Individual Behavior – What I Want

This week I run a short series on the behavior of individuals in general.

From a very high level perspective the behavior of a person is determined by

• who he is;
• how he is at the moment;
• what he wants, and
• what he thinks will happen.

What he wants

This is actually the 64 million dollar question: what do people want? Generally spoken, people will try to reach their goals, their desires, or try to avoid their fears come true. However, this can be so generic, to I will go one step back; peoples needs. The needs of humans is their ultimate goal that drives their actions.

People have physical or material needs, think about food, a roof above their heads, or may be some kind of transportation. Although once in a while I will come back to this needs, they will not be my main focus. I assume that in the context of software projects, people are not dying of hunger or are homeless.

The center of my attention are emotional needs. To be more specific about this subject, I will make use of the following taken from Eqi.org:

“In various degrees, each according to his or her own unique nature, we each have a natural emotional need to feel:

What he thinks will happen

A normal person doesnt jump of a cliff, just because he expects that he will be dead when he hits the beach. A normal person will not slap a very huge and muscular guy, just because he assumes he will get his own butt kicked afterwards. In our everyday life, and in our project life, we are guided by our perception of what we think might happen, our expectations:

“An expectation is a conditional prediction about a future event whose fulfillment will be eventually verified and reacted upon by the agent who holds it.” (Rovatsos, 2007)

Hallelujah!