If I mention the term “behaviour”, what do you think of? Perhaps of the time that you said or thought "I don’t like his behaviour", or, less frequently: "He is a nice person, I admire the way he behaves when angry or stressed". Many of us think of behaviour as something that comes out of a relationship with another person. In the field of psychology, behaviour is also something else.
Andrew reads the post:
Behaviour means how we relate to the surrounding environment, regardless of who there is in that environment. This means that behaviour can also be directed towards objects, such as when we grab a glass, a pen, or a handle. Does that sound weird to you? Let’s take a step back. Let’s think about our behaviour towards animals, towards food and towards alcohol. Ok, maybe I have now convinced you that behaviour can be directed also towards inanimate objects and ways of functioning in your environment.
We still have a stumbling block: why should psychology study the way we lift a glass? Or indeed how we hold a pencil or turn a door handle? If you are in doubt about this, you have every right. Let’s take the case of the handle. I want to open a door? I rotate the handle down, I didn’t have to learn it, I probably saw it, I repeated it and made it mine. It seems to have become our automatic behaviour. Now imagine yourself in an era, where the door handle has not yet been invented. You have been given the task of creating a method of opening the door. A curved rod that acts as a lever comes to your mind, but how to build it? Horizontal? Vertical? Oblique? And how to rotate it? Up or down? Right or left? From a personal perspective, people notice that tools have a certain use or purpose, a way in which it seems easy or logical to use them. (The English term is “affordance”- we will talk about that another time.) It is as though the tools invite us to use them in a certain way. For this reason, this behaviour needs to be studied as well.
Have I convinced you about the need to study other types of behaviour? What is behaviour for you? How would you define it?
If you want me to describe in my own words a topic of psychology, please request it in the comment section.
Cited sources: you can check behaviour definition also on Wikipedia. The author who introduced the concept of affordance is Gibson.
We still have a stumbling block: why should psychology study the way we lift a glass? Or indeed how we hold a pencil or turn a door handle? If you are in doubt about this, you have every right. Let’s take the case of the handle. I want to open a door? I rotate the handle down, I didn’t have to learn it, I probably saw it, I repeated it and made it mine. It seems to have become our automatic behaviour. Now imagine yourself in an era, where the door handle has not yet been invented. You have been given the task of creating a method of opening the door. A curved rod that acts as a lever comes to your mind, but how to build it? Horizontal? Vertical? Oblique? And how to rotate it? Up or down? Right or left? From a personal perspective, people notice that tools have a certain use or purpose, a way in which it seems easy or logical to use them. (The English term is “affordance”- we will talk about that another time.) It is as though the tools invite us to use them in a certain way. For this reason, this behaviour needs to be studied as well.
Have I convinced you about the need to study other types of behaviour? What is behaviour for you? How would you define it?
If you want me to describe in my own words a topic of psychology, please request it in the comment section.
Cited sources: you can check behaviour definition also on Wikipedia. The author who introduced the concept of affordance is Gibson.
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