressing tasks for sociology that can be, in brief, reduced to three.

First, fostering democracy and the democratization process requires disentangling the constitutive values that compose the liberal political project (personal liberty, equality, moral autonomy and multiculturalism) to address the question of social justice and to accommodate the surge in people’s religiosity in many parts in the globe.

Second, the struggle for the environment is inseparable from our choice of political economy, and from the nature of our desired economic system — and these connections between human beings and nature have never been as intimate as they are now. Past decades saw rapid growth that was based on assumptions of the long-term stability of the fixed costs of raw materials and energy. But this is no longer the case. More recently, financial speculation intensified and profits shrunk, generating distributional conflicts between workers, management, owners and tax authorities. The nature of our economic system is now in acute crisis.

The answer lies in a consciously slow-growing new economy that incorporates the biophysical foundations of economics into its functioning mechanisms. Society and nature cannot continue to be perceived each as differentiated into separate compartments. The spheres of nature, culture, politics, social, economy and religion are indeed traversed by common logics that allow a given society to be encompassed in its totality, exactly as Marcel Mauss 35 did. The logic of power and interests embodied in ‘ Homo economicus ’ prevents us from being able to see the potentiality of human beings to cultivate gift-giving practices as an anthropological foundation innate within social relationships.

Third, there are serious social effects of digitalized forms of labour and the trend of replacing labour with an automaton. Even if digital labour partially reduces the unemployment rate, the lack of social protection for digital labourers would have tremendous effects on future generations.

In brief, it is time to connect sociology to moral and political philosophy to address fundamentally post-COVID-19 challenges.

Sari Hanafi is Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; and President of the International Sociological Association .

Environmental studies (climate change)

Yasuko Kameyama

Climate change has been discussed for more than 40 years as a multilateral issue that poses a great threat to humankind and ecosystems. Unfortunately, we are still talking about the same issue today. Why can’t we solve this problem, even though scientists pointed out its importance and urgency so many years ago?

These past years have been spent trying to prove the causal relationship between an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, global temperature rise and various extreme weather events, as well as developing and disseminating technologies needed to reduce emissions. All of these tasks have been handled by experts in the field. At the same time, the general public invested little time in this movement, probably expecting that the problem would be solved by experts and policy-makers. But that has not been the case. No matter how much scientists have emphasized the crisis of climate change or how many clean energy technologies engineers have developed, society has resisted making the necessary changes. Now, the chances of keeping the temperature rise within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels — the goal necessary to minimize the effects of climate change — are diminishing.

We seem to finally be realizing the importance of social scientific knowledge. People need to take scientific information seriously for clean technology to be quickly diffused. Companies are more interested in investing in newer technology and product development when they know that their products will sell. Because environmental problems are caused by human activity, research on human behaviour is indispensable in solving these problems.

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not devoted many pages to the areas of human awareness and behaviour ( https://www.ipcc.ch/ ). The IPCC’s Third Working Group, which deals with mitigation measures, has partially spotlighted research on institutions, as well as on concepts such as fairness. People’s perception of climate change and the relationship between perception and behavioural change differ depending on the country, societal structure and culture. Additional studies in these areas are required and, for that purpose, more studies from regions such as Asia, Africa and South America, which are underrepresented in terms of the number of academic publications, are particularly needed.

Yasuko Kameyama is Director, Social Systems Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan .

Sustainability (food systems)

Mario Herrero

The food system is in dire straits. Food demand is unprecedented, while malnutrition in all its forms (obesity, undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies) is rampant. Environmental degradation is pervasive and increasing, and if it continues, the comfort zone for humanity and ecosystems to thrive will be seriously compromised. From bruises and shapes to sell-by dates, we tend to find many reasons to exclude perfectly edible food from our plates, whereas in other cases not enough food reaches hungry mouths owing to farming methods, pests and lack of adequate storage. These types of inequalities are common and — together with inherent perverse incentives that maintain the status quo of how we produce, consume and waste increasingly cheap and processed food — they are launching us towards a disaster.

We are banking on a substantial transformation of the food system to solve this conundrum. Modifying food consumption and waste patterns are central to the plan for achieving healthier diets, while increasing the sustainability of our food system. This is also an attractive policy proposition, as it could lead to gains in several sectors. Noncommunicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease could decline, while reducing the effects of climate change, deforestation, excessive water withdrawals and biodiversity loss, and their enormous associated — and largely unaccounted — costs.

Modifying our food consumption and waste patterns is very hard, and unfortunately we know very little about how to change them at scale. Yes, many pilots and small examples exist on pricing, procurement, food environments and others, but the evidence is scarce, and the magnitude of the change required demands an unprecedented transdisciplinary research agenda. The problem is at the centre of human agency and behaviour, embodying culture, habits, values, social status, economics and all aspects of agri-food systems. Certainly, one of the big research areas for the next decade if we are to reach the Sustainable Development Goals leaving no one behind.

Mario Herrero is Professor, Cornell Atkinson scholar and Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at the Department of Global Development, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA .

Cultural evolution

Laurel Fogarty

Humans are the ultimate ‘cultural animals’. We are innovative, pass our cultures to one another across generations and build vast self-constructed environments that reflect our cultural biases. We achieve things using our cultural capacities that are unimaginable for any other species on earth. And yet we have only begun to understand the dynamics of cultural change, the drivers of cultural complexity or the ways that we adapt culturally to changing environments. Scholars — anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists — have long studied culture, aiming to describe and understand its staggering diversity. The relatively new field of cultural evolution has different aims, one of the most important of which is to understand the mechanics in the background — what general principles, if any, govern human cultural change?

Although the analogy of culture as an evolutionary process has been made since at least the time of Darwin 36 , 37 , cultural evolution as a robust field of study is much younger. From its beginnings with the pioneering work of Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman 38 , 39 , 40 and Boyd & Richerson 41 , 42 , the field of cultural evolution has been heavily theoretical. It has drawn on models from genetic evolution 40 , 43 , 44 , 45 , ecology 46 , 47 and epidemiology 40 , 48 , extending and adapting them to account for unique and important aspects of cultural transmission. Indeed, in its short life, the field of cultural evolution has largely been dominated by a growing body of theory that ensured that the fledgling field started out on solid foundations. Because it underpins and makes possible novel applications of cultural evolutionary ideas, theoretical cultural evolution’s continued development is not only crucial to the field’s growth but also represents some of its most exciting future work.

One of the most urgent tasks for cultural evolution researchers in the next five years is to develop, alongside its theoretical foundations, robust principles of application 49 , 50 , 51 . In other words, it is vital to develop our understanding of what we can — and, crucially, cannot — infer from different types of cultural data. Where do we draw those boundaries and how can we apply cultural evolutionary theory to cultural datasets in a principled way? The tandem development of robust theory and principled application has the potential to strengthen cultural evolution as a robust, useful and ground-breaking inferential science of human behaviour.

Laurel Fogarty is Senior Scientist at the Department of Human Behaviour, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany .

Over the past decade, research using molecular genetic data has confirmed one of the main conclusions of twin studies: all human behaviour is partly heritable 52 , 53 . Attempts at examining the link between genetics and behaviour have been met with concerns that the findings can be abused to justify discrimination — and there are good historical grounds for these concerns. However, these findings also show that ignoring the contribution of genes to variation in human behaviour could be detrimental to a complete understanding of social phenomena, given the complex ways that genes and environment interact.

Uncovering these complex pathways has become feasible only recently thanks to rapid technological progress reducing the costs of genotyping. Sample sizes in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have risen from tens of thousands to millions in the past decade, reporting thousands of genetic variants associated with different behaviours 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 . New ways to use GWAS results have emerged, the most important one arguably being a method to aggregate the additive effects of many genetic variants into a ‘polygenic index’ (PGI) (also known as a ‘polygenic score’) that summarizes an individual’s genetic propensity towards a trait or behaviour 58 , 59 . Being aggregate measures, PGIs capture a much larger share of the variance in the trait of interest compared to individual genetic variants 60 . Thus, they have paved the way for follow-up studies with smaller sample sizes but deeper phenotyping compared to the original GWAS, allowing researchers to, for example, analyse the channels through which genes operate 61 , 62 , how they interact with the environment 63 , 64 , and account for confounding bias and boost statistical power by controlling for genetic effects 65 , 66 .

Useful as they are, PGIs and the GWAS that they are based on can suffer from confounding due to environmental factors that correlate with genotypes, such as population stratification, indirect effect from relatives or assortative mating 67 . Now that the availability of genetic data enables large-scale within-family GWAS, the next big thing in behaviour genetic research will be disentangling these sources 68 . While carrying the progress further, it is important that the field prioritizes moving away from its currently predominant Eurocentric bias by extending data collection and analyses to individuals of non-European ancestries, as the exclusion of non-European ancestries from genetic research has the potential to exacerbate health disparities 69 . Researchers should also be careful to communicate their findings clearly and responsibly to the public and guard against their misappropriation by attempts to fuel discriminatory action and discourse 70 .

Aysu Okbay is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands .

Cognitive neuroscience

Anna C. Nobre

Since the ‘decade of the brain’ in the 1990s, ingenuity in cognitive neuroscience has focused on measuring and analysing brain signals. Adapting tools from statistics, engineering, computer science, physics and other disciplines, we studied activity, states, connectivity, interactions, time courses and dynamics in brain regions and networks. Unexpected findings about the brain yielded important insights about the mind.

Now is a propitious time to upgrade the brain–mind duumvirate to a brain–mind–behaviour triumvirate. Brain and mind are embodied, and their workings are expressed through various effectors. Yet, experimental tasks typically use simple responses to capture complex psychological functions. Often, a button press — with its limited dimensions of latency and accuracy — measures anticipating, focusing, evaluating, choosing, reflecting or remembering. Researchers venturing beyond such simple responses are uncovering how the contents of mind can be studied using various continuous measures, such as pupil diameter, gaze shifts and movement trajectories.

Most tasks also restrict participants’ movements to ensure experimental control. However, we are learning that principles of cognition derived in artificial laboratory contexts can fail to generalize to natural behaviour. Virtual reality should prove a powerful methodology. Participants can behave naturally, and experimenters can control stimulation and obtain quality measures of gaze, hand and body movements. Noninvasive neurophysiology methods are becoming increasingly portable. Exciting immersive brain–mind–behaviour studies are just ahead.

The next necessary step is out of the academic bubble. Today the richest data on human behaviour belong to the information and technology industries. In our routines, we contribute data streams through telephones, keyboards, watches, vehicles and countless smart devices in the internet of things. These expose properties such as processing speed, fluency, attention, dexterity, navigation and social context. We supplement these by broadcasting feelings, attitudes and opinions through social media and other forums. The richness and scale of the resulting big data offer unprecedented opportunities for deriving predictive patterns that are relevant to understanding human cognition (and its disorders). The outcomes can then guide further hypothesis-driven experimentation. Cognitive neuroscience is intrinsically collaborative, combining a broad spectrum of disciplines to study the mind. Its challenge now is to move from a multidisciplinary to a multi-enterprise science.

Anna C. Nobre is Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK; and Director of Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK .

Social and affective neuroscience

Tatia M. C. Lee

Social and affective neuroscience is a relatively new, but rapidly developing, field of neuroscience. Social and affective neuroscience research takes a multilevel approach to make sense of socioaffective processes, focusing on macro- (for example, social environments and structures), meso- (for example, social interactions) and micro (for example, socio-affective neural processes and perceptions)-level interactions. Because the products of these interactions are person-specific, the conventional application of group-averaged mechanisms to understand the brain in a socioemotional context has been reconsidered. Researchers turn to ecologically valid stimuli (for example, dynamic and virtual reality instead of static stimuli) and experimental settings (for example, real-time social interaction) 71 to address interindividual differences in social and affective responses. At the neural level, there has been a shift of research focus from local neural activations to large-scale synchronized interactions across neural networks. Network science contributes to the understanding of dynamic changes of neural processes that reflect the interactions and interconnection of neural structures that underpin social and affective processes.

We are living in an ever-changing socioaffective world, full of unexpected challenges. The ageing population and an increasing prevalence of depression are social phenomena on a global scale. Social isolation and loneliness caused by measures to tackle the current pandemic affect physical and psychological well-being of people from all walks of life. These global issues require timely research efforts to generate potential solutions. In this regard, social and affective neuroscience research using computational modelling, longitudinal research designs and multimodal data integration will create knowledge about the basis of adaptive and maladaptive social and affective neurobehavioural processes and responses 72 , 73 , 74 . Such knowledge offers important insights into the precise delineation of brain–symptom relationships, and hence the development of prediction models of cognitive and socioaffective functioning (for example, refs. 75 , 76 ). Therefore, screening tools for identifying potential vulnerabilities can be developed, and timely and precise interventions can be tailored to meet individual situations and needs. The translational application of social and affective neuroscience research to precision medicine (and policy) is experiencing unprecedented demand, and such demand is met with unprecedented clinical and research capabilities.

Tatia M. C. Lee is Chair Professor of Psychology at the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Human Neuroscience, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China .

Maurizio Corbetta

Focal brain disorders, including stroke, trauma and epilepsy, are the main causes of disability and loss of productivity in the world, and carry a cumulative cost in Europe of about € 500 billion per year 77 . The disease process affects a specific circuit in the brain by turning it off (as in stroke) or pathologically turning it on (as in epilepsy). The cause of the disabling symptoms is typically local circuit damage. However, there is now overwhelming evidence that symptoms reflect not only local pathology but also widespread (network) functional abnormalities. For instance, in stroke, an average lesion — the size of a golf ball — typically alters the activity of on average 25% of all brain connections. Furthermore, normalization of these abnormalities correlates with optimal recovery of function 78 , 79 .

One exciting treatment opportunity is ‘circuit-based’ stimulation: an ensemble of methods (optogenetic, photoacoustic, electrochemical, magnetic and electrical) that have the potential to normalize activity. Presently, this type of therapy is limited by numerous factors, including a lack of knowledge about the circuits, the difficulty of mapping these circuits in single patients and, most importantly, a principled understanding of where and how to stimulate to produce functional recovery.

A possible solution lies in a strategy (developed with G. Deco, M. Massimini and M. Sanchez-Vivez) that starts with an in-depth assessment of behaviour and physiological studies of brain activity to characterize the affected circuits and associated patterns of functional abnormalities. Such a multi-dimensional physiological map of a lesioned brain can be then fed to biologically realistic in silico models 80 . A model of a lesioned brain affords the opportunity to explore, in an exhaustive way, different kinds of stimulation to normalize faulty activity. Once a suitable protocol is found it can be exported first to animal models, and then to humans. Stimulation alone will not be enough. Pairing with behavioural training (rehabilitation) will stabilize learning and normalize connections.

The ability to interface therapy (stimulation, rehabilitation and drugs) with brain signals or other kinds of behavioural sensor offers another exciting opportunity, to open the ‘brain’s black box’. Most current treatments in neuroscience are given with no regard to their effect on the underlying brain signals or behaviour. Giving patients conscious access to their own brain signals may substantially enhance recovery, as the brain is now in the position to use its own powerful connections and learning mechanisms to cure itself.

Maurizio Corbetta is Professor and Chair of Neurology at the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC), University of Padova, Italy; and Principal Investigator at the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM), Padova, Italy .

Merete Nordentoft

Schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders are among the costliest and most debilitating disorders in terms of personal sufferings for those affected, for relatives and for society 81 . These disorders often require long-term treatment and, for a substantial proportion of the patients, the outcomes are poor. This has motivated efforts to prevent long-lasting illness by early intervention. The time around the onset of psychotic disorders is associated with an increased risk of suicide, of loss of affiliation with the labour market, and social isolation and exclusion. Therefore, prevention and treatment of first-episode psychosis will be a key challenge for the future.

There is now solid evidence proving that early intervention services can improve clinical outcomes 82 . This was first demonstrated in the large Danish OPUS trial, in which OPUS treatment — consisting of assertive outreach, case management and family involvement, provided by multidisciplinary teams over a two-year period — was shown to improve clinical outcomes 83 . Moreover, it was also cost-effective 84 . Although the positive effects on clinical outcomes were not sustainable after five and ten years, there was a long-lasting effect on use of supported housing facilities (indicating improved ability to live independently) 85 . Later trials proved that it is possible to maintain the positive clinical outcomes by extending the services to five years or by offering a stepped care model with continued intensive care for the patients who are most impaired 86 . However, even though both clinical and functional outcomes (such as labour market affiliation) can be improved by evidence-based treatments 82 , a large group of patients with first-episode psychosis still have psychotic symptoms after ten years. Thus, there is still an urgent need for identification of new and better options for treatment.

Most probably, some of the disease processes start long before first onset of a psychotic disorder. Thus, identifying disease mechanisms and possibilities for intervention before onset of psychosis will be extremely valuable. Evidence for effective preventive interventions is very limited, and the most burning question — of how to prevent psychosis — is still open.

The early intervention approach is also promising also for other disorders, including bipolar affective disorder, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, personality disorders, autism and attention-deficient hyperactivity disorder.

Merete Nordentoft is Clinical Professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; and Principal Investigator, CORE - Copenhagen Research Centre for Mental Health, Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark .

Epidemiology

Gabriel M. Leung

In a widely anthologized article from the business field of marketing, Levitt 87 pointed out that often industries failed to grow because they suffered from a limited market view. For example, Kodak went bust because it narrowly defined itself as a film camera company for still photography rather than one that should have been about imaging writ large. If it had had that strategic insight, it would have exploited and invested in digital technologies aggressively and perhaps gone down the rather more successful path of Fujifilm — or even developed into territory now cornered by Netflix.

The raison d’être of epidemiology has been to provide a set of robust scientific methods that underpin public health practice. In turn, the field of public health has expanded to fulfil the much-wider and more-intensive demands of protecting, maintaining and promoting the health of local and global populations, intergenerationally. At its broadest, the mission of public health should be to advance social justice towards a complete state of health.

Therefore, epidemiologists should continue to recruit and embrace relevant methodology sets that could answer public health questions, better and more efficiently. For instance, Davey Smith and Ebrahim 88 described how epidemiology adapted instrumental variable analysis that had been widely deployed in econometrics to fundamentally improve causal inference in observational epidemiology. Conversely, economists have not been shy in adopting the randomized controlled trial design to answer questions of development, and have recognized it with a Nobel prize 89 . COVID-19 has brought mathematical epidemiology or modelling to the fore. The foundations of the field borrowed heavily from population dynamics and ecological theory.

In future, classical epidemiology, which has mostly focused on studying how the exposome associates with the phenome, needs to take into simultaneous account the other layers of the multiomics universe — from the genome to the metabolome to the microbiome 90 . Another area requiring innovative thinking concerns how to harness big data to better understand human behaviour 91 . Finally, we must consider key questions that are amenable to epidemiologic investigation arising from the major global health challenges: climate change, harmful addictions and mental wellness. What new methodological tools do we need to answer these questions?

Epidemiologists must keep trying on new lenses that correct our own siloed myopia.

Gabriel M. Leung is Helen and Francis Zimmern Professor in Population Health at WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, School of Public Health, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong; Chief Scientific Officer at Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health, Hong Kong Science and Technology Park; and Dean of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China .

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Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

School of Communication and Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Department of Neuroscience and Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC), University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM), Padova, Italy

Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Microsoft Research New York, New York, NY, USA

École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Department of Global Development, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China

Center for Social and Environmental Systems Research, Social Systems Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Human Neuroscience, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China

WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, School of Public Health, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China

Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health, Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China

Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

CORE - Copenhagen Research Centre for Mental Health, Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark

Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Department of Economics, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Complex Human Data Hub, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

ODID and SAME, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Centre of Excellence FAIR, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway

GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Köln, Germany

RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria

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Correspondence to Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier , Jean Burgess , Maurizio Corbetta , Kate Crawford , Esther Duflo , Laurel Fogarty , Alison Gopnik , Sari Hanafi , Mario Herrero , Ying-yi Hong , Yasuko Kameyama , Tatia M. C. Lee , Gabriel M. Leung , Daniel S. Nagin , Anna C. Nobre , Merete Nordentoft , Aysu Okbay , Andrew Perfors , Laura M. Rival , Cassidy R. Sugimoto , Bertil Tungodden or Claudia Wagner .

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Box-Steffensmeier, J.M., Burgess, J., Corbetta, M. et al. The future of human behaviour research. Nat Hum Behav 6 , 15–24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01275-6

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35 Human Behavior Examples

Psychologists, sociologists, and even anthropologists study patterns of human behaviors in order to unravel key insights into the human condition, cultural attitudes, cultural values , cultural norms , and their influence upon individuals and societies.

As the most advanced mammals on earth, we have a range of unique behaviors, generally oriented around or advanced social, technological, and cognitive abilities.

Below are examples of a range of human behaviors that make us unique.

Human Behavior Examples

Empathy is the human capacity to understand and share the feelings of another individual, mirroring their emotions as if we were experiencing them firsthand.

While some animals do demonstrate foundational elements of empathy, humans exhibit this behavioural trait at a level of complexity unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

Humans, with our intricate social constructs , have the ability to comprehensively interpret a diverse range of emotional states and respond accordingly.

Such intricate perception and attunement to the emotions of others forms a fundamental part of human communal interactions, positioning empathy as a quintessentially human trait.

2. Symbolic Thinking

Symbolic thinking represents the unique human ability to use symbols or images to depict something else.

This might sound straightforward, but it carries extensive implications . This behavior underpins the inception and evolution of language, culture, and art in human societies.

Our Homo Sapien ancestors did not only communicate through rudimentary sounds and gestures, but also demonstrated their capacity for symbolic thinking through pictorial representations and carved figurines.

This ability persists in the present day where humans employ symbolism in sophisticated forms of writing, illustrations, and virtual imagery.

3. Altruism

Altruism, the selfless act of placing the needs or wellbeing of others above one’s own, is a third uniquely human behavior.

There is an array of theories attempting to explain the evolution of human altruism, from developmental adaptation to sociocultural influences.

Besides mere kin selection, where related individuals help each other in order to improve their shared genetic success, humans also engage in gratuitous acts of goodwill towards entirely unrelated persons.

Distinct from the limited forms of cooperative behavior observed in other species, human altruism extends to widespread philanthropy, self-sacrificing heroism, and public service.

4. Creative Expression

Among the array of human behaviors, creative expression stands out as a remarkable trait.

The ability to conceive and bring forth novel ideas or objects not only for functional purposes, but also purely aesthetic or expressive ones, is a remarkable human speciality.

From painting and music to drama and literature, creative expression manifests in manifold ways across all cultures.

This expansive range and depth of creative manifestation separates humanity from other species.

5. Conceptualizing Time

The human behavior of conceptualizing time in abstract terms is significant. Humans are capable of discerning the past, present, and future, a trait unique to our species , to the best of our knowledge.

This ability to reflect upon the past and project into the future, along with understanding the abstract concept of ‘time,’ informs human decision-making processes.

More importantly, this concept of time provides a framework within which humans can plan and strategize, a trait that has significant implications for survival and success.

This behavior is striking in its complexity and in its relative absence in other species.

6. Vocal Language

Vocal language, the systematic and generative capability of assigning specific complex meanings to particular sounds, forming full sentences, distinguishes humans from other species .

Speech is the primary mode for transmitting information across generations and facilitating cooperation among human groups.

The use of vocal language allows the conveyance of complex, abstract ideas and emotions, a level of communication unmatched by non-human forms of interaction.

7. Cultural Transmission

The process of cultural transmission holds a prominent position among human behaviors.

Indeed, cultural transmission involves the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, beliefs, customs, skills, and behavioral norms in a community.

Unlike many animals that rely primarily on genetic programming to pass on survival tactics, humans teach and learn from one another in an ongoing cycle. From the crafting of tools to complex societal norms, each generation learns from the experience of its predecessors and contributes to the communal knowledge pool.

This continuous learning and teaching process enables the evolution of societies, eventually leading to the cultivation of the diverse and intricate cultures we see globally today.

8. Cooking Food

The act of cooking food distinguishes us from any other species .

Cooking has been an integral part of human behavior since the discovery of fire. It goes beyond simple food preparation, drastically altering the makeup of what we consume.

This has biological implications, allowing our bodies to obtain more energy from food materials and facilitating evolutionary changes, such as the growth of our brains. Additionally, cooking food has social implications, often serving as a centerpiece around which human gatherings and interactions occur.

9. Tools and Technology Use

Humans demonstrate a unique propensity for the use and creation of complex tools and technology.

This behavior involves not only using natural objects as tools but also modifying these objects and designing new ones to suit specific purposes. From crafting simple stone-age tools to developing advanced modern-day technologies, humans continuously innovate to enhance survival and improve the quality of life.

The complexity and sophistication of human tool use and technological development are unparalleled in the animal kingdom, making this a uniquely human behavior.

10. Self-Reflection

Self-reflection is a uniquely human behavior that sets us apart from other species.

Self-reflection is the practice of thinking about our own thoughts, emotions, decisions, and behaviors. It is a process that allows us to evaluate our experiences and learn from them, driving personal growth and development.

In essence, this behavior entails a higher level of cognition, enabling us to analyze ourselves and make changes based on our reflections. This process of introspection greatly contributes to human progress on an individual and societal level.

See More: Examples of Self-Reflection

11. Abstract Reasoning

Abstract reasoning forms a significant portion of the unique cognitive capabilities of humans.

Distinct from others in the animal kingdom, humans not only react to immediate, tangible situations but also display the remarkable capability to think abstractly.

By extracting meaning from complex situations, identifying underlying patterns, and making logical deductions, humans can contend with situations beyond sensory experience. This thought process underscores the development and application of mathematics, philosophy, and strategic planning.

12. Mourning

While grief is not exclusively human, our complex rituals around mourning distinguish us as a species.

Humans commemorate the lives of their deceased, honouring them with ritualistic practices that vary across cultures. These range from memorial services and funerals to distinct periods of mourning and the creation of monuments.

The act of mourning signifies humans’ potent awareness of mortality, capacity to remember, and the profound emotional bonds between individuals.

13. Trade and Barter

Trade and barter form an essential aspect of human societal interaction.

The practice of exchanging goods and services based on their perceived value is unique to human societies.

Unlike other species that might showcase primitive forms of resource exchange, humans have maintained complex trade systems, even from early civilization. This system has evolved over the centuries into global markets and economies, demonstrating the capacity of humans for strategic negotiation and cooperation on a large scale.

14. Law-Making

The creation and enforcement of laws are quintessentially human.

The formulation of codes of conduct governs individual and collective behavior. While numerous species have social rules, the human system of laws is unmatched in its complexity and sophistication.

From unwritten societal norms to formally enacted legislation that governs nations, this ability demonstrates the human desire for order, justice, and social stability.

15. Education

Education is an uncannily human pursuit.

The deliberate process of facilitating learning expands knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. Learners absorb a planned curriculum via teaching, training, or research — a process more systematic and extensive than the rudimentary learning found in other species.

Beyond survival skills, the scope of human education spans arts, sciences, philosophy, history, physical dexterity, and social skills . The process of structured learning and intellectual growth underscores the foundations of human civilization and progress.

16. Music and Dance

Music and dance constitute a major aspect of human cultural and emotional expression.

These artistic forms are truly universal to human societies across the globe. They aren’t simply recreational activities but serve as means to express a broad spectrum of emotions, share stories, and reinforce group identity. Their interesting characteristic is that they require creativity, coordination, and a sense of rhythm and timing — all of which serve as testament to our cognitive abilities.

Moreover, music and dance can foster social bonding and unity during communal celebrations, explaining their central role in various cultural rituals and festivals.

17. Written Communication

The development and use of written communication distinguish humans significantly.

Humans not only communicate verbally but have developed a system by which language, ideas, and information can be represented in a visual and tangible form.

This ability has enriched human interaction, allowing societies to record their histories, disseminate knowledge, and structure complex social institutions .

It marks a significant departure from simpler forms of communication seen in non-human species, demonstrating the cognitive flexibility and creative innovativeness at the heart of human growth. Given its role in the success of our species, it’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of written communication.

18. Medicine and Healthcare

The development of practices and principles related to medicine and healthcare is fundamentally a human endeavor.

Human societies have demonstrated an understanding of the mechanisms of health, injury, illness, and the body’s healing process.

With this understanding, they have embarked on developing treatments, therapies, and preventative measures to combat health problems, thus prioritizing population longevity and well-being. Our commitment to medicine separates us from other species, reflecting our cognitive complexity, empathy, and advanced problem-solving faculties.

This distinct behavior displays the transition from mere survival to a pursuit of improved quality and length of life, underlining the role of medicine in societal advancement.

19. Sports and Games

The creation and participation in highly organized sports and games underscore the depth of human creativity and social interaction.

Unlike other animals that engage in play as a form of survival training or social bonding, humans formalize play into structured games with complex rules and objectives.

This demonstrates the unique human capacities for strategic thinking , planning ahead, and operating as a team — skills that extend beyond the playfield.

Moreover, these sports and games serve as a conduit for societal bonding, group identification, and even international unity amid competition. The universal practice of sports and games is an affirmation of shared human culture, channeled through competition and cooperation.

20. Exploration

The drive for exploration and the pursuit of new knowledge is a trait that sits at the core of being human.

This desire to venture into unfamiliar territories, to study the uncharted, and to constantly push the boundaries of our knowledge sets us apart from other species.

Our history is replete with tales of explorers overcoming tremendous odds in the name of discovery, illuminating our collective consciousness .

Whether exploring geographical landscapes, outer space, or the realm of ideas, the trait of human exploration perpetuates our evolutionary imperative: adapt, learn, and survive. Ultimately, this venture into the unknown testifies to our relentless curiosity and sophistication as a species.

21. Metacognition

Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, underlines the level of cognitive sophistication that is unique to humans.

As humans, we have the capacity to analyze our thought processes, evaluate the efficiency of different thinking strategies , and alter our approach based on introspection. This level of self-awareness and self-regulation in the cognitive domain sharpens our learning efficiency and problem-solving skills.

Further, it fosters our ability for self-improvement, personal growth, and ethical decision-making. Metacognition demonstrates not just what we think, but also how we think, establishing it as a strictly human domain.

See More: Examples of Metacognition in Humans

22. Philanthropy

Philanthropy exemplifies our inherent capacity for empathy and compassion combined with our ability for advanced organization and collaboration.

By definition, philanthropy involves the use of resources to extend social goodwill and promote welfare on a large scale. This characteristic is unparalleled in the rest of the animal kingdom. This underscores our ability to sympathize with hardships beyond our immediate experiences and devise systematic approaches to alleviate those hardships.

The act of philanthropy underlines the height of ethical and moral developments within human societies, following a rationale that transcends basic survival instincts.

23. Spirituality and Religion

Spirituality and religion form an intricate part of the human behavioral repertoire for tens of thousands of years .

Humans across time and geographies have exhibited a propensity towards belief systems that explain the world around them, guiding moral frameworks, and providing a sense of purpose.

These systems encapsulate our ability for abstract thought, symbolic expression, and communal cohesion . Religion and spirituality offer a gateway into comprehending human existential concerns and our unique response to them.

These intricate systems, regardless of their truth value, offer meaningful narratives that shape our perceptions and behaviors, aptly reflecting the complexity of human cognition.

24. Sustainable Agriculture

The practice of sustainable agriculture is singularly distinctive of humans.

Taking charge of our food sources, humans transformed from simple gatherers to sophisticated farmers. This shift further catapulted us along the path of civilizational development, allowing population growth and societal stability.

We learned to cultivate crops, domesticate animals, and increasingly control our immediate environment.

While some animals show primitive forms of resource management, none approach the sophistication and scale of human sustainable agriculture. The conduct of agriculture highlights our capacity for long-term planning, understanding of ecological dynamics, and advanced problem-solving skills.

25. Civics and Politics

Civics and politics articulate the depths of human social organization.

Political structures reflect our ability to establish complex social organizations, consolidate communal values, and resolve conflicts.

These structures embark on regulating societal behaviors, distributing resources, and making collective decisions that affect entire communities or nations. Even in rudimentary forms, politics govern social interaction among human groups, highlighting our inherent social nature.

Crucially, it marks humans’ ability to construct abstract entities like power and authority and organize societies around such concepts.

Our political designs distinguish us sharply from other species, illustrating the social, cognitive, and communicative evolution of humankind.

26. Science and Technology

The development of science and technology sheds light on the intellectual prowess and innovative nature of humans.

This behavior involves systematically uncovering the salient principles governing our world and then, using this understanding, creating technological tools or methodologies.

With these, humans manipulate their environment and enhance their capabilities, from basic tools for hunting in the Stone Age to cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence.

The development of science and technology emphasizes our cognitive capacity, problem-solving skills, and the human ability to adapt and evolve over time.

27. Collective Learning

The practice of collective learning marks a major milestone in human behavioral evolution.

In contrast to individual learning, collective learning involves the inter-generational transmission of knowledge and skillsets, fuelling progressive advancements in knowledge.

Our capacity to accumulate and build upon previous knowledge differentiates us from other species. This constant state of shared learning has fostered intricate societies and cultures, accelerating human advancement over centuries.

28. Storytelling

Storytelling is a distinctly human behavior which reflects our rich cognitive and linguistic abilities.

Humans have been telling stories since ancient times, and not simply for entertainment.

Storytelling acts as a means to pass on knowledge, values, and life lessons within and across generations. It demonstrates our ability to conceive complex, abstract thoughts, formulate them into stories, and effectively communicate these to others.

The stories often carry moral, cultural, or philosophical implications that further structure human societies.

29. Aesthetics and Beauty Appreciation

Appreciation of aesthetics and beauty forms an inherent part of human behaviors.

Unlike other species, humans not only recognize beauty but create and seek it. From artistic creations to the appreciation of natural beauty, humans have a distinct sense of aesthetics, often invoking emotional responses.

This conduct underscores our advanced cognitive capabilities and emotional depth.

The pursuit of beauty and the emotional fulfillment we derive from it underscore the rich emotional lives of humans.

30. Commerce and Economy

Commerce is a social activity specific to humans, born from our abilities to communicate, negotiate and exchange.

From prehistoric barter systems to modern digital economies, humans have developed complex structures to produce, distribute, and consume goods and services. These structures, or economies, support human survival, social interaction, and growth of civilizations.

Commerce involves planning, negotiations, and risk-taking, reflecting a depth of strategic thinking. It demonstrates our ability to value resources, understand demand and supply, and connect with other individuals for mutual benefit.

31. Long-Term Planning

Long-term planning stands as a testament to the forward-thinking capacity of humans.

Visible in our daily lives, right from scheduling our tasks to drafting career paths or establishing retirement plans, humans have the cognitive ability to forecast, prepare, and plan for the future.

We envisage future events and work towards tasks or goals that may not yield immediate benefits. This behavior underscores our unique temporal consciousness, strategic thinking, and the ability to delay immediate gratification for future benefits.

32. Mapping and Geography

The creation and utilization of geographical maps are unique to humans.

This practice represents a complex behavior where we consider spatial information, scale it down, and represent it symbolically.

Maps depict physical landscapes and aid navigation, strategic planning, and territorial understanding. This unique behavior exhibits our abstract thinking skills, comprehension of physical space, and the desire to move beyond the immediate environment.

33. Body Art and Modification

Body art and modification, including tattoos and piercings, are distinctively human behaviors.

Such modifications are not purely aesthetic, but often deeply symbolic and representative of personal or cultural identity . They attest to our self-awareness , need for self-expression, and social communication.

Body art and modification contribute to our individual uniqueness while also enabling a sense of communal unity, especially within particular cultural groups.

34. Conservation and Environmental Awareness

The concerted effort towards conservation and environmental stewardship is a trait that is undeniably human.

With comprehension of our impact on the environment, humans exhibit extraordinary capabilities in working towards the preservation of nature.

The act of conservation encompasses different practices such as creating natural reserves, implementing sustainable practices, and constructing legislative frameworks to limit harmful activities. This behavior represents our capacity for foresight, empathy towards all life forms, and our understanding of ecological interconnectedness.

35. Architecture and Infrastructure Development

The creation of complex architecture and infrastructure is purely a human endeavor.

From homes hewn out of caves to towering skyscrapers, humans engineer and construct structures for shelter, utility, and a symbol of societal progress. These constructions reflect our ability to manipulate the environment using tools and technology, our understanding of materials and their properties, and our innate need for safety and community.

The development of complex structures and infrastructures substantiates human ingenuity and the drive to create functional as well as beautiful spaces for inhabitation and use.

I made the decision to present examples of uniquely human behaviors in this article in order to demonstrate aspects of ourselves that make us special. But, I could very well have presented behaviors based on a range of types (such as overt behavior , covert behavior , ethical behavior , unethical behavior , learned behavior , prosocial behavior , and collective behavior ).

To explore in more depth, I recommend starting out with my types of behaviors article , which will demonstrate the ‘lay of the land’ for cognitive-behavioral studies, and can help you to spread out to other sub-categories that I’ve explored elsewhere on this site.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — What is Culture — How Culture Influences Human Behavior

How Culture Influences Human Behavior

• Categories: Human Behavior What is Culture

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Published: Jan 29, 2024

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Definition and components of culture, the influence of culture on perception and cognition, the impact of culture on socialization and identity formation, cultural relativism and ethical considerations, cultural influences on language and communication, culture's influence on behavioral norms and practices, implications for intercultural communication and interaction.

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Home Essay Examples Psychology Human Behavior

Human Behavior In Society

• Category Psychology
• Subcategory Behavior
• Topic Human Behavior

Behavior is the reaction and response to any change in the environment. It is actually how one response toward others. Behavior is the action and mannerism made by the individuals to conduct with others.

Society is the combination of all living things in which all things interact with each other geographically and socially. It is the large social group that shares the same geographical, social and same political authorities. It is a combination of many communities. There are six categories of society. Each of them has its specific characteristics.

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Categories of Societies:

• Trapping and combined societies
• Clerical societies
• Agricultural societies
• Horticultural societies
• Industrial societies
• Post-industrial societies
• Characteristics of societies:
• Biggest group of living organisms
• Fulfill all the requirements of its members
• One of the basic characteristics is collaboration and relationship

The positive response to anybody is the good behavior. Examples of good behavior are activeness, passionate, curative, creative, keenness, reasonable, managed and accurate. Activeness in behavior means always busy in something which proves to be beneficial for the development of society. The passionate behavior in society leads to progress. The curative behavior creates good relations in society. The creativeness in the behavior leads to the inventions and development which are beneficial for the society members. The keenness in behavior always finds new ways for the betterment of society. Reasonable behavior in society deals well with the matters of people. The managed behavior wants everything should be done in the right way. The accurate behavior in society provides preciseness to any aspect of the society.

The negative response to anybody is bad behavior. Examples of bad behavior are nervousness, carelessness, idleness, undisciplined, inflexible behavior, stress, selfishness, greed, anger and uncomfortable. The nervousness in behavior makes people crazy and uneasy which leads to many mental problems. The carelessness in behavior leads to the destruction in society. The idleness in behavior in society leads to the laziness in work. Undisciplined behavior makes society’s environment uncomfortable. The inflexible behavior proves to be very dangerous for relations with other society members. The stress in behavior takes you away from society and takes you in the world of tensions and worries, which may also lead to mental retardation. The selfishness in behavior proves very dangerous for society because selfish people think about their interest, they never think about the benefits of the whole society. The greedy behavior in society leads to failure in every field. They just think about the positive aspects/results of every work, but in this case the results come against the expectations which cause loss. The anger in behavior proves to be very threatening in relation.

The interaction with people means to react and communicate. For example, we communicate with groups, organizations, and nations for relation, trade, and migration. There are two possibilities that how we react with the people of society. One is that we react with good manners and others rudely. But we must react with the people in good manners. For becoming good in social interaction, we must follow the following instructions.

• Straight forward
• Build rapport
• Be a helper
• Always be positive
• Listen effectively
• Give your time to the people
• Develop your communication skills
• Accept and celebrate differences
• Be cooperative

By following the above points, we can behave good with the people of society. Our personality depends upon our behavior that it will groom positively or negatively. There are two main types of people in our society one is good and the other is bad. If we want to develop our personality positively, then we should interact with both types of people with good manners. This attitude will help in grooming a positive personality, otherwise, our personality grooming will move towards the negative phase of personality so, we must react positively. it is said that ‘As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults. Adults like to have fun, too’. (Richard Thaler). So, that we must react positively with the people to groom our personality, there must be another possibility that our behavior is not good it will lead our behavior towards negative aspects due to which there is fear of the becoming notorious in the society, if we deal with the bad people with the bad manner then its impact on our behavior is very dangerous. This all is due that people influence our thoughts and feelings they don’t care due to which we also behave rudely there are the factors which influence the human behavior

• Abilities (Good abilities like honesty, braveness, hardworking and determination influence the men towards positive behavior.)
• Gender (Gender can also influence the human behavior that how a person can play a good role in his gender.)
• Race and Culture (Race and culture also affect the behavior that our frequency exactly matches with the same race and same culture.)
• Attribution (Attribution also effect our behavior when we perform something well for the other person it also improves our behavior.)
• Perception (perception also helps in improve our behavior towards positivity.)
• Attitude (Good attitude also help in building positive behavior.)

These all the above points help in improving the behavior and help in reacting with the people with a good attitude. If you know how to respect myself and how to respect others then you should also know that how we respected b

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• Essay Database >
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• Essay on Perspective

Human Behavior Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Perspective , Human , Development , Environment , Behavior , Conflict , Theory , Sociology

Words: 1000

Published: 11/02/2022

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Question 1: Define the psychodynamic perspective and discuss two big ideas associated with it.

Psychodynamic perspective typically refers to theories that were developed by Sigmund Freud which were later adopted by many people. It refers to the art of understanding what is going on in the mind of another individual. One of the main ideas associated with psychodynamic theory is the critical importance of one’s early experiences in life. Childhood events end up shaping an individual’s personality later in life and those events are the determinants of that individual’s personality development. The other main distinctive idea held by this theory is that nothing in life happens simply by chance. Everything has a reason as to why it occurs and that there is no such thing as random thought or behavior. Most expressed behaviors and personalities always arise from a combination of certain psychological factors as well as biological entities.

Question 2: Define the developmental perspective and discuss two big ideas associated with it.

Development psychology can be said to be a technique that aims at explaining how children and at the same time adults change over time (Hutchison, 2014). One of the main ideas that is held by the approach is the idea of normative development. Normative development can be understood from the perspective that one’s current personality was reached upon through continual and cumulative processes. It is through this dimension that you can explain why children who were raised in orphanages oftentimes act cheerfully when they are placed in better places. The other main idea of this approach is the importance of both nature and nurture. It is through the balance of both nature and nurture that forms the basis for change. The two allow both biological aspects and environmental factors to act upon an individual and allow the development process to take place.

Question 3: Define the social behavior perspective and discuss two big ideas associated with it.

Social behavior perspective can be understood from the point of view that the art of learning and behavior is developed from the stimulus-response relationships that individuals always encounter in their lifetimes (Hutchison, 2014). One of the main ideas that social behaviorism perspective holds is the fact both animals and human beings are as a result of what they have learned from the environment (Hutchison, 2014). We can act in the way we act because of what the environment has taught us. Our response is always derived from something that is acting externally in the environment. This way, we either learn by association while dealing with stimuli in the environment or learning from the consequences of a given action. Another idea of the approach is the fact that individuals have no free will to choose their responses or how they would act as the environment always determines all our behavior. It is this tamed way that a dog can be made to know when it is time to feed simply by a ring of a bell.

Question 4: Define the humanistic perspective and discuss two big ideas associated with it.

The humanistic perspective can be understood from the point of view that human beings are always motivated by the potential and ability to be creative and productive despite their social and environmental conditioning. Human beings have the will to choose and that we are entitled to choose a given path for ourselves. One of the main ideas of humanistic perspective is that human beings have the utmost free will to choose their own path. Human beings are motivated by their personal agencies which refer to the choices that they make in life as well as the consequences of the choices that we make. It rejects the notion that human beings are just there to be made to behave in certain ways. Similarly, zombies can react blindly to the environment. The other main idea that humanistic perspective holds is the fact that human beings are basically good in nature and are always motivated by that inner drive to make themselves as well as the world in which they live in better. It is through this perspective that human beings can overcome any form of hardship or pain that comes their way as they can tap into the centrality of their human values and their creativity part. Question 5: Compare and contrast the ideas of the systems perspective and the conflict perspective. Cite examples of how you think these theories would help with assessment and intervention in your interaction with clients. The conflict perspective, primarily focuses on the negative and the ever-changing nature of the society that human beings live in while on the other hand system perspective can be understood as the process of understanding how things that can be said to be regarded as systems always happen in a way that they influence one another within a given complete structure (Hutchison, 2014). System thinking is used as a problem solving approach such that in its applications, it tries to balance holistic thinking as well as reductionist thinking while conflict perspective on the other hand, is only used for explaining social change and cannot be used to explain social stability. Dealing with my client conflict perspective theory will help me in analyzing the issue with the client from the perspective of his/her related interests that are conflicting with the resources that are available. Unequal groups in the society always have conflicting values and agendas and it is through the application of conflict theory that I will be able to draw this from my client. On the other hand, system perspective theory will help me study my client’s human behavior and his/her experiences in a complex system. It will help me to discern my client’s needs and his/her expectations so that the client can feel whole again and part of the system.

Hutchison, E. (2014). Dimensions of human behavior + dimensions of human behavior - the changing life course, 5th ed.: Sage Publications.

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Social Influences on Human Behavior Essay

Introduction, description of the specific behaviors, precursors and consequences of the behaviors, associated phenomenon with the selected behaviors, whether the behaviors necessitate therapeutic intervention.

Human behavior is susceptible to change based on one’s social situation. A person in a group will have a heightened level of social awareness that will prevent them from acting appropriately. Two scenarios of behavior alteration will be analyzed in order to demonstrate this tendency.

The first incident was the gang rape of a high school student at Richmond, which occurred on 27 th October 2009. The victim was a fifteen year old student who was attending a dance at the school’s gymnasium. Ten men raped and tortured her in the presence of ten other witnesses who surrounded the attackers and took pictures of the incident. Several other individuals joined the crowd of witnesses and continued to watch or laugh at the girl. The school had a number of security guards during the incident, yet no individual bothered to call them. Even the assistant principle noticed that a group of strange men was in the school premises, but he did not investigate the matter further. This administrator did not alert teachers or the police concerning such a peculiar situation. One student who left the party reported the incident after the girl had already been raped and was in critical condition. She was found under a bench, half conscious.

The second behavior is something that has taken place in several organizations around the world. An employer assigns workers with the responsibility of creating a new company manual. In performing this task, they are expected to meet regularly and give their suggestions and ideas. After collection of ideas, different members must compile, edit and prepare the manual. They need to research and add more information concerning those suggestions in order to translate them into usable material. However, many of the employees do not carry their weight in the project meetings as well as the implementation phase. This occurs regardless of the fact that most of the employees are highly productive in their specific departments. The project ends up dragging for long and members create an inferior product at the end of it all.

The rapists had varied ages, but most of them were young. Additionally, most of the eye witnesses were immature. Psychologists explain that youth are more likely to be detached during a dangerous situation because they do not understand the idea of victimization well. Eyewitnesses did not have any personal association with the rape victim thus explaining why most of them remained passive. Failure to notify the police or other authorities in the vicinity contributed to excessive prolonging of the rape, psychological and physical torture of the victim.

The second issue of employee stalling occurred in an organizational setting. The individuals were not used to working in groups. Furthermore, there was no explicit evaluator who would hold project members responsible for project failure. This incident also occurred in a western context. Employees had minimal collective tendencies; consequently, they did not care much about the effect of their actions on the group. Perhaps their behavior would have been different if they came from a collectivist society, such as China (Sheppard, 1993).

The group under consideration had difficulties in sharing information outside their weekly meetings. Employees had to wait for seven days before they could make any useful decisions. When they did make any contributions, these were not recognized by an authoritative figure. They did not feel satisfied about the project team as well as the way in which work was done. Furthermore, few of them identified with the group. They defined their membership in terms of their respective departments as well as the organization in general. None of them mentioned the company manual committee as a group that they belonged to. They did not think that members of the group valued them. Since the project team constituted of forty members, it is likely that most of the participants felt that their efforts were too trivial to make any significant contribution to the project goals. Furthermore, there were no tangible rewards or foreseeable outcomes of the tasks. All the above factors were precursors to their stalling behavior. The consequences of their behavior were depletion of company resources during the project and wastage of valuable company time. Performance declined in the company and employees were also demoralized.

Groupthink may be attributed to the 2009 gang rape incident. This was manifested in the form of the bystander effect. The latter phenomenon refers to the tendency to refrain from taking action in an emergency situation when a high number of people exist. One’s response as an eye witness is likely to be more active if no observers exist (Brun & Tiegen, 2011). When people are present in large numbers during an emergency, then diffusion of responsibility takes place. In the case of the Richmond rape, most of the witnesses probably felt that others would notify the authorities about the matter. Additionally, social influence played a large role in determination of their actions. Sometimes individuals may act passively in an effort to be socially acceptable. In the gang rape, it likely that the observers continued to watch the ghastly act of rape because of influences from other witnesses. Since the crowd had a large number of men, it is likely that the need to appear more masculine made the eyewitnesses appear less empathetic towards the victim.

The phenomenon that led to employee stalling was social loafing, which is the reduction of individual effort when people need to work in a group (Kowalski & Westen, 2011). Psychologists explain that people will reduce their personal efforts in a group when they do not see a connection between their inputs and the outcomes of their world. Furthermore, social loafing may occur when a group is large in size with very divergent members. Also, if people think that their input is insignificant then social loafing will arise. In this case, members of the organization had all the above qualities hence explaining why their behavior changed when in a group.

The first case of gang rape necessitates therapeutic intervention because it led to highly severe and dire consequences. Members of the high school or the Richmond community need to be sensitized about group think and its dreadful effects. They can learn about the importance of sound moral judgment even when one is in a large group. Unless the individuals learn about thinking independently, then they may remain inactive in future incidences.

Organizational psychologists can also intervene in cases of social loafing. In the concerned case, they would have identified individual contributions among project members. Administrators should also have made group members feel valued. Team cohesiveness could have been increased and evaluation systems instated. The organizational psychologists could also have reduced the number of team members.

The two cases under consideration were undesirable; one was even tragic. Alterations in behavior were caused by social situations or the presence of a group. Mental efficiency and bad judgment were caused by group think and social loafing, which only arise when participants are socially aware of their situations. Therefore, the behavior can be altered if therapists deal with these social influences.

Brun, W. & Tiegen, K. (2011). Responsibility is divisible by two, but not three or four: Judgments of responsibility in dyads and groups. Social cognition , 29(3), 15-42.

Kowalski, R. & Westen, D. (2011). Psychology . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons.

Sheppard, J. (1993). Productivity loss in performance groups: A motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin , 113, 67-81.

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