Over the last few months, I’ve plunged back into something I’ve always had a curiosity about – behavioral psychology.
I know, I’m weird.
Maybe it’s the teacher in me. Or, maybe it’s from spending too much time in office environments dealing with people with different personalities. But for whatever reason, how people learn and why people do what they do fascinates me.
My psychology courses in college were pretty basic. They focused on general ideas – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Freud’s theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego. But when it comes to behavioral psychology, new research focuses on specific pieces like habits, where creativity comes from, and learning styles.
WHY PSYCHOLOGY MATTERS
When many hear the word psychology, they instantly think of someone lying on a couch talking about her childhood.
But my interest is more on the research side of psychology, specifically how people learn and work. As a teacher, I met students from a variety of backgrounds, with wide ranging interests and abilities. Part of my challenge was to gauge how each student learned best. And then, to incorporate teaching methods to give students the chance to get information in a way that made sense to them.
And in business, I’ve been on a lot of teams and worked with people with VERY different personalities. Long story short, learning to work with others is much harder for an adult. As kids, our views are more flexible. But for adults, we bring our own ideas, goals, and personalities into the cubicle. Figuring out how to work with all those differences is a challenge.
WHY BEHAVIOR MATTERS TO A WRITER
One of the most important reasons I have a renewed interest in behavioral psychology goes beyond personal curiosity. As a fiction writer, creating believable characters is crucial. And understanding why people act the way they do goes a long way in helping writers create those characters.
How a character acts or thinks depends on several factors: their current situation, their personality, their past experiences, and their future plans. As a narrative develops, a character makes choices and takes action based on all these things.
But if a writer isn’t in tune with peoples’ real-world motivations, writing realistic characters will be difficult. Writers need to understand the differences between how people of different ages and backgrounds might respond in similar situations. A teenager’s motivation can depend more on how his friends will see him or trying to fit in with particular group. Wheres for an adult, decisions are often based more on family needs or financial situations.
For the main character in my novel, his behavior centers around three key elements: the fact that he’s 17 means he’s in the middle of transitioning from being a child to learning to be a young adult, the fact that he his relationship with his father has been changed by recent events, and the fact that his younger sister has a health crisis.
As the writer, it’s my job to make sure he acts like a 17-year-old, not like me. While I’ve been around a lot of teenagers and new college students as a teacher, researching adolescent behavioral psychology and brain development helps me better reflect what he might do if he were a real person.
Summary
It’s important that fiction writers take the time to really think about their characters’ motivations. You want your characters to make sense. This doesn’t mean you can’t have them do something unexpected. It just means you need to understand the motivation behind acting certain ways, even when unexpected. Having a basic knowledge of behavioral psychology can help you when crafting your characters. Developing their backstory is one thing. But developing how they think, act, and feel takes some understanding of real-life behavior.
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