Behavior is a pattern of actions or reactions that varies depending on factors such as context and mood. It is influenced by an individual’s character and motivations, and can provide insight into their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Understanding one’s own behavior, as well as the behavior of others, is an important part of personal and social development, and can help individuals to improve and achieve their goals.
40+ Types of Behavior:
Altruism
Altruism is the motivation to do good for others, without expecting anything in return. This can apply to the well-being of people, animals, and the environment.
Attitudes
An attitude describes an individual’s state of mind with respect to a situation, person or thing. These are highly specific such as an employee’s attitude towards a particular task. It is common for the same individual to adopt a completely different attitude depending on the context.
Blame Shifting
Blame shifting is a failure of accountability whereby an individual or organization attempts to place blame on individuals who aren’t accountable for a failure.
Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases are patterns of thought that lead to suboptimal outcomes such as poor decisions. Most are the result of mental shortcuts, logical errors, social factors and memory shortfalls.
Contentment
Contentment is an easy type of happiness that comes from simply appreciating life. This is a basic type of human experience and human condition that perhaps everyone has experienced and some people are able to sustain for long periods of time.
Cooperation
Cooperation is the process of working together for mutual benefit.
Cruel Wit
A cruel wit is a tendency to deal out clever criticisms and hostile humor. It may be correlated with material success as a cruel wit is somewhat common amongst executives and other positions of authority.
Denial
Denial is a statement that something is not true. This term is often used to imply neglect or suppression of the truth.
Doublespeak
Doublespeak is language that is intentionally misleading. It often takes the form of euphemisms, or pleasant terms for unpleasant things.
Gaslighting
Gaslighting is the sustained and strategic use of misinformation to attempt to cause someone to doubt their memory, perceptions or sanity. This is considered unethical, manipulative and abnormal. The term gaslighting is very commonly misused to apply to minor insults, criticism, sidelining and disagreements.
Ghosting
Ghosting is the practice of ignoring someone as a means of ending social or business connections with them. The following are illustrative examples.
Human Beings
A human being is any member of the mammalian species Homo sapiens — a relatively new species that has been around for about 315,000 years. Humans spent most of their history as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Human Nature
Human nature are the common dispositions, characteristics and capabilities of people. These are foundations of human thought and behavior.
Human Spirit
The human spirit is the set of innate characteristics of human beings that are durable and universal features of humanity. The exact nature of the human spirit is a foundational question of philosophy that has many viewpoints and perspectives.
Humanity
Humanity are the collective characteristics of human beings. This term has fully positive connotations and is used to describe the charming and valuable aspects of humans and human civilization.
Inferiority Complex
An inferiority complex is the erroneous belief of an individual that they are unable to cope with real or imaginary deficiencies. Everyone has feelings of inferiority from time to time. An inferiority complex is a negative reaction to this that causes problems for an individual.
Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is the inaccurate belief that something is impossible based on experience.
Loaded Questions
A loaded question is a question that contains an accusation or unjustified assumption. Answering the question directly makes it appear that the target has accepted the accusation or assumption. As such, a loaded question is essentially a trap. The safe response to a loaded question is to challenge its assumptions. Asking loaded questions can be perceived as aggressive, arrogant or unethical.
Malicious Compliance
Malicious compliance occurs when an employee uses an organization’s own rules, processes and procedures against it by taking them too seriously or literally. It is often motivated by a grievance or resistance to change.
Mediocrity
Mediocrity is a lack of angst. This is associated with acceptance of the uninspiring as good enough.
Passive Aggressive Behavior
Passive aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility. It is associated with actions and communication that are designed to derail a strategy, trigger emotions of a target or damage their reputation. Such actions may be taken in secret. Alternatively, they may occur in the open in such a way that they’re technically not breaking any rules.
Pathologizing
Pathologizing is the practice of labeling something or someone as psychologically abnormal or unhealthy. This word mostly has negative connotations and isn’t typically applied to legitimate scientific knowledge or medical practices. As such, pathologizing is heavily associated with the use of popular psychology by officials, administrators, academics, authors, public speakers and individuals.
Personal Life
A personal life are elements of the human experience that are freely chosen by an individual. This can be contrasted with an individual’s role in society such as a professional or student who is constrained by the expectations of their occupation.
Petty Authority
Petty authority is the use of authority by an individual to justify unreasonable, unfriendly, manipulative, cruel or arrogant behavior. In some cases, a small amount of authority is enough to trigger negative changes in an individual’s behavior. Organizations that bestow authority such as governments and companies are generally viewed as responsible for ensuring that it isn’t abused.
Polite Fiction
A polite fiction is the ability of groups to substitute fiction for reality when it is conductive to group harmony.
Procrastination
Procrastination is the act of delaying something that needs to be done. The term implies an unsatisfactory state whereby effort is avoided causing stress and/or poor outcomes.
Reactance
Reactance is a motivation that occurs in response to an attempt to limit freedom such as freedom of choice, expression or privacy. People tend to be highly motivated to preserve their freedom and may react negatively to commands, rules or actions that are perceived as a threat to certain individual freedoms. Reactance has implications for leadership, management, sales, marketing and other domains that depend on social influence.
Risk Taking
Risk taking is an undertaking which has a probability of a loss. In most cases, this also involves some probability of a gain.
Safety In Numbers
Safety in numbers is the rule of thumb that relatively large social groups provide safety to their members.
Saving Face
Saving face is preserving one’s social status after a failure, mistake or disagreement. A person may attempt to save their own face and people in a group may help them. Alternatively, members of a group may attempt to embarrass or humiliate someone who has made a mistake, causing them to lose face.
Sense Of Entitlement
A sense of entitlement is the belief that you have a right to things you need or want. This isn’t necessarily bad but is often portrayed in a negative light.
Setting Up To Fail
Setting up to fail is a malicious political strategy that gives a team or individual a mission, project or task that is deliberately designed to fail. In most cases, the doomed assignment is an order of magnitude too much work relative to the resources or capabilities available.
Sidelining
Sidelining is a political tactic that involves ignoring, distracting or removing the opposition so that they no longer play an active role in a program, project, initiative, team or function.
Social Acceptance
Social acceptance is the process of being included and respected by other people. The desire for social acceptance is a strong motivation that helps to explain a broad range of human behavior. Social acceptance includes any positive social interaction and inclusion in communities, cultures, organizations, teams, work, events and conversation.
Social Behavior
Social behavior is the way that people interact with one another.
Social Comparison
Social comparison is the process of evaluating oneself using comparisons to others. This is a common and innate process that spans cultures.
Social Interaction
Social interaction is any communication that occurs between people. This includes everything from greeting a neighbor with a gesture to intensive communication such as negotiation, debate and public speaking.
Social Loafing
Social loafing is the tendency for people to contribute less effort to a group activity than an individual activity. This was identified by French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann in 1913 with measurements such as how hard individuals pull in a tug of war alone and in a team.
Socializing
Socializing is the process of interacting with people. This is a basic but surprisingly complex and difficult process that benefits from experience, knowledge and effort.
Sour Grapes
Sour grapes is a tendency to assume that something a person can’t obtain or achieve must have little value. It is a type of cognitive bias that is often explained by a sense of cognitive dissonance that occurs when a person desires something they can’t obtain. By assuming that unobtainable things must have little value, this stress is reduced. The term sour grapes originates with a fable about a fox who sees grapes he can’t reach so he assumes they must be sour.
Superficial Behavior
Superficial is the prioritization of appearances over realities. This word always has negative connotations.
Sycophancy
Sycophancy is insincere behavior designed to win favor with someone who has social status or authority.
Taking The High Road
Taking the high road is the principle that you maintain your personality and standards of behavior in response to difficult situations such as an encounter with political tricks, unethical behavior, insults and indignities. The principle addresses the common urge to shift into negative behavior when encountered with difficult people or situations. Changing your personality or standards in response to such challenges can make you look like the bad guy and leave you with a sense of regret.
Tit For Tat
Tit for tat is a common strategy of diplomacy and business that responds to each attack from an opponent with a roughly equivalent counterattack. The logic behind tit for tat is that it demonstrates a commitment to defend yourself. An important element of the strategy is preventing counterattacks from being viewed as an escalation. Otherwise, a downward spiral of escalation may break out.
Victim Mentality
A victim mentality is a pattern of unreasonable beliefs or assertions that one is a victim of others. This shouldn’t be confused with actual victimhood whereby an individual has actually suffered a significant injustice in a particular situation.
