Behavior and Perception

This semester at school, I’ve been taking a course that discusses the psychology of human learning and how it applies to teaching music. While this class has definitely taught me a lot about the subject of how one learns a musical instrument, it’s also made me evaluate a lot of other areas of the life experience.

One of the questions posed many times over the course of the semester is “How does one observe that a behavior has actually been learned, and that a habit is assimilated?” This led to discussions of the specificity of language and accurately describing how we actually perceive the behavior of others (in other words, how ideas [nouns and adjectives] are translated into specific behaviors [verbs]).

For instance, when asked to describe why another person- let’s call her Rachel- is “a good friend,” one might be tempted to say something predictable like “Rachel cares about her friends.” While that may be true, and Rachel may indeed care about her friends a great deal, that does absolutely nothing that shows us (or more importantly, her friends) that Rachel is indeed a good friend because it is something completely internalized to her. Instead, more accurate descriptions are phrases like “Rachel planned a surprise party for Sarah’s birthday” or “Rachel attended Betty’s concert and cheered as loud as possible at its conclusion.”

These statements show the type of feedback that Rachel has given her friends in order for them to ascertain that she is a good friend and does indeed care about them. Feedback can be anything that leads to a change in thought or behavior. You don’t study for a test and subsequently earn a low grade. Feedback. You tailgate behind a car in the pouring rain and rear end them when they slow suddenly. Feedback. You write your mom a heartfelt card for Mother’s day and she smiles at you with a twinkle in her eye. Feedback. You prepare a great deal for a gig and play well, and are subsequently called back to play with the same group again. Feedback.

Those are just a couple more obvious examples, but all of us are constantly giving and receiving feedback amongst our friends, peers, family, lovers, colleagues, and surroundings. Because feedback is such a sensitive and constant process, it’s important for us (at least, if we have any care about how others perceive us) to evaluate the type of feedback that we give others. This might seem obvious, but the next time you’re listening to someone talk for an extended period of time in a conversation, pay attention to the body language you’re using while they speak. If you make appropriate facial expressions, and interject relevant comments when it’s clear that they’ve paused between thoughts, you will likely be perceived as a good listener. If you’re checking Facebook on your iPhone, your conversant will probably develop a different opinion.

Evaluating the sort of feedback that one gives another person is especially important if one seeks to change their opinion in some way. You have, in the past, given this person negative feedback that they now associate with you. You must now provide an equal or greater amount of feedback in the other direction. If one wants to be forgiven and regain the trust of another after a mistake, one must show remorse and dedication through concrete actions that can be clearly perceived by the other. Say you accidentally spill wine on your friend’s white shirt at a party, permanently ruining that shirt and leaving that person with a stained shirt for the remainder of the night. In your embarrassment, you rush out the door, humiliated that you ruined their lovely shirt (and in front of all their friends, no less). For several days you feel horrible and avoid talking to them, because you feel so awful that you can’t bear to face them. You know that you feel terrible. However, they don’t know how you feel. The feedback they’ve received from the situation is that you ruined their shirt at a party, left without apologizing and haven’t talked to them since. In their eyes, you’ve shown no effort to fix the mistake. On the other hand, if you had profusely apologized immediately after spilling your drink and offered to replace their shirt, their opinion of you will probably be quite different.

I know this has been a bit of a ramble (and if you’ve read this much, kudos), but I’ve thought much about this lately and how the opinions we form of others are carefully calculated, consciously and/or subconsciously, from the type of feedback we receive from them (and the other way around). The perception of our personalities is the sum of the feedback we have given, through our behavior, to those doing the perceiving.

Thoughts?