study of human behavior psychology

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Is it possible to understand everyone at a deep and meaningful level, to get what really matters to people, no matter how different they are from you? That proposition sounds a little absurd. After all, human psychology is really complex. Some people are abused as children, others are love

I'm here to help you understand the micro, the human individual, in any given moment, what drives your mother, your spouse, your boss. Human behavior, no matter how seemingly bizarre or mundane, is designed internally to fulfill one or some of the common needs. If you want to understand what really matters to a person at the level of deep motivation, ask: which of the common needs have they been pursuing? Here's a story from my personal life. My wife Shelly sometimes gets upset with me for not cleaning the dishes to her exacting standard. I can see her there, as I'm cleaning, over my left shoulder, pretending to read the mail, watching me. Now, I could easily conclude, "That's a little weird. She might be OCD." But these brilliant observations don't get me very far.

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 If I want to understand my wife, and I do, I ask a basic question: what needs are driving her? Shelly's a busy woman. She teaches high school full-time, she drives our kids everywhere, she calls my mom to say hi and "I love you." Excuse me. I got a little emotional with that.  She calls my mom to say hi and "I love you." Clean dishes, neatly stacked and put away, fulfill in her the common needs for order and rest. Finally some peace of mind. And there's one more huge need motivating her dishwash spine: when I leave stuff on the dishes, like that big piece of vermicelli hanging off the back, that's so super obvious to her, after she's said, "Larry, do a good job this time; this time, please, do a good job," she concludes I don't care about her. If you want to understand everyone, including Shelly, the outside world matters to us only because we're trying to fulfill needs internally. She doesn't really care about clean dishes. At depth, she, like everyone else, wants respect, to be loved.

 

Human behavior is complex, but human motivation is actually simple. We seek these common needs, and nothing else. Now, I didn't myself discover that common needs drive human behavior. The idea was proposed around 50 years ago by the psychologist Carl Rogers and then further developed by the extraordinary peacemaker Marshall Rosenberg. I came across their concepts around 15 years ago, and they made good sense to me. So, I began to implement them in my personal life, to decode family and friends. And I was understanding people. I was intrigued, but I was also skeptical. I asked Marshall Rosenberg, "Why 30 needs, and not 755?" And he said, "Oh, it could be 30 or 755. The need to survive, for example, could be further broken down into the needs to not walk off a cliff, or to not be eaten by predators.

 

Thirty is just a useful level of aggregation." I thought, "OK, that's a good answer, but what about this Marshall? What are needs, from a neurological perspective? What's happening in the brain? How do they actually motivate us?" And here, Marshall said, "Oh, that's simple. Needs are life force, human life force." And I thought, "Whoa. That's not science at all." And so, I spent the next two years meeting with neuropsychologists and speaking with evolutionary biologists and reading cognitive journals with footnotes, and I eventually concluded this needs stuff is grounded in solid science. And because research shows that if you mention the word "neuroscience" or "brain" in a big talk, it's a thousand times more likely to go viral, (Laughter) let me say, this is neuroscience.

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