Daily Archives: 24 October 2021

Out of character behaviour 

It is easy to become complacent to the troll. Lurking in the shadows or projected on a screen. A few months ago, I would have offered explanation from Carl Jung, and his archetypes. I would have been satisfied with that. The shadow parts within us that lash out because we ignore them, causing them to lurk as subconscious parts within. Parts we have repressed. Rejected persona. Carl Jung and the neo-Jungians (who develop their models still to this day) will explain how these parts occasionally break their silence and act out.

linear cause and effect

Modern day behaviourists like Stephen Ledoux, author of “What causes human behaviour – stars, selves, or contingencies” would call such Jungian theorising mystic or scientifically baseless.  And just discredit the entire discipline now standing beyond these philosophical starts.  He would look to the behaviour itself, reflect upon the knowable factors leading up to the event as cause.  The radical behaviourism which permits physiological conditions to be considered beyond the external environmental that the first in the field would have considered.  He might offer a detailed linear cause and associated effect chain of events.

Subconscious emotional response

Joseph Ledoux by contrast, a neuroscientist and author of “The emotional brain” might be a little more sympathetic to the theorising of early 20^th Century psychologists. “Emotional responses are for the most part generated unconsciously. Freud was right on the mark when he described consciousness as the tip of the mental iceberg”, states Joseph Ledoux, as quoted by Rita Carter in her detailed 1998 illustrative book “Mapping the Mind” – which Joseph Ledoux offers a full page to the influences of the Limbic System over the Frontal Cortex, (ibid pp98).

External influence – chemical

In this same book, Rita Carter also highlights the impacts of neurotransmitter levels if impaired or kept artificially high. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and noradrenaline. Recreational drug use also impacting receptor effectiveness – both at the time of use and through longer term abuse. That includes alcohol. Similar cause can be outlined from diseases and associated medications that can cause chemical or physiological alterations.

External factor – prompting hormone response

Regulation of other hormones are relevant too. Robert Sapolsky presents at some length in his lectures how the complexity of these interactions can cause short-term change to likelihood of response. He also presents the changing structures in the brain through prolonged stress or how combined factors can directly attribute to action potentials that are enacted or overridden within the Limbic System, the Cortex, or beyond. Or perhaps we are tired, and the frontal cortex becomes slower in enacting a more diplomatic response. Still acting to intervene but weaker or slower and too late because we have already pressed send on that reply.

External factor – language

In written exchanges this can be easily misinterpreted. We are all capable of ambiguity in our writing, but misunderstanding could arise from more fundamental starts. In his book “Language and Social Relationships”, Asif Agha (2007) writes extensively about the nuances of language and the implications in various forms of dialogue. “Register” for example may offer a multitude of inference but anyone of us is only capable of sounding out a few, but more adept in recognition of many more (pp147). All are lost in written form, but our tone is still sounded as we write. It may be heard quite differently by the reader.

He reflects upon cultural influence, but also dialect, sociolect, and denotational footings, all of which create differences

such differences are sometimes exploited strategically to create social partitions or boundaries within an interaction, but social boundaries can result willy-nilly too.  In multi-party encounters where multilinguals and codemixing mark off monolingual interlocutors as out-group (or non-participants) with respect to certain utterances, whether intentionally or not; social boundaries enacted in such cases may coincide with differences of propositional uptake and thus involve cognitive boundaries too.

Asif Agha 2007, pp133

External Factors – socio-cultural

Or maybe our societal psychological interactions have played a part. The compartmentalised elevated hierarchy we have earned in another social group. This group has rewarded our selfish acts, and we therefore take these lessons into groups anew. Perhaps this is behavioural Operant conditioning? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is the amygdala and the hippocampus now working slightly differently because of a newly connected neural network response. Sitting above this however is our socialised understanding within the frontal cortex. Maybe this directs us to a safer experiment in this new group. It is safer to pull down a minnow, than attack the silverback we know we will never be.