So How Does Behaviour Get Made Then?

Behaviour happens because it can.

That is not at all helpful, but if we give up thinking that each person is inventing their own unique pattern of behaving, or has patterns of responding hardwired into them, the first question we have to ask is ‘Where does behaviour come from, then?’ And the most sensible answer is ‘All around us’.

The challenge is to understand how two different people can experience the same event and yet have completely different ways of understanding it.

Years ago, I had a car accident. The car was written off. I was fine, apart from sore ribs. I viewed that day as a fortunate bonus. It was a good day. It could have been a lot worse.

I think a good analogy is cheese-making. Cheese is the end product of a process that is centuries old. Individual cheeses can be judged and assessed, ranked on their quality, be known by their unique quality of tastes and textures. A cheese can be assessed.

Another woman, Cherese, had a similar accident at a similar age. Her response was to remain a nervous driver throughout her life.

We both experienced similar events, but the meaning we gave to those experiences meant that our behaviour patterns were very different. We accessed different possibilities for giving meaning to our experiences and because we gave the experience different meanings, our patterns of behaviours were completely different.

Agential realism allows us to recognise this meaning-making as a source of behaviour. Out of all possible ways that I could have made sense of the accident, I selected ‘I was fortunate’ as the meaning. Cherese selected ‘I could have been killed, I need to be very careful, when I’m driving…always’.

These differences are in the arena that fascinate psychology. Agential realism lets me understand this difference as a difference in the possibilities for meaning that we accessed. I don’t need to be labelled as a person who is optimistic, or resilient, simply as a person who had access to and selected a particular way of giving meaning to the accident. The words that I chose, enabled my subsequent driving behaviours. The words that Cherese chose enabled her subsequent driving behaviours.

We don’t need to be analysed as people with specific characteristics but as the product of the language, the meaning possibilities, that we selected and that subsequently directed our actions.

Agential realism allows us to recognise this meaning-making as a source of behaviour. Out of all possible ways that I could have made sense of the accident, I selected ‘I was fortunate’ as the meaning. Cherese selected ‘I could have been killed, I need to be very careful, when I’m driving…always’.

These differences are in the arena that fascinate psychology. Agential realism lets me understand this difference as a difference in the possibilities for meaning that we accessed. I don’t need to be labelled as a person who is optimistic, or resilient, simply as a person who had access to and selected a particular way of giving meaning to the accident. The words that I chose, enabled my subsequent driving behaviours. The words that Cherese chose enabled her subsequent driving behaviours.

We don’t need to be analysed as people with specific characteristics but as the product of the language, the meaning possibilities, that we selected and that subsequently directed our actions.

Agential realism allows us to understand people as functioning within boundaried selections of possibilities, referred to as material-discursive boundaries (Barad, 2007).

When we read people’s actions through the selected meanings that are driving their actions, then we can unshackle ourselves from humanism, and step into the world of posthumanism, where possibilities for change in behaviours may only be a shift in the grammatical structure of a sentence away. Exciting or daunting? Quite overwhelming at times in the transparency that such analysis offers us.