The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

infinitude of thoughts and actions available to us, we can gain greater and greaterinfluence over our lives.Cycles: On the concept of reciprocal determinism.I first heard of the concept of reciprocal determinism from Albert Bandura’swork at Stanford University. He was trying to address the conundrum of how toretain a scientific approach to human behavior without proclaiming that ourbehavior is completely determined by our genetics and our learning history.Skinner had recently published his Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a radicalbehaviorist account which argued that the environment determines our behavior,and thus, that human acts are not free, and therefore do not earn us dignity.Psychoanalytic thought also had a similar deterministic bent to it, suggesting thatmany of the factors that mold our personality are not accessible by consciousthought. Later, genetic approaches to human behavior would also imply that muchof what we do is determined by our heredity.The concept of reciprocal determinism acknowledges that our environmentdoes have an influence on us. It teaches us certain types of thinking and behavior.In that sense, our environment does determine much of what we do. The simplestexample is language: We speak the language of the people who raise us. You cantake a baby with any genetic loading and, by adopting him into a specific culturalenvironment, you can completely determine the language that baby will eventuallyspeak. At the same time, individuals also influence their environment. As thatbaby grows, he or she could choose to study certain other languages, seek friendswho speak those languages, or travel to an area where those languages are spoken.The choices the individual makes will increase or decrease the chances that he orshe will speak other languages, or even continue to speak his or her native one.HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 65