Five Outside Factors
I count five factors outside a person’s basic genetic makeup as a member of the Homo sapiens species that affects his decision making process. These factors could be divided up differently, and you’re welcome to do that for your own use, but I find that dividing them this way makes them the easiest to explain. They are, in no particular order: abilities, skills, available resources, personal history, and cultural background. You could add in some other things like liabilities, opportunities, information, or personality if it makes the list easier to use, but I don’t bother because ultimately those additional categories fit into the five basic categories in various ways. A liability is a negative resource, an opportunity is an abstract type of resource, information is either a skill, an ability, or a resource, and personality is made up of everything in the Web of Human Behavior.
I count everything that makes an individual unique for reasons beyond his own control as an ability. This includes all genetic traits, all physical abilities regardless of their source, and anything else that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. Sight, for instance, is the ability to see. Intelligence is the ability to think. Poor health is an inability to endure harsh environments. An assertive personality gives a person a great ability to assert himself. For a personal example, I’m 6’3”, which makes the top of my refrigerator look like a convenient place to put things.
Individual skills are any skills that a person has learned. The better he is at the skill, the more he will be able to use it to preserve the survival of her DNA. For example, to a person who can play the guitar, a guitar looks like an instrument she can play. To someone who can’t play guitar, it doesn’t.
Available resources consist of anything the person has, or doesn’t have, to draw upon beyond his physical self to achieve his objective. If the person has resources and can use them, they will affect his decision-making. If the person doesn’t have them and needs them, they will affect his decision making differently. If the person has them but can’t use them in a situation, they won’t affect his decision-making. This includes physical resources, but also more abstract things, like time, another person’s personality, the laws of physics, and man-made laws. For instance, a person who has 25 minutes to drive to work will make different decisions based on that time resource depending on whether he needs 20 minutes to drive to work, 25 minutes, or 30 minutes.
Personal history overlaps somewhat with skills, because it includes everything the person has ever learned. Unlike skills, it includes everything the person has learned that doesn’t directly relate to the situation. That can include things that relate to the situation indirectly, and things that the person thinks relate to the situation but don’t actually. For instance, if a woman has been physically abused, if a man raises his voice at her she probably will perceive him as a threat, so she will start trying to escape abuse—even if she doesn’t have specific skills to use in escaping abuse, and even if she was no danger of being abused in this case. If the man who raised his voice didn’t intend to abuse the woman, then the woman’s reactions won’t make sense to him.
A person’s cultural background will teach him values of objectives and approaches—that is, objectives he should or shouldn’t work toward, and ways he should or shouldn’t work toward them. This overlaps with personal history, but it is a specific source of abstract influences on the person’s decision-making. It is the most pervasive and least tangible form of learning from life experiences, because the person doesn’t necessarily learn from specific events or even realize he is learning from them. Instead, cultural values are learned gradually over time by association. Usually the person takes them for granted as the way the world is supposed to be, without realizing it’s only the way the world is supposed to be according to his own culture. Everyone who belongs to a minority already knows how that works.
That’s it. All human behavior revolves around these 18 points. Any time you feel an emotion, you are being affected by some combination of these. Any time someone else feels an emotion, they are being affected by some combination of these. Any time you have a disagreement with someone else, the two of you are being affected differently by these 18 things. Usually the best way to resolve your disagreement, or at least to begin to understand it, is to identify where it originates. Basically, every main character in Shakespeare’s plays figured this out the hard way. Shakespeare was able to write plays about this happening to people because he figured it all out ahead of time.