Perspectives on Human Behavior

Abstract

Human behavior has always been intriguing, differing with persons and situations. This unpredictability is contributed by his nature, personality, and thinking process. Behavior is dictated by the interplay of a complex set of factors based primarily on need fulfillment. Every individual strives to fulfill needs but to a varying extent. These needs exist in dyads and emerge in systematic ascendancy with increased chronological age. Behavior results from the struggle between the choice of these dyadic needs, as to which is to be given primacy and which could be set aside or regulated. The situation is compounded by the fact that the next set of dyadic needs emerge to gain supremacy even before the earlier set of needs are done away with. Behavior is the result of the needs that emerge, the individual's choice for the fulfillment, the degree to which they are met, the extent of carryover of the unmet needs, and the accumulating " need-worry ". That is to say, hypothetically every individual undergoes a transition in life as he completes one set of needs. It is an irony that a real completion rarely takes place. Each of these stages of emerging dyadic needs at its onset appears to be a " little world "in which the individual is engulfed and gets focused on the struggle to attain. Five such little worlds are found to exist in the history of life of an individual. This discourse is an attempt to portray human behavior through the lens of need fulfillment as a perspective. The dyadic needs that emerge in stages at different times in life span, their significance, sub-components, and implications for fulfillment are discussed. Data has been collected through in-depth interviews from a select sample of diverse age groups and social backgrounds.