Originally posted by mad_gater
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You don't seem to understand what I've been trying to say. I never said that humans don't think. I said that simply thinking does mean anything unless it's actually backed up by behavior. Look at Darley and Batson's "Good Samaritan" experiment. They recruited seminary students for the study. They told half the participants to give a sermon on job opportunities and half the participants to give a sermon on the story of the Good Samaritan. The experimenters introduced a situation where the participants would meet a person slumped in an alleyway on their way to the sermon. There was no significant difference in the number of participants who stopped to help between the two groups. The only thing that had an effect was the amount of time the participants had. About 2/3rds of the participants who were not in a hurry helped, about half of the participants who were kind of hurry helped, but only 1/10th of the people who were in high hurry helped. If thinking was an important factor then why didn't more of the seminary students who were supposed to give the sermon on the Good Samaritan help the person?
That was just one experiment that shows how the situation can override thinking.
Originally posted by mad_gater
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Also, I never said that humans are incapable of resisting temptations. People have to be taught to resist temptation.
And if you knew anything about behaviorism, you would know that even creatures as lowly as pigeons and rats can be conditioned to resist temptation and control their own behavior. Another famous (former) behaviorist named David Premack taught pigeons to control how much food they ate. Basically, he put a pigeon in a Skinner box where the pigeon could peck at a disk to get food whenever it wanted but he added another disk that the pigeon could peck to turn off the food giving disk. He conditioned the pigeon to peck the the disk that stopped food dispensing before it even got full. Through conditioning, Premack taught pigeons to control their instinct to eat. You can denigrate animals all you want but the fact is that you can teach animals to go against their compulsions and resist temptation, and those same methods can be applied to humans. Heck, those methods are applied to humans, you just don't know enough about psychology to see when they're being used.
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