The Oil Drum

87 comments on The Behavioral Aspects of Peak Oil: Basic Contingencies

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PeakPlus on June 20, 2007 - 8:59am

Ok, I admit, maybe advertising is not "whatsoever [useful] in examining larger society in any meaningful fashion" in your definition. But it sure is useful for the successful advertisers.

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Vintermann on June 21, 2007 - 3:40am

But how much behaviorism is there in there? I'm asking because I don't know. I've seen some useful behavioral papers about evaluation of early computer user interfaces, and I've heard (and can easily believe) that it was also successfully applied in human interface design in planes, cars, machines etc.

However, the behaviorist programme that humans can and should be understood solely in terms of input-output relationships - I've seen critics refer to as pseudoscience, and I understand the young Noam Chomsky first became famous for a devastating critique of it. Apparently the critique was fair, because it managed to convince a lot of psychologists to abandon it.

Philosophically, it may be a consistent position to see humans as some sort of reward-maximising machines, but my impression was that it was rejected as a framework for psychology. So about this attempt to apply it to peak oil, a wide social phenomenon, I'm sceptical (but I'm an engineer, not a psychologist).

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PeakPlus on June 21, 2007 - 7:12am

[...]that humans can and should be understood solely in terms of input-output relationships ... to see humans as some sort of reward-maximising machines ... I'm sceptical

...as you should well be.

An individual human is a very complex "machine" - it does in no way function linearly. It is chaotic and responds often very "illogically", meaning non-linearly. That is why it is hard to found behaviorism as a "science". It - like politics, like sociology, like education, like psychology itself, and like advertising(!) and war-propaganda - is an Art. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

But like any "-ology", it helps to talk about it, for some things work "better" (more often) than others.

We can also ology about the reasons why it didn't work, like Dr. Grant is doing.

p.s. Am neither an engineer nor a psychologist (rather a trained historian):
But I love models, which are in themselves imperfect ways of predicting outcomes for complex systems.

Cheers, Dom