Determination Shows Character

by Ron Kurtus (14 December 2002)

A person with determination is someone who is earnest or unwavering in his or her purpose. If there's something this person wants to do, he or she will not give up easily or get distracted by something else. Some people give up too easily. If you're determined to achieve a worthwhile goal, you'll reap the rewards.

Giving up

Some people give up too soon.

A person may have a goal to do something, but then the task seems more difficult than he or she thought it would be. The person then weighs the desire to achieve the goal vs. the work required & decides to quit.

i.e., a young man may want to get a job as an electrician. But then he finds that he must take classes & go thru a 2 year apprenticeship. To him, that's too much work. So he continues working at McDonald's.

Another situation is if the person doesn't have confidence in him or her self’s ability to complete the task.

Benefits of being determined

Rewards

One major benefit of being determined is that you achieve what you set out to do. If it was a good goal, you'll reap the benefits of that achievement.

Other people usually can have a positive opinion of you. A person who is steadfast & determined to achieve an honorable goal is admired as having good character.

Quotations

Famous people have made comments on the benefits of determination.

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."
Confucius

"Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it."
Winston Churchill

"Never stop. One stops as soon as something is about to happen."
Peter Brock

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it's the size of the fight in the dog!"

Such sayings can be inspiring.

In conclusion

Some people quit too soon. If you're determined to achieve your goals, you'll most likely reap the rewards of your hard work.

It also is an indication of your character.

Determinism: accepting all behavior, thoughts & feelings as being the inevitable, lawful, outcome of complex psychological laws describing cause & effect relationships in human behavior.

Moreover, we think the person who doesn't "help himself" deserves what he gets. The drunk who refuses treatment is responsible for his behavior; he is "weak willed" or wants to drink & fall in the gutter.

The 15-year-old girl who becomes promiscuous & then pregnant "should have known better" & deserves to be a poor, uneducated, ostracized mother.

The abused woman, who knows there's shelter & help available but stays with her abuser, is "making her own choice" & is "morally responsible" for her own pitiful condition.

Even the psychotic homeless person sleeping under cardboard on the street is assumed to be to blame for his/her condition, at least "no one else is to blame!"

Our explanatory labels given to these people convey no deep understanding of the origin of their problems. Our thinking simply uses "free will" to blame the victims.

Waller also points out that many Behaviorists believe that "free will" & "moral responsibility" are intellectual cop outs, i.e., convenient & easy excuses for not looking deeper into the person's history, the environmental causes, for understanding.

Why would we do that? If we can pin the responsibility on the victim, we can quickly dismiss the importance of unequal education, wealth, health, trauma, child care, social-family conditions, etc.

.... how many schools or colleges offer courses in self-direction or self-control or self-help? These skills could be taught to everyone. But once we start thinking in terms of teaching coping skills, the concept of "free will" loses some of its power to blame the actor.

This is because as we teach self-control to others it becomes more & more obvious that outside-the-actor factors (environmental, educational & historical) have influenced how every human being behaves.

Consequently, assigning "moral responsibility" exclusively to the individual becomes harder & harder to do.

Research has studied why some people are industrious & others are lethargic.

industrious: characterized by hard work & perseverance

The lethargic ("lazy") or oppositional ("argumentative") person is certainly not "morally responsible" for how he/she was rewarded & dealt with as a child.

In short, the evidence is weak for the belief that "free will" is largely responsible for what we do. If we don't have "free will," then we aren't totally "morally responsible" for what we do (but maybe we are partly responsible).

Similarly, we should question the beliefs in a "just world," that everyone gets his/her "just deserts," & that everyone has access to a level playing field.

justice:

1. The quality of being just; fairness.

b.       The principle of moral rightness; equity.

c.       Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness.

d.       The upholding of what is just, especially fair treatment & due reward in accordance with honor, standards, or law.

e.       Law. The administration & procedure of law.

f.         Conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason: The overcharged customer was angry, and with justice.

Everything has its causes.

Things don't happen by magic. According to determinism, there's nothing that "just happens," no "accidents" without a cause, no arbitrary divine intervention (or, at least, very rarely), no unavoidable fate, no mystical "free will" & no predetermined destiny.

All scientific efforts attempt to discover & understand "laws"- basic dependable cause & effect relationships. If there were no order (laws) in the universe, then there would be nothing to learn (except that nothing is stable & thus, understandable).

The opposite seems to be true; every event has a cause & this cause-effect connection is potentially understandable. I'm not saying we scientists understand everything right now (far from it) nor that we will eventually be able to predict all behavior.

That's nonsense. Yet, I have a belief that we'll be able to understand & control many of our own behaviors in 1000 years. It's our doubts about this matter that causes our reluctance to earnestly search for & use scientific knowledge about the laws of human behavior.

Our ignorance about behavior keeps us preparing for & fighting wars; suffering hunger, preventable illness & ignorance; making poor choices about careers, marriage partners, child rearing; having many avoidable emotional problems; etc.

Much human behavior is unquestionably very complex, but it's reasonable to assume that all behavior is potentially understandable, i.e. a consistent, logical, to-be-expected outcome resulting from many causes.

One way of looking at this is to say, "If I knew all the laws that are influencing your behavior, I'd understand you perfectly. I'd see that given your genes & physical condition, given the effects of past events & your memory (perhaps distorted) of past experiences & given your view of the present situation, I'd do exactly what you're doing, no matter how saintly or how evil. "

If true, that's an awesome statement or belief.

If a person can learn to think this way, i.e., that all human feelings & actions are caused by psychological laws, then all behavior becomes, in a sense, "acceptable" because it's, at the moment, unavoidably lawful.

attribution: assigning to a cause or source

Purposes

The last method helped us recognize our irrational thinking.

Determinism is rational thinking, which can be used to replace harmful irrational ideas.

Determinism replaces "awfulizing" & "musturbation." Understanding the causes of any upsetting event is a big step towards accepting & adjusting to that event. 

Most of us have pet peeves; different kinds of behaviors, attitudes, personalities & circumstances that bother or upset us. Many of us are deeply disturbed by how we were treated by parents, siblings, peers, bosses, etc.

Adopting a deterministic attitude or philosophy will help us accept everything that's happened; it was lawful, not awful. You may, of course, be able to change some things in the future, but whatever occurs, in the past or future for good or bad, is lawful.

Steps

STEP ONE: Learn to think like a determinist. Think of all behavior as caused & lawful. Discover the causes. (This is a long, rather deep & tiresome discussion of determinism - stick with it. It's not easy to change how we see the world.)

The ideal determinist doesn't just look for causes. If that were the case, the person always blaming others or the paranoid who feels persecuted by someone would be a super determinist.

One ideally will search for the true causes by testing one's hunches. Psychology may be the only discipline in which the student has a lot of false beliefs about human behavior to unlearn as well as learning a lot of new things about the causes of behavior.

Throughout our lives we're bombarded with unsubstantiated or just plain wrong beliefs:

Suppose we humans are capable of learning to live justly & lovingly with every other person on earth.

That is, assume that the necessary knowledge will eventually become available & we're capable of acquiring & using that knowledge to interact considerately with everyone.

In the mean time, are we "free" as long as we don't have & use that knowledge?

Some people say "no" (Williams, 1992), to live a lie or to live in ignorance is to lose our freedom. Clearly, to be controlled by foolish emotions or false beliefs is to be enslaved by ignorance, but we're not yet knowledgeable enough to be free to live justly & considerately.

We don't yet have the knowledge needed to assess what's fair nor the self-control skills to do what's just. Yet, our ignorance, while regrettable, is understandable & lawful.

The laws of behavior determine how we act & feel in specific circumstances, just as the laws of physics determine how a rocket might go to the moon.

The most common confusion by students is between determinism, a way of viewing the world & determination, a motivated state or a willingness to work hard for some goal.

A determinist may or may not be hard working. Being lazy or indifferent is just as determined by psychological laws as being highly motivated.

These concepts are confused merely because the words sound similar.

Perhaps the major objection to determinism rests on another misunderstanding, namely, each individual usually feels that he/she makes spontaneous choices & uses will power & thus, is "free."

You never once made a choice or acted in a way that was uncaused or defied the laws of behavior. Even if you give up & say "this career planning is too much work" or "too confusing," that too is a lawful decision based on your past experience, your self-concept, your calculation of the consequences, your tired or frustrated feelings, your inclinations to deny the problem, etc., etc.

This is what most politicians are referring to when they speak of "freedom."

There's another meaning:

(b) how possible is it to think or act in ways that are contrary to the laws of human behavior?

The determinist would say, "No possibility! Can water flow up hill?" As illustrated by the career decision process in the last paragraph, when any behavior occurs, the determinist assumes that it's caused, that it's lawful (the to-be-expected, inevitable outcome of the causes existing at that moment).

Remember, determinism doesn't rule out making bad choices, acting impulsively, freezing up, becoming psychotic or anything else that is lawful.

This influences your final choice of what to do, although your choice, either simple or complex, is determined by the causes & effects operating in your head at that instant.

We're "free" in the sense that we can know & use the laws of behavior to change ourselves, to learn more about the situation or self-help, to see more options, to view the situation differently, to change our "minds," expectations, emotions & attitudes, to try a new approach, etc.

Our mental activity becomes another cause of our behavior or feelings, sometimes the dominant cause. Our mind creates our freedom (within the limits of what is lawful). This isn't always a conscious decision-making process, our minds will often change without any effort on our part because the interplay among the myriad of laws is constantly changing - we see the situation differently, our feelings change, we become interested in something else, etc., etc.

If you don't have the decision-making skills or the knowledge to make wise choices, is that freedom or ignorance? If you're so upset or so in love that you can't make good judgments, is that freedom or dominated by your emotions?

If you feel compelled to carefully weigh the pros & cons of several alternative solutions, is that freedom or compulsivity?

In contrast with Williams & the hermeneutic-social constructionist tradition (insisting that only realistic & moral choices are "free"), I still believe we humans are often "determined" to do stupid, mean, immoral things, because these acts are lawful in our circumstances & from our psychological history.

With the wise use of these same laws, however, I believe we're "free" to become, i.e., capable of becoming, smart, kind & moral. You can see that there are many different notions about the simple-sounding concept of freedom.

Regardless of how we define freedom, determinism is still a tenable notion for describing everything that happens. And, how do we explain the existence of these laws of behavior (or physics)? Is it merely "the nature of things?" If so, what a miracle!

Is it the work of God? If so, what a miracle! We don't know why the laws exist, only that they do.

"Will power" is another poorly understood concept. It isn't calling on some special power or an unexplainable force to enable you to achieve some desired goal.

It's merely an understandable, straight-forward but maybe-unusual-for-you concentration of effort to reach a goal. We think of ourselves as being in control when we make a special effort on a project & we are, but there isn't any magic involved in increasing our motivation to overcome the temptations or difficulties we face.

There are lawful reasons or causes (usable self-help methods) for these surges of "determination," e.g. we may have increased our motivation by thinking about the importance of the project, by visualizing the possibility & consequences of failure, by confronting our despicable lack of commitment, etc.

Clearly, we humans do change our minds & behavior frequently which makes it seem to us as if we're in control, that we merely "will" or intend our actions. I think we do change but entirely in accordance with the laws of behavior set in motion by our genetic & experiential background, our perspective & the situation we're in.  

We don't just whimsically decide what course of action to take, without any compliance with the laws of behavior. In fact, there's no evidence that any of our thoughts or decisions or self-instructions are unlawful or without necessary & sufficient causes.  

We certainly act on our own "volition," i.e., we make decisions (both consciously & unconsciously) about what to do & act on those decisions.  

But our volition itself is caused, it's lawful too. Our "will" isn't totally free; we can't instantly will ourselves to do just anything (from all possible behavioral choices); what we will ourselves to do certainly isn't accidental; the neurons in our brain leading to thoughts & actions are lawful; our thoughts, intentions, hopes & our "will" have their causes.

This is called the fundamental attribution error: believing internal factors, such as motives, personality traits & abilities, are more responsible than environmental factors in causing another person's behavior (Baron & Byrne, 1987).

We get mad at people who're late because we think they "don't give a damn about us" or "don't have their stuff together." Children disobeying us drive us up a wall because we think they're challenging or defying us.

[Note: these irritating personality characteristics of others may be true, but the characteristics have their causes. Defiance isn't just a "mean streak," it has a history.]

We frequently neglect to investigate all the reasons, internal & external, why people do things, such as be late or break rules.

Analyzing all the causes is hard work; thus, most of the time we'll accept a quick & easy explanation of a behavior. Only when the behavior of others seems strange or upsets us (or we're responding empathicly) will we work very hard to understand it (Hansen, 1980; Hastie, 1984).

Knowing all or most of the causes of others' behavior (to the same extent we know why planes fly) might allay our emotional reactions to them.

By the way, we tend to be far more generous in our self-explanations than in our attributions about others. The environment seems to us to be more the cause of our behavior than our internal motives, traits & thoughts.

You fall because you're clumsy; I fall because the floor is slick (Fiske & Taylor, 1984). However, this isn't true when we're successful; we tend to take credit for our successes; it's our cleverness or drive or charm.

Unless we're very self-critical, external factors - a hard task, bad luck, someone else messed up - are often blamed for our failures. This is called a self-serving bias (Miller & Ross, 1975).

We misunderstand the causes of our behavior in many ways. 

Finally, an interesting study by Feather (1985) demonstrates that our explanations of behavior clearly reflect our values & attitudes, e.g. conservatives explain unemployment in terms of laziness while liberals think in terms of sluggish economy.

In short, there are many factors that cause us to overlook or minimize certain causes of behavior. If we're going to understand behavior, such as unemployment, we'd better study all the causes, including lack of training, laziness, poverty, discrimination, self-concept, economic conditions & many more.

Some of our behavior is thought to be caused by factors beyond our control; thus, we have the plea in court of innocent on the grounds of insanity. It's an old notion that a person might have an "uncontrollable impulse," e.g. when finding one's spouse in bed with someone else.

Thus, a society seems to have a choice between

• (a) denying there are unconscious causes (which would be absurd) 

• (b) refusing to hold a person responsible for unconsciously caused acts (which our society is reluctant to do).

So, we refuse to think about it very much.

B. F. Skinner's (1972) book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Berofsky's (1971), Determinism & Rychlak's (1979), Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, are good references in this area.