Decoding Human Behaviour

I got a visitor last week at my place. Lets call him Swapnil. Swapnil is a 26 year old guy from Bhillai. Swapnil hails from an upper middle class family. He was born in riches and was pampered throughout his childhood to an extent that he never had to slog it out. As he grew up his interests shifted toward gambling. He started skipping classes to gamble. he would lose a lot of money but since daddy dearest had deep pockets, he didn't have to worry much. He'd end up replenishing his quota of money every single day and lose all of it. Occassionally he'd win too but the win is to lose ratio was close to 1:100. His mother too never wanted him to struggle by slogging it out. He managed to complete his highschools(class XII) and got into a diploma course for electronics but bailed out after 3 years. Then he went back to gambling and betting and ended up losing 25 lakhs INR during one of his bets. That was a major blow to his dad who at that point in time was battling a bunch of courtcases with his relatives over a property dispute. Amidst all this pandemonium, the financial situation at Swapnil's house was deteriorating. He no longer had the backing of his dad when it came to pursuing his interests. He felt crippled and decided to not do anything worthwhile with his life. At home the constant nagging of his once endearing mother was becoming too much to handle and that is exactly when Swapnil decided to work somewhere.

I met his last year in a project I was spearheading in UP East. He joined our team and tried working hard but he wasn't as energetic as the rest of our crew. He did not have any ambition or goals. He would just come to office and sit and try to do some kind of clerical work. He'd wait for the evenings when we'd all hang out and have fun either outside or at a booze party at some friend's place. His only objective was to have fun. I observed him over 6 months where I and my colleagues tried hard to motivate him to do something. I even went ahead and coached him on a few programming lessons in Python thinking this could help him get a decent job in tech. However he just didn't have the grit and determination to carry on anything successfully. He'd give up any task he was assigned. End of the day we decided to give him some desk jobs that were easy in nature. Even when he was in Bangalore for a period of merely 4 days, all he could talk about was short cuts that'll make him rich, most of whcih included gambling and betting. I tried real hard to persuade him to try his hands at a job but he really didn't have any motivation to do a job. However the silver lining in the cloud was the fact that if the dicusssion revolved around gaming or building a gambling game, Swapnil would become super creative and be ready to build on the gaming logic. He'd even start drawing the paper wireframes. I was mildly surprised when he did it the first time. But maybe in a few hours he'd be back to normal with absolutely zero concern for his career.

Let's now take the case of a childhood friend called Jitesh. Jitesh and I schooled together. We spent 12 years together in school and have known each other for 34 years. Our families know each other quite well. I have always known Jitesh to be a hard working and smart guy. Although he was competitive be it sports or academics , he wasn't the type to engage in fights or infernal affairs. He didn't go out much unlike us, who were breezing away everywhere.I have always known Jitesh to be a quite person. He was uber religious and he'd sometimes take me to Hanuman Temples on a Tuesday. He wanted to do somethign different from what his dad did. He wanted to make a career in engineering unlike his dad who was a businessman. He worked super hard and managed to crack a space for himself in the software industry. He grew organically in the organisation and now over the years is a director with a software company. The Jitesh I knew as a kid and as a teenager was a fun loving guy who was also a family guy. He'd keep close ties with all his siblings and uncles and would ensure he keeps everyone happy. Quintessentially he was the ideal son every Indian dad would ever want. But now over the past few years I have discovered a new avatar of Jitesh. Jitesh the simpleton , the boy from next door is now a politically charged person with radically communal views. He does not believe in secularism anymore and feels the country belongs to only the majority and has absolutely no concern for other ethnic or religious groups. I am gobsmacked at the sudden transition of the Jitesh I knew to someone I could barely recognize anymore. What caused this sudden metamorphosis is something I am oblivious to? How did a sweet guy turn so politically charged is somethign beyond my comprehension? But let's use these examples to talk a bit about human behaviour.

If you see the above two examples, you'd find that they define two individuals with two different behavioural patterns. It's quite difficult to say anything about these individuals or their corresponding behaviours on the basis of a few data points that I described. We really can't deipher the actual Swapnil and Jitesh, unless we have spent a lot of time with them to unravel the enigma behind their respective demeanours. Even then we can't say with cent percent certainty about their true human behaviour. But isn't it essential to first define what behaviour is?

Let's see what Websters says about behaviour

So if we were to define behaviour, we could say the way a human conducts himself is called behaviour, subject to external stimulus. Now that we have defined behaviour, let's just talk about what really constitutes human behaviour. If you see the entire chronology of events in a person's life, almost each one of them tends to shape his behaviour. A child develops a major part of his behaviour by observing people around her. She tries to ape her parents as she starts building her own behavioural patterns. It is not only aping physical or verbal gestures that parents do but also imbibing ideologies or point of views. As Jack Nicholson says in this famous dialogue from 'The Departed'

Behavioural studies show that the socio economic and geopolitical schools of thought that parents have tend to shape a large part of a child's behaviour. Add to that a lot of external stimuli and you get yourself an individual with a behavioural pattern quite complex in nature. Put some 200 plus cognitive biases on top of it and the person becomes seemingly complex. Add some layers of emotions and you have with you a recipe for disaster or prosperity. David Hume in his seminal book " A treatise of human nature" tried to excavate human nature through a series of hypothesis, assumptions and thought experiments but toward the end he concluded that it would be difficult to generalise the observations since every human is a victim of circumstances. People are born to different families, different ethnic, religious or socio economic groups and under different circumstances. I do realise that genetics does have a pivotal role to play in replicating or triggering behavioural patterns similar to parents but circumstances have a bigger role to play. If one sees the confession tapes of Ted Bundy, one would find he always felt what he did was morally correct. So did Charles Manson and his cult responsible for the murder of actress and model Shanon Tate. In fact if one watches 'Mindhunters', a series on Netflix that showed how FBI's behavioural Sciences Unit actually interviewed some of the biggest serial killers in America to understand more about the patterns of behaviour these psychopathic individuals display and how they could be used to catch potential serial killers on the loose. Take a look at this interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siR0GYuH0aY

I could cut another example from the series 'Westworld' that showed how a droid devoid of emotions that was programmed not to react, goes berserk triggered by emotional impulses and avenges herself by killing her creator, who had designed her to be tortured inside a West World theme park, where a lot of people would land for recreation. Take a look at this scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro0H8c4mgq0

Here we are talking about a sentient AI, something which might take us a while to build. The element of discussion is that the best and worst of human beings are triggered by emotions embedded deeply in our so called consciousness. Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University tends to call himself a behavioural biologist and explains human behaviour in the context of chemicals emanating in the brain. His discussions interestingly explain the human behavioral tree using chemical compounds that originate in the brain and that are chiefly responsible for any type of behaviour. One of his famous quotes is about the fact that "We don't hate violence;we hate the wrong kind".This is one of his favourite speeches on human behaviour that attempts to explain the best and worst of human behavour. Take a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk&t=137s

Even Carl Jung in some of his seminal writings tried to explore human behaviour through some thought experiments. His entire theory of individuation is based on conscious and unconscious personas of a human being. Freud tried to explain behaviour through the dreams that a human being has and a larger part of human behaviour could be explained by interpreting dreams. He inarguably ended up building one of the most seminal theories in modern psychology that still finds its usage today. However as psychology progressed and we had brilliant psychologists like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, come up with powerful theories that would explain human decision optimally. Kahneman and Tversky concluded that most decisions made by human beings are rooted in emotions. A majority of decisions that we make have no base in rationality and are by products of complex emotional loops embedded deeply in the psyche. In an interesting experiment done by neuromarketer Martin Lindstrom, a number of smokers were shown anti smoking messages and their brain activity was recorded using a series of fMRI machines. What the researchers found was profoundly mesmerising as well as perplexing. Martin and his team discovered that most smokers on seeing an anti smoking advertisement do feel immensely guilty. However the anti smoking campaigns triggered a part of the brain called nucleus accumbens that is chiefly responsible for desire and arousal. That basically meant that most smokers felt far more aroused to have a cigarette on seeing an anti smoking ad inspite of feeling equally guilty. That basically means that there are elements of behaviour that we also aren't aware of.

James Clear tried explaining behaviour through the formation of habits in his best seller 'Atomic Habits'. Clear speaks about how habits shape our behaviour over a period of time. In fact The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a social psychology experiment that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. It was conducted at Stanford University on the days of August 14–20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students.[1] In the study, volunteers were assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" by the flip of a coin, in a mock prison, with Zimbardo himself serving as the superintendent. Several "prisoners" left mid-experiment, and the whole experiment was abandoned after six days. Early reports on experimental results claimed that students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, while many prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers' request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. The experiment has been described in many introductory social psychology textbooks,[2] although some have chosen to exclude it because its methodology is sometimes questioned(excerpt picked up from Wikipedia page). Robert Cialdini too in his cult book 'Influence:The art of persuasion' talks about certain facets of human behaviour which are really interesting. One of the examples he cites, talks about an incident where, the UK Government realised that there were a lot of citizens who hadn't paid any taxes and instead of penalising them, they put up an advertisement that stated how every Proud Brit pays their taxes and thanked them. Right after the ad was published , the tax collections increased by more than 50%. These happened to be the same guys who were delaying their tax payments.

Now from the above examples it is quite evident that behaviour is a multi layered and multidimensional creature. It is not easy to model behaviour using mathematical systems. It has a lot to do with consciousness and the matrix of emotions embedded deep within consciousness. Our corresponding behaviours are a sum total of a lot of factors across our entire lifetimes. One can't sum it up using digital logic. If that be the case then do you really think understanding human behaviour by virtue of data is the right approach. Let's say for a retail storeIf I have defined a set of variables and the intention is to capture their values in a 24 hour window for say a set of n people. Repeating this drill across a month or maybe six gives us a set of data that could tell us a bit about our choices but it doesn't reveal the exact reason behind our choices or anything about our behaviour or intentions. Clayton Christensen in his best seller 'Competing Against Luck' talks about how an ice tea bought by a guy in the morning is different from the same ice tea bought in the afternoon. In both the cases the article that is bought is the same but the intentionality differs. Data could be one of the lenses through which you might try to understand a few bits about a person's behaviour, but it just isn't comprehensive enough to explain human behaviour elegantly and at length. The larger question is - if data isn't enough to explain human behaviour in entirety then how do we decode human behaviour? Is there a mechanism to unravel the mysterious nature of human behaviour?

To answer that we will have to bank on non conventional mechanisms in this technological world of bits and bytes. Ever wondered how politicians know their constituencies better than a product manager knows his target segment? The answer is simple and one doesn't need a Harvard professor to answer that. It all depends on building relationships. Politicians build relationships at the grassroot level and keep meeting the folks of their respective constituencies at every possible opportunity they get(can't say the same about Indian politicians though). This innate touch with the local communities helps them understand the pulse of the constituency far more accurately than some demographic data. Additionally what is also equally important is to understand the anthropological aspects of human behaviour. Anthropology is something that has been largely ignored by scholars who study behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology. Our cultures to a major extent define our behavioural patterns. Unless we try to dissect the cultural data points to understand more about an individual, we will never be able to accurately understand human behaviour. I would not shy away from saying that even behavioural biology as propounded by Professor Robert Sapolsky, is also important to understand how the flow of chemicals in our brain is responsible for a lot of behavioural patterns we exhibit across the day in a 24 hour window.

The only answer that comes to my mind when it comes to understanding human behaviour would be forming study groups and research bodies. I have read a lot of wonderful stuff written by Cassie Kozyrkov and Kirk Borne about how data plays a fundamental role in understanding human decision making process. I do admire the depth of research they have done before making a presumptous claim like that. I however feel, its not sufficient to understand behaviour. The answer lies in deep research in neuroscience and consciousness. We might have done ground breaking research in neuroscience and do have a fair understanding of how our neural networks with their mesh of dendrites work in carrying information across the body using neural pathways, but we are still at a rudimentary level when it comes to understanding consciousness. Unraveling consciousness is tantamount to understanding human behaviour. A lot of exploration needs to be done to crack open the secrets of human behaviour via the human brain. Till we do that most of the hoopla around machine learning mimicing human behaviour or data scientists making predictions using large data sets would be in vain. We are far from understanding human behaviour let alone build systems that can do so. Perhaps we will take another couple of decades before we have something substantive in our hands. Elon Musk's Neuralink might come up with something in the next decade or so. Let me conclude by quoting Edmund Burke when he said,“The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.”