Rewarding Dependent Behavior Gets America This!
In 2010, I blogged the following article explaining that there are only two basic kinds of behavior among humans and other animals.
The science of psychology has known this for a very long time. We have taught this information in our colleges and universities for decades. However, we do not often teach it in our primary and secondary schools. This is a strategic American failure, though it is not likely that simply teaching such facts will change human self-interest behavior patterns.
For that to occur will require an all-enveloping cultural pattern of rewards for unselfish, responsible, moral/ethical, prosocial and pro-future cultural survival behavior patterns among its entire population.
This, of course is what America’s Judeo/Christian religions helped us to do, before their influences were diminished for complex reasons that I have discussed in previous blogs. The historically failed religion of “secular humanism” is now in its ascendancy and it is miserably failing to achieve the essentials noted in the paragraph above.
Much of the educated population around the world has also been exposed to psychology’s principles that shape human behavior. Yet socialism, communism and progressive/liberal influences among democracies and republics all reward dependency through their centralized political systems.The results of this are, and always have been, poor to disastrous.
Of course, so-called conservative political organizations are also prone to corruption by the same self-centered human tendencies to maximize their own personal immediate rewards, more quickly and in greater measures.
People, like lower-order animals, tend to be motivated by immediate rewards. “What’s in it for me”? “How can I get what I want”? “How can I get it faster and in larger quantities”?!
This tendency of homosapiens, like all other animals on planet earth, is also manifest in governments. Politicians and political parties act like gigantic animals: “How can we get more power”? “How can we get more votes”? “How can we get more money and get it faster for our favorite projects and constituents”…”the projects and constituents that will in-turn give us more votes”!?
Deferring immediate personal gratification in order to achieve long-term benefits as individuals and as sociocultures in is not the default behavior pattern of animals, whether they be humans or organizations of humans.
This behavior pattern must be taught to us and consistently reinforced in us…….by ourselves!
How could it possibly be otherwise?
Please let me refresh your memory about two basic principles of psychology in my article below.
https://culturalsurvivalskills.me/2010/04/20/two-basic-kinds-of-behavior/
Now please see the video illustrating what happens when, as individuals and as sociocultures, we reward dependent behavior in ourselves and in others.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/RBqjZ0KZCa0?showinfo=0&rel=0&hd=0
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 9/13/15
P.S. 1, Race is irrelevant. Rewarding dependent behavior increases the rate of dependent behavior, irrespective of race.
P.S. 2, Thanks to Lee Hornack for sending this older, but marvelously illustrative video to me.
Lee Hornack
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Tags: Lee Hornack, Rewarding Bad Behavior Gets Bad Behavior, Rewarding Dependent Behavior Gets America This!, Rewarding Good Behavior Gets Good Behavior, Two Basic Kinds of Behavior, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., VTM
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