Behavior Matters - How Research Improves Our Lives

8/6/2019 Behavior Matters - How Research Improves Our Lives

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BEHAVIORMATTERS:How Resear ch Impr oves Our Lives

The Decade of Behavior (2000–2010) is a multidisciplinary initiative to focus thetalents, energy, and creativity of the behavioral and social sciences on meeting manyof society’s most significant challenges. These include improving education and health

care; enhancing safety in homes and communities; actively addressing the needs of anaging population; and helping to curb drug abuse, crime, high-risk behaviors, poverty,racism, and cynicism towards government.

The beginning of the 21st Century is the ideal time to highlight how insight intobehavior will help meet these worldwide challenges. Behavioral and socialscientists are encouraged to bring their research results forward to help inform thepublic and the public policy process about the Decade of Behavior major themes:

• Improving health • Increasing prosper ity• Increasing safety • Promot ing democracy• Improving education

www.decadeofbehavior.org



LIVING HAPPIER

Beating FearIf you’re like most people, some things are terriblyfrightening to you. Everyone has fears. But for some, thesefears interfere with normal, everyday activities. When afear is strong andirrational, it is labeledas a phobia. People

with phobias havefears that they knoware out of proportionto the harm the focusof their fears canactually cause.The most commonphobias areagoraphobia (fear of

open spaces), social phobias (fear of being evaluated orembarrassed), and specific phobias (such as fear of snakes,flying, or water). Phobias usually don’t go away on theirown. Fortunately, psychologists have devised a type of therapy, called desensitization therapy, to help peopleovercome their fears. Interestingly, this therapy grew outof a long tradition of research on animal learning.

In 1860, Ivan Pavlov was studying the digestive system.

To measure salivation, he gave food to dogs connected tosaliva-collecting devices. Pavlov noticed that the dogs begansalivating even before they were actually given their food;in fact, dogs seemed to drool as soon as they heard hisfootsteps approaching. Further studies confirmed thisobservation: A signal, like his footsteps, that reliablypredicted food brought out the same response as food, thatis, it made the dogs salivate. This type of learning is calledclassical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning. 98



LIVING HEALTHIER

Healing TouchWho doesn’t enjoy a good back rub? Every year, peoplespend millions of dollars on appointments with professionalstrained in a variety of massage techniques. Long thoughtto be a luxurious way of reducing stress, psychologistsnow have empirical evidencethat touch therapies suchas massage can, among otherthings, improve health,reduce pain, increasealertness, facilitate growthin infants, and reduce healthcare expenditures.

There are many examples of touch in the animal world anda growing body of evidence of a biological purpose forsuch touch. D ogs love to havetheir stomachs rubbed,horses enjoy being scratchedbehind the ears, and rodentsoften sleep piled on top of each other. Psychologist J eff Alberts and his colleagues study the sensory experiences

of fetal and newborn rats. They have found that female ratsinstinctively touch and manipulate their babies in orderto provide a variety of sensory experiences to them.This enrichment of the young rat’s environment beginsbefore birth, when the pregnant female vigorously groomsand scratches her abdomen. After birth, the mothercleans and handles the babies, licking them and movingthem from place to place. A rat baby who is removedfrom the mother at birth has lower growth hormone levels 1514



LIVING TOGETHER

Preventing ViolenceViolence seems to stalk our world. Not a day goes by thatwe don’t hear about local murders and muggings, not tomention international violence, hatred, and tension.A related phenomenon is “copycat” violence—aggressiveacts committed after viewing or reading about similar acts.We may scoff at the notion of people engaging in violencebecause they watched a rock video on MTV or listenedto an aggressive song, but could it be true? Psychologicalresearch suggests that aggressive acts are, at least in par t,influenced by what we have observed and learned.

In 1965, psychologist Albert Bandura had children watcha video in which an adult punched, kicked, and hit aBobo doll, an inflatable punching bag in the shape of aclown. The children were divided into three groups:One group saw the adult aggressor rewarded with praiseand candy, another group watched the adult being verballyreprimanded, and the third group saw that there were noconsequences for the adult’s behavior. The children werethen placed individually in a room full of toys, among them,a Bobo doll. Children who saw the doll aggressor eitherrewarded or suffering no consequences were more likely tocommit their own violent acts against the doll, compared tochildren who had seen the adult aggressor punished. Thislearning by observing the behavior of others is called sociallearning or observational learning.

Can we apply these findings to the real world? After all,it could be argued that it’s natural for children—or at leastsome children—to hit and kick a blowup doll. In fact,field and laboratory research on media violence stronglysuggests that viewing violent acts on TV and in the moviesaffects us negatively in several ways: (1) It decreases our 2322



contact supported by the external community. Theseprinciples have been successfully applied to schools, athletic

teams, military organizations, and workplaces. Psychologistsstudying intergroup relations will continue to play animportant role in improving how members of the manygroups in our diverse society relate to each other.

Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA:Addison Wesley.

Sherif, M., Harvey, O., White, B., Hood, W., & Sherif, C.

(1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Caveexperiment. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

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Behavior Matters - How Research Improves Our Lives

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