Behavioral Psychology:
Behavioral psychology is the study of psychology through a person’s physical actions. That saves you from having to ask them any questions, for one thing, and for another, it lets you study their subconscious behavior—meaning things they think or feel that they aren’t aware of, and couldn’t tell you about anyway.
The basic assumption is that the person can’t be relied upon to have any idea why he acts the way he does, you can only determine that from the outside. There’s a joke in behavioral psychology that goes something like this:
What did one behavioral psychologist say to the other behavioral psychologist after sex?
“Was it as good for me as it was for you?”
You use behavioral psychology any time you draw any conclusions about what a person is thinking or feeling based on the way they act. Suppose you meet up with a hot chick and ask her for her phone number. She gives it to you. But then you call her and she doesn’t answer. You leave a message. But she doesn’t call you back. You call her again, she doesn’t answer again, you leave her a message again, and she still doesn’t call you back. So you call her again, leave another message, and she still doesn’t call you back. What conclusions can you draw from her actions? This is a pretty easy one…
Suppose your teenager was out at a party last night. When you see him the next morning, you ask, “So, what’d you do last night?” He launches into a really detailed story about, “Well, first I went over to so-and-so’s house, and then we went over and picked up someone else, then we went to the party and hung out for about an hour, then we went to the store to get some more soda…” By the time he gets to the end of his story, he has an alibi for just about every minute of the night. That probably means he got drunk, got stoned, or got laid, and doesn’t want you to find out. If you care about that, you might keep an eye out for more clues to what’s going on, and then start trying to fit pieces of the puzzle together.
As you can see, you can break human behavior down into finer and finer details to find out more specific things, but as you do, you have to look harder and harder for the clues to fit together. But that’s the basic idea.
Of course, this only works if you interpret the behavior correctly. The hot chick who gave you her phone number but never answered her phone might’ve had to go out of town for a week because her mother was in the hospital. Or your teenage son might’ve been at a party where some people were doing something he knew you wouldn’t approve of, so he came home with a well rehearsed alibi for every minute of the night so he could prove he wasn’t in on whatever you wouldn’t have approved of. If you go searching through his laundry for beer bottle caps, empty condom wrappers, or bags of weed because you don’t trust him, well, maybe that’s why he came home with such a well rehearsed alibi, because he already knew you didn’t trust him!
When I was going to school for my automotive degree, there was a kid in my class who was a nice kid, pretty quiet, medium height, and a slim build. Any time anyone made any kind of reference to homosexuals around him, he would always say, “Oh, I hate fags, I can’t stand ‘em.” This school was located in the third largest city in Maine, which isn’t saying very much, because the Phoenix metro area alone has a population roughly 5 times the entire state of Maine. As you might imagine, among people who go to technical college, and especially among people who go to technical college in such a rural environment, basically nobody likes homosexuals. Or bisexuals. Or even people who look like they might be homosexuals…
There you have an example of a more advanced use of behavioral psychology. Since I knew these background clues about where this kid grew up, and I saw him go so far out of his way to denounce homosexuals multiple times, and he did it every time anyone mentioned anything about homosexuals around him, it was rather glaringly obvious that people had probably accused him of being a homosexual a lot when he was growing up.
Did he really hate homosexuals as much as he said he did? Or was he just trying to keep anyone from accusing him of being one himself? For as nice as this kid was, I can’t imagine him hating anyone that much just for being who they were. Or had he made such a strong negative emotional attachment to the idea of homosexuality that he did hate one particular group of people that badly now? Had he consciously figured out how to keep people from accusing him of being a homosexual? Or had he just subconsciously moved stuff around in his brain until he started talking in a way that kept him out of trouble, and now he really hated homosexuals as much as he said he did? I never found any of this out, but they are interesting questions to wonder about.