Behavioral Perspective
What is Behavioral Perspective?
The behavioral perspective suggests that we must only reference what is observable when trying to understand human behavior. Classically, this perspective rejects internal processes and focuses on behavior as a consequence of interactions with the environment.1
The Basic Idea
Many philosophers, scientists and biologists have long sought to answer a simple question: What motivates human beings? What can explain our decisions, actions and behavior?
The behavioral perspective belongs to a school of thought known as behaviorism or behavioral theory. Behavioral theory is the overarching analysis of human behavior focused on examining a person’s environment and learned associations. Behaviorism suggests that all behavior is acquired through conditioning and can therefore be observed without consideration of thoughts or feelings. Since all behavior is but a response, behaviorism also suggests that anyone can learn to perform any action with the right conditioning. Instead of attributing talents, skills, or behaviors to genetics, personality, or cognition, behaviorists believe them to be simply a product of conditioning.2
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief – regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
– John B. Watson in his paper “Psychologists as the Behaviorists View It”2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
