Every notice how sometimes our behavior never matches with the event we are at? For example, you are at a party with your friends and they are having a great time and the party is actually a lot of fun, but you find the party boring for some reason. A View About Behavior is about how we react to the events and people we encounter every day. We go to school every day but our attitudes about it don’t ever match up. As college students are body’s are telling us, “yes, go to school. You’ll get a good education,” but our minds are telling us, “yeah, I have no motivation right now to even think.” So our behavior about the school day changes entirely and we have the mind set to not feel motivated to do anything. This article talk about how we have the cognitive means to respond conditionally. In a psychology class we are taught about Pavlov’s theory about how a dog’s cognitive response trains the dog to behave a specific way.
Alfred Korzybski says that we think of general semantics as a methodology for understanding and how we perceive and construct meaningful life events. This includes our language behaviors. We use the process of abstracting to determine our reactions to specific events. The example I gave above about going to a party thinking that it would be fun, but turns out to be boring in your opinion. We use the process of abstracting to analyze stereotypes and we invite problems of misunderstanding through facts and inferences.
Lastly, the article talks about how it is easy for a mapmaker to misrepresent a region of a map and how we distort and misinterpret our experiences and thoughts. Our behavior depends on how we interpret our experience and humor is a big part of that as well. We recognize our biases and make discriminating judgements when we stereotype through humor. The article lastly quotes that “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade.” This is how our behaviors are effected by our perception and how we interpret race.
Below the video is called, “If My Brain Were A Person,” which is about how life would be if our brains were a person and they were telling us what to do. Enjoy!