Concept
Behavior
Overview
Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions of organisms, individuals, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well as the inanimate physical environment. It is the computed response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary. While some behavior is produced in response to an organism's environment (extrinsic motivation), behavior can also be the product of intrinsic motivation, also referred to as "agency" or "free will".
Taking a behavior informatics perspective, a behavior consists of actor, operation, interactions, and their properties. This can be represented as a behavior vector.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Behavior is discussed.
That is, the relation of stimulus and response is either reduced to plain cause and effect or else is rejected altogether and supplanted by a bare concomitance of the physical and mental series. In either case conscious behavior is reduced to the type of reflex action, the only issue between the two doctrines being the question whether or not it is necessary or permissible to interpolate mental links in the causal…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
But while associated behavior is, as we have already noted, a universal law, the fact of association does not of itself make a society. This demands, as we have also seen, perception of the consequences of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in producing it.
John Dewey, The public and its problems
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
It is accompanied with an elevation and nobleness of mind, joined with a coolness and sweetness of behavior, and backed with a becoming assurance and inflexible resolution. And from this diffusiveness of the nature of good it follows, that the best and most accomplished men are inclined to converse with persons of the highest condition.
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
names the idea; opens on it
All the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words which I now let fall.--So it is with the impressions you will make there…
William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology
a chapter is titled for it; names the idea
Whence experience, not without some divine assistance, hath, I suppose, made it evident that that was a very true judgment and assertion, that this courteous, gentle, and kindly disposition and behavior is not so acceptable, so pleasing, and so delightful to any of those with whom we converse, as it is to those that have it.
Plutarch, Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 1
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Behavior
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Problem solving
- Learning
- American English
- Organism
- Nervous system
- Ontogeny
- Well-being
- Individual
- Scientific method
- Volition
- British English
- Behaviorism
- Consciousness
- System
Place in the tradition
Part of Eliminative materialism.