To what extent is behavior caused by processes that occur inside the person?

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To what extent is behavior caused by processes that occur inside the person? In contrast, to what extent is behavior caused or triggered by factors outside the person?

-- Joe Chan (angelic_4283@yahoo.com), June 16, 2004

Answers

Hi Joe, You offer an interesting, but difficult question. The short answer is both internal and external events typically work together to cause behavior, and either an internal or external source can be the initial trigger of a sequence of internal activites leading to behavior. For example as far as triggers are concerned, hunger may started with internal physiological triggers caused by food deprivation, or hunger may start with an advertisement of one of your favorite food. A longer answer would discuss the problems of quantifying the relative frequency of internal versus external triggers that lead to a particular behavior or quantifying the overall relative power of internal versus external influences. Also you would have to deal with the likelihood that many internal and external events can have either immediate or delayed effects (or both), which would make measurement more difficult. I will guess that when you are alone in a quite room, or even better sleeping, that most behavioral or mental triggers will come from internal events (thought they may be commonly related to past external events). However, this does not directly answer your question of the relative influence of internal versus external factors, which I think is hard to quantify. Interestingly we have a similar problem with quantifying the relative influence of heredity and environment. This is usually done (e.g., with identical twins raised apart) by breaking the problem down to how much does heredity versus environment influence a particular physical characteristic, behavior, or personality characteristic. Researvh has found that heredity has more influence on our height than it does on our weight, and that certain mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) and certain personality traits (e.g., shyness) have relatively high hereditary components. Some would go on and generalize that typically general physical traits have the highest genetic loading, then intelligence and personality, and finally preferences like particular religious affiliation and particular hobbies would have the lowest hereditary loading (but probably there would still be some hereditary influences on even these activities). Back to your question of the relative influence of internal versus external events. It may be difficult experimentally to isolate internal versus external influences so that their relative contributions might be compared (as was done in the twin studies to measure the relative influence of heredity and environment). Maybe you can come up with an appropriate experimental design to measure the relative influence of internal (e.g., brain activity, consciousness) events versus external events (events originating outside you skin). I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (pkleinginna@georgiasouthern.edu), June 17, 2004.

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