18.6
The concept of human behaviour
  
  If we pick up any psychology book, or popular book on human nature, we inevitably will encounter the word "human behaviour."  In todays world, as a legacy of the 20th century, almost all consideration of the human mind is in some way influenced by the writings of people discussing the "behaviour" of human beings in terms of traits and motives.  
  The word behaviour has been around in various forms since around the beginning of the 16th Century. We now understand its meaning to be the "manner in which a person conducts themself". The word also used to mean "a person".  
  The interesting history about the word "behaviour" is that the ancient words from which it is formed such as be and healfe only appeared in Old English and Old Frank around 600 AD.  
  This is consistent with historical research that cannot find any European languages existing before 600 to 800BC with a word in their vocabulary equivalent to the first personal pronoun " I ", and that the first examples of writing in the first person did not appear until this time either.  
18.6.1 The modern context of human behaviour  
  Despite all the complexity of definitions associated with modern behavioural science, in today's context, the words "human behaviour" essentially means: "the way in which one human conducts themselves relative to other human(s)."  
  If we look at this meaning, we can even interpret the meaning in the context of everything we have discussed in previous chapters as either:  
 

(a) "the physical and or psychological effect of the relative features, relationships and fortis of one human being on other human being(s) and/or their environment."

 
 

or (b) "the physical and or psychological effect of the relative features, relationships and fortis of other human(s) and environment on one human being."

 
  This is entirely consistent with the contemporary definition of human behaviour, yet with relevance to the specific "thing" and/or "things" we are describing. For when we talk of human behaviour, we are talking about the effects of interactions, the results rather than the "things" that caused them.  
  To make this even clearer: when we talk of human behaviour, it is like counting the number of times cars and trucks travel down the closest main road, their angles, their weight, their colour etc, including the road, rather than focusing on the features, relationships and fortis's that are causing the trucks and cars to travel down the road.  
  No wonder human behaviour has been one of the most elusive (and therefore to some self professed "experts", one of the most lucrative) areas of human understanding. How can anyone make sense out of the literally millions of events that occur to affect you unconsciously and consciously as you may drive to a supermarket and purchase some goods.  
18.6.2 The strong disagreement that will exist with this definition  
  Contemporary behavioural scientists will argue against this modern treatment of the word behaviour. They would most likely point to the important discoveries by behavioural science in terms of "why" people do what they do, not just catalogue movements, speech, "behavioural statistics". Behavioural scientists may also strongly defend the fact that they have catalogued vast amounts of data on the features of individuals and that they have a good understanding of the features, their interactions, therefore effect (behaviour) and why.  
  We are not disputing the significant contributions made by behavioural science. We are merely pointing out what the meaning of the words "human behaviour" actually imply by logic.  
  It is essential to understanding just how complex a task it is to understand effect, rather than cause. For if we are to talk of the features of individual humans that contribute to the effect we call behaviour, then we have to use a different word than behaviour. Historically, this is where the words "human nature" come in.  
     
 
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