“People’s behavior is largely determined by forces not of their own making.”Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compe

People tend to think of their behavior as totally judicious, determined highly by the logical reasoning process of own without any extraneous matters outside, but there are lots of examples that can be used to belie this notion. These examples show that people’s behavior is actually a final ramification of diverse interaction between their personal motivations and outside matters; social forces.

First of all, there are some social areas that require somewhat coercive policies to retain its main purpose of existence. This coercive policy can be thought as an extraneous motive of people’s behavior, rather than an intrinsic one. Education, especially for the young, can be used as a perfect example for this. If you ask the reason of ‘studying’ to an 8-year-old student, he might probably answer like this: “Because I have a homework to do.” Answer from a 15-year-old high school student might not be that different, talking about an exam he should prepare. As you can see, homework and examination system is the representative motivation of studying for most of the students worldwide. Teachers use this two system efficiently to make their students learn the proper knowledge they have to at their level of development. However, those education-methodological systems are in fact totally extraneous, a coercive force the students did not want at all, but effectively determines the student’s behavior.

Second, the fact that the power of ‘peer pressure’ is significantly high among human beings make their behavior vulnerable to social circumstances such as government system, cultural custom, or social trend. People tend to buy things they did not really want or things they cannot make a lot of use out of just because most of the people do have one of those. People’s natural instinct not wanting to be ostracized by others, make them to follow what others do. Same thing happens for the social system of ‘marriage’. Some sociologists say that peer pressure that the society imposes on single male or female is a crucial drive that allowed the survival of social system of marriage until this day. This shows that people’s behavior is largely determined by forces they did not make.

Some might argue, however, that people’s behavior is in fact finally determined by own thoughts and mind, undermining the seemingly extraneous circumstances mentioned above as one of measly substances that affects the overall decision process. People’s behavior based on their natural instinct, such as sleeping, eating or sexual mating can be used as its logical ground.

However, unfortunately, many instinctive behaviors turn out to be vulnerable to social circumstances. The act of eating three times a day, for instance, which is usually known as a natural result of human being’s periodic hunger, is actually a human-made tradition started from our ancestors after agricultural society. Before the agricultural society, when human beings gathered food by hunting, humans could not supplement their necessity of food three times a day periodically. Only after the food was plenty enough for humans to eat three times a day, the current tradition of breakfast, lunch and dinner has been settled.

To sum up, even though there are widespread notion among people that one’s behavior is largely determined by their own forces they made for themselves, there are lots of examples to negate this prevailing preconception. The fact that educational techniques such as homework and examinations actually determines many student’s behavior of studying, or the fact that people are susceptible to the effect of peer pressure can be effectively used to belie the preconception mentioned above.