How to Rethink Human Behavior

A Practical Guide to Social Contextual Analysis

Bernard Guerin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138123373
• eBook ISBN: 9781317302407
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Developed from the author's long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable 'facts'. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history.

The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from 'within' but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed.

Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn:

• How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking
• How your thinking is a conversation with other people
• How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies
• How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways
• How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression

How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.

1
RATIONALE AND BASIC SOCIAL ANALYTIC SKILLS

Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weakness, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them . . . Dear blunderers, I am one of you.

(George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879)

This book is about teaching you some useful people skills. These skills will help you to observe people in their contexts and to analyse what you observe to make more sense of why people do what they do, say what they say and think what they think. You will be able to understand people better and work and live with them better.

The basic approach guiding all this, which is a natural or ecological science approach, is that what people do arises from their contexts or environments, so we must focus on observing and analysing those contexts and not just the things people tell us – because what they tell us has also arisen from those contexts and does not necessarily reflect the contexts accurately.

You do not have to totally go along with this approach in order to learn the skills (Guerin, 2016). The skills will be useful in any case and are worth learning. But, along the way, you will find out something about the limitations of previous ways of observing and analysing, and some limitations in how current psychology thinks about people. You will also learn lots of really neat stuff about people and what they do in everyday life, bringing together all the social sciences – sociology, social anthropology, psychology and social work.

If you read this and follow up with your own practical observations, the book will give you skills or tools to tackle the puzzling questions about people in your everyday life, in your clinical or professional practice, and in your research. You will also begin to understand yourself better as well. This will not be done in the way that academic disciplines normally deal with social behaviour, however. I will present a broader and – I believe – more useful and practical way to understand social behaviour, one that incorporates all the traditional disciplines which study human behaviours and also all the newer perspectives, such as discourse analysis and postmodernism.

One of the problems in teaching these skills is that every situation in life is slightly different, and every person and their history is different. The common way to handle this is to use abstract theories and generalizations that pretend to cover every example. Here I want to teach you some observation and analysis skills, but you will need to consider the differences and diversity in your own examples. How well you do this will depend on your own life experiences and knowledge of everyday contexts, rather than how well you know the grand theories of academics. If you continue lifelong learning in these skills, you will grow and develop in understanding people. I will help you along that path, but my help will be more like guidelines than actual rules.

The plan for you to learn the skills: an overview

The book is based around learning some key skills for observing and analysing what people do, but the analysis is based on learned skills not theory. Table 1.1 gives you the broad list of skills, and as I go through each chapter there will be additional, more detailed skills to learn.

This book will first take you through some ideas about two key skills: contextual observation and possibility training. These go a bit against the normal ways we work with people and therefore require some practice. With the first I want you to get to a point where you can see some people behaving somewhere and, rather than observe only the main people and objects present, I want you to actually see the possible contexts that might be occurring – especially the social relationships, economics, culture and history of what is going on. Meanwhile, you will be helped in this by training in not simply naming the most obvious cause of or factor in what might be going on, but in analysing (instantaneously springing from both your training and your life experiences) the many possible strategies that might be taking place. After practising this training, you will actually see more when you look at people in the world.

To help extend your analytic skills in this book, I will next go through four very broad but common strategic contexts from which social behaviour emerges (Chapter 2). These are shown loosely in Figure 1.1. First, what are the resources in life that people will work to get, or, in everyday terms, what do people want? What are they trying to do with their lives in general? This is not as simple as it might sound, and some broad points will orient you. The second broad context to start your analyses consists of the different social groupings, audiences, relationships, networks or populations that are important in analysing the possible contexts for social behaviours. This is about the social groupings through which we work our lives and how in the context of different social groups we find different social strategies and behaviours emerging.

TABLE 1.1 List of skills learned in book

	Skills to be learned	Chapter
1	Making contextual observations	1
2	Contextual analysis with possibility training	1
3	Avoiding stereotypes in your analyses	1
4	Learning from similar analyses and experts	1
5	Analysing and observing resources	2
6	Analysing and observing populations and audiences	2
7	Analysing and observing exchange and generalized exchange	2
8	Analysing and observing secrecy	2
9	Analysing and observing monitoring	2
10	Trust as the interplay of secrecy and monitoring	2
11	Strategic usurpation as a common but overlooked analysis	2
12	Analysing and observing social context	3
13	Analysing the social properties of economic systems	4
14	Analysing the social properties of a capitalist economy (twenty-five tricks)	4
15	Analysing the social inequalities and stratifications of life opportunities	5
16	Analysing the social and behavioural outcomes of gender inequalities	5
17	Analysing other lack of opportunities	5
18	Tricks for observing the contexts of opportunity (six tricks)	5
19	Tricks for analysing and observing historical contexts (three tricks)	6
20	Tricks for analysing and observing the cultural contexts (four tricks)	7
21	Tricks for analysing and observing all five contexts	7
22	Analysing language use is analysing social contexts and strategies	8
23	Observing language use in everyday life	8
24	The many verbal micro-strategies to represent or portray the world	8
25	Strategies to keep and entertain your audience	8
26	The many verbal micro-strategies to massage your social relationships	8
27	Analytic questions to explore the contexts of thinking	9
28	Contextual observations and thoughts: ‘reading people’s minds’	9
29	Methods for analysing thoughts-in-their-contexts	9
30	Methods for analysing bluff games and their challenges	10
31	Methods for analysing social dilemma games	10

These first two ways of analysing what people do, to get you oriented, can be usefully thought of in the social science idea of ‘exchange’, which brings together both resources and populations. In fact, we only get resources through other people. So we will explore possibilities that emerge from working with different social relationships to access different sorts of resources. We will also see that many of the issues of current life arise from the context of having many necessary relationships with people who are basically strangers to us. And this includes many mental health problems, as we shall see.

ANALYSIS BOX 1

You are in a shopping mall or market and you see an adult (presumably a parent) take a toy fluffy sloth from a child and, without the child seeing, the parent goes to the nearby shop and sneakily puts it back on the shelves secretly so the child cannot see this happening.

What did you observe? Only that?

What did you analyse? Only that?

This scenario and your observation is commonly what we do – only see and name the obvious – but you have missed most of the possible contexts. It appears that there is nothing special happening, and you have a simple way to talk about this event if anyone were to ask. But most likely you will think nothing else about it (but more below).

FIGURE 1.1 Four main strategic contexts for analysis

ANALYSIS BOX 2

Following on from Analysis Box 1, what might the parent be trying to achieve in terms of resources (more on this later): trying to save money without the child knowing the toy fluffy sloth wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Rationale and basic social analytic skills
• 2 The basics of practical social analysis
• 3 Analysing and observing social relationship contexts
• 4 Analysing and observing economic contexts
• 5 Analysing and observing the contexts for environmental opportunities
• 6 Analysing and observing historical contexts
• 7 Analysing and observing cultural contexts
• 8 The contexts for language use: conversation and other discourses
• 9 Analysing the contexts for thinking
• 10 Analysing social strategy
• Index