An excerpt from the book Homo
Imitans by Leandro Herrero:
Behaviours are wonderful things! They are
powerful, they are explicit and they provoke many emotions.
However, for many people today behaviours are still ‘secondary citizens’, only understood ‘as a result’ of other things such as values, beliefs or thinking.
These are people who, very often truly
genuinely, say that changing behaviours means little unless the
mindset or the attitudes have changed. They would say you can
change behaviours, but it will be just superficial,
not for real, just a game of pretend. Your (real) thinking will not have
changed. Mindsets and attitudes... You know how I feel about
those!
In many parts of the world, ‘behaviours’ still
get bad press. They seem to be
mentally associated with ‘forcing people’ to do something. In English, ‘to behave’ means to
behave well, to conform to the norm, to stick to the rules. In
psychiatry, behavioural therapy has long been labelled as
a sort of superficial approach, not comparable with the
more ‘serious’ and ‘deep’ therapies such as psychoanalysis or
psychotherapy, which are based upon understanding and
insights.
These stereotypes won’t go away soon. I don’t have much room to digress here and I know a discussion about this could go on for hours, perhaps even days or months...but I do believe we need to elaborate a bit on this before we move on. People, particularly the ones who associate behaviours with carrots and sticks, have a hard time understanding the potential value and pragmatism of focusing on behaviours.
This view of behaviours as the poor, secondary, visible representation of more noble bodies such as mind, mindset, cognition, value systems, etc. is well-maintained by many Homo Sapiens professions for very good reasons. We all tend to attribute all motivation for our actions to the essence of Sapiens. The opposite would mean
accepting that we are less in control than we think we are and
that our free will is less free than
we think.
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