Individual Behavior
Individual Behavior: It can be defined as a mix of responses to external and internal stimuli. It is the way a person reacts in different situations and the way someone expresses different emotions like anger, happiness, love, etc.
To get a brief idea about the individual behavior let us learn about the individual behavior framework and other key elements related to it.
Individual Behavior Framework
On the basis of these elements, psychologist Kurt Lewin stated the Field theory and outlined the behavior framework. This psychological theory studies the patterns of interaction between an individual and the environment. The theory is expressed using the formula
B = F(P,E)
where, B – Behavior, F – Behavior Function, P – Person, and E – Environment around the person.
Say for example, a well payed person who loses his job in recession may behave differently when unemployed.
Causes of Individual Behavior
Certain individual characteristics are responsible for the way a person behaves in daily life situations as well as reacts to any emergency situations. These characteristics are categorized as −
- Inherited characteristics
- Learned characteristics
- Inherited Characteristics
The features individuals acquire from their parents or from our forefathers are the inherited characteristics. In other words, the gifted features an individual possesses by birth is considered as inherited characteristics.
Following features are considered as inherited characteristics:
- Color of a person’s eye
- Religion/Race of a person
- Shape of the nose
- Shape of earlobes
- Learned Characteristics
Nobody learns everything by birth. First our school is our home, then our society followed by our educational institutions. The characteristics an individual acquires by observing, practicing and learning from others and the surroundings is known as learned characteristics.
It consists of the following features:
- Perception: Result of different senses like feeling, hearing etc.
- Values: Influences perception of a situation, decision making process.
- Personality: Patterns of thinking, feeling, understanding and behaving.
- Attitude: Positive or negative attitude like expressing one’s thought.
From Latin “Humanitas”, the concept of Man means human nature, general culture of the mind. It is also “men” in general, the human race taken as a unit. Most philosophers defined as any human being endowed with reason. What man is the ultimate metaphysical question.
Definitions of man by the Philosophers
Simone de Beauvoir:
“Humanity is a discontinuous series of free men permanently isolate their subjectivity. ”
Husserl (phenomenology):
“Each figure is spiritual in nature in the space of world history. This trial shows humanity as a single life kissing men and peoples and linked only by spiritual traits: it envelops a multitude of types of humanity and culture, but by imperceptible transitions, melt into each other. ”
Nietzsche (see Nietzsche Philosophy Summary):
“Mankind! He was never between all the old, old one more horrible (except perhaps the truth is a problem with the use of philosophers?”
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss”
Merleau-Ponty:
“Man is a historical idea and not a natural kind”
Sartre (Existentialism is a humanism):
“Man is nothing else than his plan, it exists only insofar as it is realized, so it is nothing but the whole ”
Heidegger (Being and Time)L
“Man is a creature of the distant”
Pascal:
“Man is a reed, the weakest of nature, but it is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush: a vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But when the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him The universe knows nothing “