Cultural Survival Skills

Permissiveness+Neglect+Abuse in Children= Bad Behavioral Contagion!

Many Americans look upon recent developments in American politics in amazement. You can easily hear: America is falling apart! What the hell is going on?! What is happening to us?! Things are spinning out-of-control!

The truth is that all of the social chaos and fearsome anarchy, as well the rise in popularity of Marxist ideals and socialism, have been growing under all of our noses for many years.

A plethora of variables have contributed to the mess that America is now. What we are experiencing is a close approximation to complex cause-effect sociocultural downward spiral that has badly damaged almost all of Western Civilization.

There are a great many influences that singularly and in combination, bring stress and harm to the quality of a population’s behavior patterns. Such influences can be war, petulance, disease, famine, and natural disasters, etc.. Changes of this sort are classified as distress. On the other hand, changes that are considered good, happy or “beneficial” can cause more moderate stress and are known as eustress. Each kind of stress requires adaptation, time and energy to accommodate. 

Then there is a host of stressful advantages and disadvantages that arrive in the form of what may be called “modernization”; namely technological advancements in the area’s of communication, transportation, entertainment, medicine, economics, other time-saving and work-saving advancements. These cultural changes tend to increase faith in mankind and diminishing faith in founding religions as well as other cultural, social, economic and political beliefs and preferences. Many also make life less effortful and rewards more easy to obtain. These cultural changes can contribute to a weakening of motivation and perseverance within a population. Consider the anti-motivational effects of welfare programs and true socialism, for example.

It is important to add, to the previous incomplete list of influences and stresses, the variable of increasing complexity in governments. Governments tend to grow in power, scope and complexity until they become ineffective and moribund. Defunct governments loose legitimacy and increase the likelihood of revolution.

Democratic societies appear to be particularly susceptible to his chain of events, their life-spans are thought by many to typically last around 200 years or so.

It appears, as with individuals, all changes within sociocultures, good or bad, are stressful because they require that a population, political, economic and social agencies change and adapt their behavior patterns in order to meet new challenges.

An important source of change, stressing the entire sociocultural system is what happens to families and the children that they rear. It is important to note that families both affect sociocultural evolution for good or bad and are, in turn, themselves affected by sociocultural evolution, for good or bad. 

This brings us to the matter of Behavioral Contagion, defined as: The spread of particular behavior patterns within a population via scientifically validated Biopsychosocial mechanisms.

It is important to note that changes within populations stress the various social and political agencies that serve them. I call this level of behavioral contagion; Higher Order Behavioral Contagion.

There are many avenues of behavioral contagion. Biological influences include physical damage due to physical injuries, diseases, or inherited characteristics. Social influences include the more’s, folkways, and other behavior patterns among the population to which individuals are exposed. Psychological influences include the mechanisms of behavior change found within the scientific realms of Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Conditioning and Learning Psychology, Behavior Analysis and Applied Behavior Analysis, etc. They also include the perceptual, emotional and belief changes that are influenced within each domain.

Now, please learn about one very important current avenue of bad behavioral contagion in America.

Permissiveness+Neglect+Abuse of Children= Bad Behavioral Contagion!

https://culturalsurvivalskills.me/2018/11/11/permissiveness-produces-bad-behavior-1/

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.

Health Services Provider in Psychology

Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Indiana University South Bend

Tags: America's decline, Authoritarian Parenting, Authoritative Parenting, bad behavioral contagion, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Higher-Order Behavioral Contagion, Permissive Parenting, Permissiveness+Neglect+Abuse in Children= Bad Behavioral Contagion!, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., VTM

This entry was posted on November 18, 2018 at 7:36 PM and is filed under Boiling the American Frog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.