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What Makes People Behave From The Way They Do?

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“What makes people behave in the way they do?” A question that has intrigued philosophers for millennia, and helps philosophy departments all over the world to continue to receive their limited budgets. Answer to this question are wide ranging, and have changed throughout time. Religions point to their gods and doctrines to find an answer. Ancient thinkers varied this religious answer somewhat by referring to some immaterial spirit that is found in human nature that makes us different from other animals that inhabit the Earth. Over time the answer to this eternal question came to result in lines of thinking that a person’s race or economic class determined their behavior and thus this lead to Nazism and Communism. The death tolls were horrifically catastrophic in both cases. Also in the twentieth century social scientists began to believe that all human behavior was the result of the environment a person grew up in, and through social engineering the ills of society, such as violence, greed, etc, could all be cured. These cures remain elusive. As technology and understanding of the human brain advanced, theories were put forth that genetics, or DNA determined how a person behaved.
Ultimately, however, the answer to the question of human behavior probably lies somewhere between several different schools of thought. The theory I put forth is that the average mentally healthy person across all societies hold certain beliefs that are written in genetic stone.

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