Pondering on Human Nature

Human nature is a fascinating concept. It is the belief that there are certain emotions, desires, and responses that are truly universal, which is to say they exist to varying degrees in all people regardless of whether they live on Manhattan’s upper west side in a million dollar apartment, or in conditions of squalor in a poor neighborhood of Bangalore, India. The love a mother has for her child may take different forms in different parts of the world for instance, but it is a universal concept if there ever was such a thing. Certainly there are always exceptions to the norm, horrendous examples of mothers doing unspeakable acts, or abandoning their children due to drug addiction and prostitution, but those events become noteworthy and remain in our consciousness for the simple fact that they are so extreme in their abnormality.

I often ponder why we act, and react in the ways that we do. How much is due to the environments we are intertwined with, both the short term, such as a certain context or scenario, and the longer term physical and cultural environment which we are exposed to over time. How much of our behavior is based on our own innate feelings and attitudes, again we have to distinguish between the short term, our given mood at any moment, which of course can also be based on environmental or situational factors thus further complicating the analysis, and our long term personalities and general dispositions. This is known as the nature versus nurture theory of human behavior, on one side our behavior is determined by our innate and internal qualities, on the other it is determined by the world we are a part of.

Of course there are very few, if any behaviors that are truly one or the other, there are always a myriad of factors that determine how we act in a given situation. Humans are in some ways very consistent in our responses, we smile and laugh when we are happy and in a good mood, we tend to be more cynical and pessimistic when we are down, but we are also very inconsistent, as evidenced by our mood swings between the two examples given above. And how to explain why we are feeling good, or down? Sometimes it is easy enough, we get a piece of good news and we become happy and energetic, but often times we just feel good for no apparent reason. When you get to be of a certain age you learn not to question or look for reasons but rather to ride the wave while you’ve got it, just as you also learn not to dwell too hard on the down times, because they won’t last.

Attraction is another one of those elements of human nature that fascinates me. What attracts us, physically, sexually, emotionally to some people more than others? Scientists and psychologists try to study such matters and propose some interesting and even plausible theories to explain the so-called laws of attraction, but inevitably such scientific explanations have their flaws in that they can’t predict with consistency how people will respond in given situations. Attraction seems to have a certain physical or chemical element, but this is also dependent on the situation, the mood, the response of the object of your attraction, even the time of day. The old joke back in college was that the girls get better looking as last call approaches. But how someone responds to your initial offer of interest plays a big role as well. And if someone initiates the interest, they also take on an elevated status. Which is not to say that you become interested in anyone who looks your way, there are still matters of preference and chemical attraction and your mood at the time, not to mention your overall receptiveness to others and your skills of observation.

One thing that I believe is a fundamental element of our human experience, and the thought that drove me originally to start writing this piece, is our desire for human contact, and in particular our desire to elicit some sort of response from others. In physics there is the concept of every action producing an equal and opposite reaction. Since we are referring to the social science of human behavior, there is no formula that will predict with much accuracy the equal and opposite part, but the notion that everything we do is designed, consciously or not, to produce some sort of reaction is in my opinion at the heart of our human existence.

It is well noted that babies need stimulus to properly develop, that those extreme situations where babies are denied contact produces tragic results in terms of their development. I don’t remember the name of it, but there was a movie with Jodie Foster where she was in such a situation, and she had no concept of interacting with others or with her environment. One of the first things we are conditioned to do as humans is to cry, because somehow we learn that this action produces a reaction, namely food or comfort. As we age our behaviors become more subtle and more indirect, a teenager acting out because they aren’t getting enough attention, a spouse becoming unfaithful because their partner has seemingly stopped noticing them and responding to our needs, a world leader pretending to have weapons of mass destruction in order to tweak a more powerful nation.

Everything we do is intended to get a response, even if the desired response is to just be left alone, as we can often signal such desires with our own body language or lack of eye contact in a social setting. The things we say and do, sometimes calculated, sometimes without thinking, the eye we catch and hold, the smile we return, the embrace in which we hold on for just a tad longer than normal, these are all ways we have of communicating in hopes that we elicit some sort of response from those we are communicating with.

Think of how we use technology, most of the newer technologies that have taken off in the modern era are centered around some form of interaction and allow us to do so quicker and more often than ever before, often in real time. Cell phones allow us to stay in constant contact, and texting takes that even further. Email allows us to communicate more frequently than did letter writing, and instant messaging allows even more rapid contact and response time. Social networking sites have become all the rage, from My Space to Facebook to Twitter, people are expressing a desire not only to act and react with friends and loved ones but with total strangers, often people from far flung places whom we would never have the opportunity to interact with otherwise.

There is the saying that no man is an island, and while again we can give some abnormal example of the hermit who lives in isolation in the woods somewhere, the norm is that people are social creatures, that a large element of our human nature is our desire to reach out to others in hopes of getting some sort of response out of them. It is what motivates musicians to write and perform music, actors to get on stage or in front of a camera, writers to put pen to paper. The responses we get then go a long ways toward determining our attitudes and beliefs, and ultimately our behavior.

There aren’t really answers to questions regarding human nature and why we behave as we do and why we are attracted to who we are, mostly there are only more questions posed. This is a field of study more suited for philosophy than for science or even psychology, although as with most areas of interest, we get a fuller picture when we consider the findings of different disciplines. One thing is for certain though, humans are an interesting lot, and human nature being what it is, we can expect that will not change anytime soon. It gives us something to always ponder on, to discuss and debate, to write about, and while we may never answer such universal questions as the nurture versus nature debate, it sure makes passing our time here on this earth a good deal more interesting.