These are the simple underlying reasons why we do what we do.
The bulk of human behavior can be explained by a chain of cause and effect that leads back to these few axioms.
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Axioms of human behavior
The 9 axioms shown above (the nine factors underpinning human behavior) can be described as follows.
We share many characteristics with other animals that influence our behavior. A crucial one for this framework is biological asymmetry (axiom A2), in other words, being in our own bodies gives us a specific perspective, which means that we cannot know the thoughts, feelings and sensations of others the way that we know our own, and so we cannot have perfect empathy with others. As with other animals there are differences between the sexes (axiom A4), and in the human case the most fundamental of these are that males and females:
- have different levels of certainty that a child is theirs: women know, men think they know (axiom A5)
- have (at least initially) different levels of investment in the children: women invest nine months of resources (axiom A6)
- have different potential numbers of offspring: women are limited to one birth every nine months; men could have more (axiom A7)
Human behavior is distinctive in the animal kingdom because of our distinctive evolutionary environment (axiom A8), which was an extremely unpleasant one, with many threats and few resources. Our response to that environment was to become a learning animal, able to develop survival solutions in days rather than evolving them over generations. The process of evolution through natural selection (axiom A1), operated on the factors that governed that learning process so that, in the same way that it shaped our bodies, it also shaped our psychology (axiom A3).
The final underlying factor (axiom A9) is only a principle, and is not perfectly reliable, but it does provide a philosophy for conducting an analysis. This is Occam’s razor, which suggests that if complex and simple explanations are available, the simplest one should be preferred.