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The recent convictions of two Vermont teenagers for the brutal slaying of two Dartmouth professors make us wonder how two ostensibly "normal kids," one of them an honors student, could engage in such behavior without giving major signals of their grossly antisocial dispositions.
Similarly, when an adolescent pilot deliberately flew a stolen plane into a Tampa office building, friends and neighbors said "His mind must have snapped," and that he must have had a "nervous breakdown."
When someone behaves in a way that violates our expectations, our thinking goes dichotic. Yesterday she was okay; today she's not - normal people and abnormal people, sick folks and well folks. But the human psyche is not like that. Minds don't snap, and nerves don't break down all of a sudden. Figures of speech, often invoked when the behavior of an individual appears to be "out of character," do not explain anything.
When tragic, unbelievable behavior seems to emerge from nowhere, it is inevitably preceded by a process underway for years. In behavioral catastrophes, we tend to medicalize - i.e., to look for an organic origin rather than causes based in experience. We also tend to presume, erroneously, that human behavior is essentially unpredictable.
Sigmund Freud dealt with these problems a century ago. People, he said, often appear to have a disease when in fact the disorder stems from a learning experience. He insisted, also, that there are no behavioral "accidents," because all behavior is caused.
The notion that behavior is lawful and that learning processes are the roots of much of it is thought by many to have originated with the behaviorist, professor B.F. Skinner because he, like Freud, insisted on the critical role that experience plays in behavior. Skinner did demonstrate strikingly that the developmental destinies of animals and humans are determined greatly by their environments and experiences. But it is central to both Freud and the behaviorists that pleasure and annoyance, and the contexts in which they occur, are the foundations of the often startling power of cumulative experience. Neither Freud nor Skinner denied the importance of the nervous system. Freud, originally a neurologist, understood that all experiences, and remembrances of things past, and the consequences of those memories, are carried by the nervous system.
Scientists today are confident that behavioral events, like all natural phenomena, can be understood in cause-effect and developmental terms. Behavior is lawful. Nonetheless, sometimes the behavior of an acquaintance is so contrary to expectation that we fail to predict it, and experts can hardly explain it.
Just as natural laws form the basis of physics and chemistry, laws describing and explaining the regularities of human behavior also exist. If it were not so, we would find the behavior of our friends weird at best, because they would not be at all predictable one moment to the next. The laws of learning and behavior are always in effect?like Newton's laws of gravity and Ohm's law of electrical circuitry. Our knowledge of them and their implications are incomplete, and await further discoveries, but that is so in all sciences.
Only in the last hundred years has humankind found its way with gravity, and put thousand-ton vehicles in the air. So we shouldn't blame our failure to anticipate tragic behavioral events on the inevitability of "accidents," but rather on the incompleteness of our information.
We would all welcome scientific advances in the detection of incipient offenders and potentially dangerous events in our midst. The opportunity was missed, unfortunately, to stop the lad who flew the plane into the Tampa building in obvious imitation of the World Trade Center terrorists. But we must accept that, in principle, predicting and controlling the heinous behavior of dangerous individuals is possible. This requires a leap of faith for some, but for many behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists it is no longer such a wild dream.
The nervous system does not come ready-made with angry, hurtful, despicable impulses. Humans do come equipped with strong defensive reflexes, biologically useful in savings one's life when threatened. If treated badly, even babies fight back. From infancy onward, the overarching importance of two major response systems is evident: the capacity to become attached to significant, trusted individuals in our early lives as the essence of enduringly positive, loving relationships with others, and second, the readiness to defend ourselves against harm. From these basics, humans learn very complex, even artful response patterns that help later to defend us against psychological pain, like humiliation, sadness and personal grievances.
The science of human development is still immature, because of years of neglect. But this much we know. Children who are born into the hands of someone who loves them unconditionally from the start, and into a welcoming society that affirms the selfhood of individuals, usually become comfortably attached to significant others and manage to defend their personhood without doing grave damage to others. They don't surprise us later by brutalizing people they don't know or ramming a plane into a populated building.
Lewis P. Lipsitt, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Medical Science, and Human Development at Brown University, where he has been a Brown faculty member since 1957, was the founding editor of The Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter.
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