Do you find any validity in this statement? Either in theory, or relative to your own life experiences.
I don’t think it’s something you can take to the bank, but more often than not I think it’s true when it comes to people.
Quoting from my textbook for my Criminal Psychology class (Criminal Behavior: A Psychosocial Approach, 8th edition, Bartol and Bartol):
I agree with this as far as criminal behavior goes. Dominant responses are very difficult to eradicate, and once a pattern of violent behavior has been established in an individual then it is safer than not to predict that they will rely on that pattern in future situations. I think one just about has to extrapolate this to different situations – otherwise, where would you draw the line?
Bearing in mind that the best predictor is the one that’s better than all the others but not necessarily a really good one, yeah, it is true about people. We are remarkably consistent.
I dunno. As someone who changed her entire eating habits overnight, basically, and lost ~100lbs, I wouldn’t consider it an airtight theory. Motivation strikes like lightening, you never know when someone is going to hit an emotional breaking point and overhaul something about themselves.
I would be more likely to say that it’s true for little things than big things, like losing keys, or driving a certain way, or a number of things that you’ll never really be confronted with a huge, drastic reason to amend or even think deeply about.
There’s something I find myself saying fairly often to friends who are talking to me about someone they’re having problems with: “If a given behavior works for somebody, they have no reason to change it.”
As with the above opinions, it’s not always true all the time; but it’s a fairly accurate generalization.
I think the statement has validity, because we are creatures of habit.
It’s often the basis of interview questions, e.g. “tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult situation.”
It works, sometimes, but people will often apply it erroneously. Give a past response to a stimulus, chances are a person will respond to the same stimulus in a same or similar way, unless the response received some kind of negative feedback the first time.
The trick to predicting someone’s behavior isn’t just knowing their past history, but knowing them well enough to know what they’ll perceive as similar stimuli.
I absolutely find validity in it. For those who don’t, please answer this: what do you assert to be a better predictor of future behavior?
It would be very disconcerting if the statement was not largely true. People have personalities and well developed ways of dealing with the world. If your family, friends, or coworkers woke up every morning with a new personality and little evidence if how they would react to different situations that day, then you couldn’t ever form any real relationships with anyone because you couldn’t get to know them deep down. A major component of knowing people well is a subset of this question.
I think it’s mostly true. It’s important that the past behaviors that you are evaluating are complete experiences. After having been through a stressful event, one may choose to train one’s responses to be different from what they were, or one may choose to think one will never be in a similar experience and choose not to address the less than optimal behavior.
The more complete experiences that are available for evaluation, the better they are at predicting future behaviors. That is, a specific behavior is less of a predictor of future behaviors. But past experiences are indicators because they indicate what types of behavior that individual is more likely to judge worthy of change — or whether the individual is one who learns/changes as opposed to those who merely go about confirming their own prior convictions about the world.
Hmmm. I tend to believe that people don’t change, but then again, people constantly can surprise you. Not very helpful, but such is life. In regards to criminal behavior–I’d say it depends. Is this a “youthful transgression” aka dare to steal candy or a pattern of behavior motivated by either the need for money or a sense of entitlement (aka I deserve an iPod, so I’ll take this one). I’d say the former is superficial (it should still be punished) and transitory. The latter is more ingrained and therefore more likely to be repeated.
I think it’s mostly true for all animals, people or otherwise.
Nailed it.
Past behavior may not be a perfect indicator of future behavior, but it’s where the smart money bets.
Yeah, but you made a real conscious choice to do so, and I’m betting it was something of a struggle at first. Most people don’t make such huge overhauls to their lives like that.
Not only that, it’s also where your insurance company’s money lies.
To that end, an in-law is an actuary and her addendum to this is “Frequency leads to severity”. IOW, if you are repeatedly getting into small bits of trouble, sooner or later you will get into serious trouble. Or, in her case, lots of little claims almost always lead to a large claim.
Like others have said, I’m in the “not perfect-but better than anything else” camp.
Certainly, when taken at face value, the statement seems obvious. Of course there is no “better predictor” (or, if there is, I can’t think what it would be).
But in thinking about this statement and its seemingly common acceptance in psychology, it seems to be saying that, even when a person recognizes a behavior as negative, he or she is still more likely to repeat what they’ve done in the past. To put it simply, “people rarely change.”
Perhaps I am reading too much into the statement itself but nevertheless I wonder how common or uncommon it is for people to successfully change ingrained negative behaviors. In my own observations, the success rate does not seem to be high.
(I was thinking more of the average person and not so much the criminal or deranged, but those are very interesting points as well.)
Exactly. Though my immediate inclination is to think of how this axiom applies to undesirable behaviors, it’s generally pretty darn true with the desirable ones.
That’s how trust is earned, friendships are made and reputations are built.
If I’ve consistently demonstrated integrity, compassion and honesty, won’t you come to expect that of me? Wouldn’t it come as a terrible shock if one of your good friends was to suddenly treat you with contempt?
I would think that if someone has a history (not just a one-time thing) of theft, or drug use (not including addiction), or cheating on a spouse, or job-hopping, it’s not out of the questions to expect that at some point they’ll continue or revisit that behavior. It’s not guaranteed, but hey, it’s more than an even chance IMO.