Folk Psychology is just like folk mechanics, folk thermodynamics, folk meteorology, folk chemistry, and folk biology, a framework of concepts, roughly adequate to the demands of everyday life. It is a seriously mistaken theory, many of the claims it makes give rise to behavior, and many other presuppositions of the claims are false. Belief, desire and other familiar expressions are among the theoretical terms of this theory of mind. Thinking is not measurable, the way a person’s mind works is not measurable. I will show through different events and aspects of conditioning and behaviorism that folk psychology does not offer a true understanding of the human mind.(Churchland)
The Lottery is the story of the meeting of villages’ members who all meet in the town square. Everyone’s name is placed in a box. Names of a winning family are selected and there is a huge celebration. Then the family members from the winning team draw straws to pick the one winner of the lottery. Again there is a huge celebration when the winner is announced. “The Lottery has been going on for as long as I can remember, this is my 77th time says an old man.” The winner then goes into the center of the circle and the town’s people form around her and begin to stone her to death. The whole while she is screaming it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. The winner’s family is included in the stone throwing. This event happens every year. The town believes that through sacrifice of a scapegoat that the town will flourish. If this doesn’t take place then the crops will die and the town will fail. Is this brutal? (Jackson, 291.) In this depiction, the village including the victim’s family has been conditioned to believe that what they are doing is the right thing to do. Why their behaviors are considered bad when it is all they know and a tradition passed down through the years. A true understanding of the human mind could only come from understanding how and why a person acts. This story illustrates a series of conditions which is an ultimate influence on the way the village acts, in order to gain understanding man must have absolute certainty that all of man-kind is not under some kind of absolute conditioning by a superior creature or entity which causes us to act the way we do. Certainty of this can not be obtained nor can true understanding of the human mind.
The topic of conditioning as it relates to folk psychology can be explored further in The Crucible. In this play, Arthur Miller draws parallels between the terrible acts which took place at the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism. The Crucible depicts the small town of Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials. It starts with a girl named Abigail being accused of dancing with the devil, dancing was strictly forbidden in this colony. She quickly repents and then goes on a series of wild accusations claiming she saw certain people of the village talking with the devil. These people are then rounded up and held trial and are either forced to repent and ask forgiveness and admit to this lie or to die by hanging in the town square. Abigail quickly enlists the help of the town’s girls and it quickly escalates out of hand. (Miller, 93.) So to do McCarthyism of the 1960’s where various famous people were accused of being Communists and were black listed. Fear was a very big problem and everybody accused everyone else of being a communist and therefore a Russian spy. America was in the middle of a cold war and threat of attack was a daily concern. Actors such as Lucille Ball and playwrights such as Arthur Miller were some of the name of the accused. (Morgan, 54.) America has been lulled or conditioned into believing that the American way is superior. Adjectives such as “un-American” have now become bad words. The members of Salem worked rather quickly to purge its small community of any and all evil that may have taken place by any means necessary. 300 years later America repeated the process with the red scare and McCarthyism. Events change but the results of conditioning remain the same. People have been programmed to believe what another wants them to believe. True behavior and understanding of the human mind can not be reached.
From 1939-1945 Hitler’s Nazis party massacred over six million Jewish citizens. These victims were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to perform hard acts or manual labor until they were chosen for ultimate termination. The events of the holocaust are one of the most horrific periods of time throughout history. Hitler set up many youth organizations called Hitler’s Youth to physically and mentally train perfect boys to become perfect men, members of his perfect superior society. These young boys were programmed and conditioned with Nazis hate and propaganda and given some knowledge of Hitler’s ultimate plan for the extermination of the Jews. After the war when questioned many of the citizens of Germany and some of the soldiers claimed that they had no idea that this atrocity was even taking place. While six million people are being murdered around you how can you not know it is happening? I submit the following explanation, when you are in an accident or witness a terrible event, sometimes your brain will put your body in a lulled state known as shock. Shock allows your body to cope with senses it normally would not face, such as extreme pain caused by an accident or the murder of a loved one. Our mind causes our bodies to suppress all the pain and all the memories connected to that pain. Just as Hitler’s Youth were programmed and conditioned to be perfect little Nazis so to is the body conditioned to shut down when events happen that it can not cope with at the immediate time. Behavior can not be predicted and true understanding can not be achieved, despite this fact Adolf Hitler’s 1935 auto-biography describes Hitler’s objective of ultimate conquest. Could this tragedy have been avoided if his book had been read earlier?
B.F. Skinner was a behavioral psychologist who conducted lab experiments on rats. Best known for Skinner’s Box experiments he set up a series of behavioral tests where he would leave the rats little choice but to do the action he wished them to, in this case press a pedal. When the rat pressed a pedal it received a treat. B.F. Skinner observed that the rat learned from this reward system. As long as there was a treat when the rat pressed the pedal he would keep pressing it. When the treats ran out the rats quickly learned that pressing the pedal was pointless. Are humans and rats not the same? Stanley Milgram’s study on obedience used two test subjects. One man was on one side of a box and another man was on the other. One man was told that he was to administer a series of electric shocks to the other man, and that he may hear screaming but to ignore it, if he did not administer the electric shock he would receive it himself. Over time the shock became more intense and the victim of shocks kept screaming in pain, begging for the other man to stop the experiment. Then the man administering the shock is told that the next dose of electricity will surely kill the other man and is told to administer it. Without hesitation he does it and the screams die down. What the man who is administering the shock does not know is that the electricity is not really shocking the man on the other side. This man was given a series of conditions in which he was willing to kill another human being. Animals just like lab rats. Unable to predict behaviors or actions true understanding of the human mind can not be achieved.
I have shown that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory. Conditioning has played a huge part on human behavior. Over time man has been told to commit terrible acts and they do blindly. There is no way to tell how or why someone will act or whether or not they are under an ultimate experiment, because certainty of this can not be reached folk psychology does not offer a true understanding of the human mind.
Works Cited:
Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery and Other Stories. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.)
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Penguin: New York. 1996.
Morgan, Ted. Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2003.)
Churchland, Paul. Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior. Philosophy of Mind and Action: 1989.
