Link to the Original Essay

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the idea the mind is its behaviors. In a sense, if someone acts a certain way, that tells you about the nature of their mind and its dispositions in that very moment.

For instance, if I touch a hot stove, recoil from it, and scream “ouch”, that’s an indication that the character of my mind at that moment is “pain.”

Behaviorism would in this instance focus solely on the action of recoiling, rather than the inner sensation when it comes to revealing the nature of mind. For the behaviorist, the epistemological weight of actions is the only relevant factor when attempting to understand the nature of the mind.

But, we can envision a scenario whereby such behaviors are repressed to the point of losing such behavioral dispositions — indeed, from a societal perspective, we do this in raising men (at least emotionally).

In this instance, they feel pain but cannot do anything with it, for they are not disposed to. Pain is still an experience for them, but the behaviors associated with it are impossible.

Indeed, in such a scenario, we could test such individuals blindly, and some of them might fake pain-related behaviors. Here, behaviorism is refuted, as, behavior lends us little to no insight into the nature of mind. The best we can do here to gain some insight is to ask participants if they are in pain and hope they are not lying.

Intelligence and The Nature of Mind

Intelligence, however, is another matter. Behavior here is far more reliable in terms of understanding the nature of an individual’s mind.

Let’s say we have someone who is bad at reading, writing, critical thinking, math, and any other learnable skill, and across time, with the best teachers, they can make little to no improvements.

If such a person says “I am smart”, we have no reason to believe them — especially in the way we would if they said, “I am in pain.” A person’s chronic intellectual performance tells us a lot about the nature of their mind. Namely, that they lack certain intellectual dispositions and abilities, and in turn, are incapable of thinking and reasoning in certain ways or capacities.

The same could be said about the nature of one’s mind with reference to their character or personality — or, more precisely, emotional intelligence. One’s chronic emotional responsiveness to emotionally charged situations tells you a lot about the nature of their inner life. Which is to say, how someone behaves and can be reliably said to behave in emotionally charged scenarios tells you a lot about the nature of their mind.

Take for example an individual who acts chronically compassionate versus one who acts chronically callous: the difference in behavior between these individuals and what this tells us about differences in the composure of their minds is difficult to exaggerate. On the one hand, the way in which these two sorts of people respond to emotionally charged situations — both behaviorally and emotionally (i.e. externally and internally) — is very different. And to gain insight into the general nature of these people’s minds, we need only repeatedly see them in action.

Let’s take an example: your spouse has come home from work and they are upset. They being to tell you why they are upset and they begin to cry. The way an individual reacts to all of this — and other similarly emotionally charged situations over time — tells you a lot about the nature of their mind.

The partner who reliably has nothing to say, no physical or emotional comfort as a response, or is outright hostile to this, has a vastly different composure of mind then the generally compassionate individual who is emotionally comforting and actively expresses their sympathy. We know a lot about their emotional (inner) lives through observing such actions.

On the one hand, the callous person probably experiences a fair bit of disgust (as disgust sensitivity and emotionally callous behavior are highly correlated) and/or numbness, and simply may not have the disposition to empathize with others very well. The compassionate person, on the other hand, can feel many emotions, can empathize regularly, and is capable of expressing such empathy through actions (e.g. emotional comforting).

One could definitively say that the callous person is not emotionally intelligent, whereas the compassionate person is. On the one hand, emotional intelligence gives us great insight into the nature of a person’s inner emotional life, as expressed above. On the other, it lends us further insight into many other probable factors that compose a person’s mind, like professional and personal interests, or political dispositions.

For instance, if someone is generally callous, it is very likely that they will lean conservative politically (as, on the personality scale, political conservatives are heavily correlated with low levels of empathy and compassionateness) and in turn, the character of their thoughts (the intellectual character of their mind) will be highly predictable — and so too with compassionate individuals and liberalism.

Now, one might argue that emotional intelligence doesn't give us all of the details when it comes to the nature of mind, and this argument is correct. What it does, however, is narrow down the general nature of individual minds.

Using emotional intelligence rules out many potential factors that could compose an individual mind.

For instance (speaking from a probabilistic standpoint), the abovementioned compassionate person is unlikely to think that their partner is simply weakminded and should stop crying, whereas we can’t rule out such thoughts in the callous person. In this vein, the behavior of individuals in emotionally charged scenarios overtime gives us insight into how their mind is very likely to be composed and how it is very likely not to be composed — when such individuals are clear of mental illness or other strongly mind-influencing health issues.

Barring this, the complexities of the composure of someone’s mind are very reliably understood by their actions in relation to emotionally charged situations. Take an interpersonal look at this: maybe you meet someone and they are callous towards; perhaps there’s something more to them — maybe deep down they have deep emotions but have difficulty in expressing them. But do you really want to run the risk of being wrong here and potentially letting someone like that into your life?

Probably not. Occam's razor is useful in this instance: quite often, things aren’t as complex as we make them out to be. In this instance, the simpler explanation stands stronger: if someone is acting callously, they probably aren’t emotionally intelligent. And if someone is acting compassionately, they probably are emotionally intelligent.

To complicate things here is to give the benefit of the doubt potentially to your own detriment. Perhaps such people have dispositions that they have yet to have tapped into — but until they have tapped into them, they aren’t very relevant when we are discussing how the inner workings of their minds are oriented.

To rephrase one of Nietzsche’s many strange remarks on women, “People are considered deep — Why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. People aren’t even shallow.” Very often, what you see is what is. Rocks need not be flipped, for there isn’t a bottom to many people.

I think this is very worth pointing out. It is quite common — and has its roots in modern psychology — to attempt to hypothesize an excusatory narrative for the emotionally ignorant behavior of others. This isn’t to negate the legitimate causes of emotional ignorance (e.g. upbringing, genetics, biology, environment, etc.), as, such causes are out of all of our control (i.e. we indeed do not have a choice in our base-level of emotional intelligence).

Rather, it is to point out that people who are emotionally ignorant are not always complexly explainable.

Maybe it isn’t the case that, while on the outside, they are callous and cold, but on the inside emotionally understanding but just have trouble expressing it: more often than not, how people act is quite on par with how they think and feel in their own mind. Barring intimate knowledge of another person through their own testimony, is dangerously naive to think otherwise.