Aggression
How do societies conceptualize "legitimate" vs. "illegitimate" aggression?
How do humans inhibit, produce,
and use violence?
Attachment
How do humans affiliate,
identify, and attach?
What are the objects of attachment?
How do individuals disaffiliate?
How do thy describe love and kinship?
Behavioral history (n.) –
The study of human actions and patterns of action in history; a historiographical school that explores how an individual's ecology influences his/her actions, and how actions reshape shared and individual ecologies.
Did you know... ?
Like other historiographical approaches (which distinguish themselves according to the disciplines and theories from which they draw), behavioral history is defined by its engagement with fields like biology, behavioral ecology, behavioral economics, and psychology.
Aggression
How do humans produce and inhibit aggression? Which individuals are authorized to behave aggressively? How do humans assign aggression
to certain spaces and times?
Attachment
How do ideas, people, and spaces become objects of attachment?
Under what circumstances
do humans detach and distance themselves from people and objects?
Collective Behavior
How do humans behave in groups? How do individuals affiliate and disaffiliate? How do individuals create collective movements? How do individuals navigate between groups?
Consumption
How do individuals interact with objects? How do groups utilize, exchange, and expend material things in their environment? When are objects used, and in what spaces?
What is the difference between behavioral history and behaviorism?
Behaviorism was a field of psychology popular from 1910–1960. In explaining human actions, the behaviorist school focused on conditioning, stimulus–response, and environmental factors.
Behavioral history retains behaviorism's interest in applied problems, human learning, and stimulus–response patterns. However, advances in the biosciences have given scholars a better appreciation for
1) the vast amount of variables in any decision-making setting and 2) the indeterminacy of individual responses to cues.
As a result, behavioral history considers most individual and environmental variables to be unknown and unknowable–especially when dealing with historical actors and accounts of their actions.
Why study behavioral history?
Technological advances are rapidly changing what we know (or think we know) about human behavior. Neuroscience, for example, has provided scholars with new information about how individuals react to environmental cues. The disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and psychology are already wrestling with these new research findings.
Historians have an important role to play in these debates. Historians can attest to the variability of human behavior through time and across cultures; historians can also alert other scholars to source limitations, and urge caution to those in the hard sciences who would take for granted that their data represents immutable, universal, empirical, or objective fact.
At the same time, the biosciences can alert historians to the significance of environmental factors previously overlooked. Engaging with the sciences can thus reveal new paths of inquiry and methodologies for studying the past.
Learning
How do humans use verbal, aural, visual, and kinesthetic processes
to learn? Who do individuals choose to imitate, and why? When is learning transmitted, and when does innovation occur?
Signaling
How do humans communicate
with one another? What types of signals are sent? How are signals veiled, received, and interpreted?
Why do individuals send
costly signals?