Why the Mind is Overrated

– Courtesy photo

By Jordan Yassine

Life would be great if everyone just got along. The world would be a much simpler place. Unfortunately, human nature is anything but simple. We’re complex creatures. People are simply hard to understand.

If everyone understood each other then we’d have no more disagreements — no more arguments or conflicts. Some people would give anything for that to happen. According to society, the best way to understand a person is through their thoughts and feelings. However, that’s impossible. We have no way of knowing what anyone else is thinking or feeling. Sure, we can ask them. Unfortunately, they may not even know themselves.

There’s a more reliable way to understand the people in our lives. However, it involves using a different lens: experience. We all have a history full of experiences. Your experiences have shaped you into the person you are today. Unlike thoughts and feelings, we can see each other’s experiences. If you study people’s experiences long enough you’ll start to notice patterns. These patterns can be used to understand each other.

This is what behavioral science is built on. Behavioral science uses people’s experiences to predict their behavior. Predicting behavior is why we choose to understand thoughts and feelings in the first place. We want to know what someone is thinking so we can expect what they’ll do next. However, we don’t need thoughts and feelings to do that.  

According to a research article published in the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, our experiences are made up of consequences. We’re rewarded and punished for things that we do. Our experiences also have ‘triggers’, or events that started them. These triggers are related to our consequences. For example, as a child you may have had an aunt or uncle who spoiled you. Every time you saw them (trigger) you chose to hang out with them and be spoiled (consequence). If you put people’s triggers and consequences together you can predict how they’ll behave.

This can be done without having to guess anyone’s thoughts or feelings. Unfortunately, society has down-played the role that the environment has in our lives.

The environment has more control over us than we realize. Our triggers and consequences come from the environment. Our environment is also filled with people and objects. Many times a specific combination of people and objects will trigger a person’s behavior. This can be as simple as a greeting to as complex as a job. The fun thing is figuring out what that combination is.  

My point in writing this article is to give you a different way to look at the world. As a society we’ve been taught that reading thoughts and feelings is the best way to understand someone. However, that’s guesswork, and guesswork can be dangerous. We should be sticking to what we see instead. Look at the triggers of people’s behaviors. Look at the consequences of their actions. Look at how they mingle with their environment. You can learn depths about a person without having to guess what’s on their mind. That’s not opinion, that’s science.

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