Behavior

BEHAVIOR. - It may be defined as the practical attitude that the animal and man assume in the concrete situations of life. It therefore consists of a moment, which may be called cognitive, through which the agent recognizes himself in a given situation, and of an active-operative moment with which he responds to that situation and obtains a new condition of equilibrium which in man reaches, in free actions, the level of moral responsibility and of personality.

In modern psychology the theories on behavior reflect the philosophical orientation of their respective proponents. Watson's "behaviorist" school (behaviour = behavior), raising Pavlov's reflexology to the status of a psychological method, claimed to explain behavior by means of simple reflexes, disregarding any reference to the existence of a consciousness and of conscious processes and stopping at simple objective analysis, that is, of the physicochemical processes of the nervous system in relation to the physical processes of stimuli. The "Gestalt" psychology (Gestalt) maintained instead that behavior arises by virtue of a reorganization of the entire perceptual field; the value of the stimulus, at which Watson's pure associationism stopped, does not exist in itself but is a function of the total situation of the subject: for this reason K. Koffka distinguished a geographical environment and a behavioral environment, just as W. Köhler distinguishes a phenomenal world (which is the object of psychology) and a real world from which the stimuli for consciousness proceed. A synthesis of behaviorism and Gestaltism is the purposive behaviorism of E. C. Tolman: the learning of a behavior, as well as its functioning, is subordinated to the knowledge of a determinate end, that is, to an Insight or vision of a dynamic principle of unity of the behavior, and thus the originality of the psychic process seems to be preserved. Purposive also is the theory of behavior of the "hormic Psychology" or tendential psychology (Equā = drive, impulse) of W. McDougall, according to whom the animal from its very first moments shows a well-defined orientation of its acting which therefore has its reason in an original drive preceding any cognitive process. Man's behavior, once the first infantile stage is passed, depends on the development of his higher life.

Cornelio Fabro