Life is often described as a continual journey of self discovery. It is made up of countless opportunities to better understand why we feel the way we do, act the way we do and why others might think or act differently. This journey of understanding self and others influences how we engage with our world - a social and physical world largely created by human behaviour; behaviour which can be extremely confusing, confronting even. This article has been written in an attempt to develop or exercise the ‘mind muscles’ involved in planning our own behaviour and our reactions to the behaviour of others. We attempt to do this by breaking down human actions into a few basic building blocks; values, intentions, actions and outcomes (VIAO). This is done not just for theoretical purposes but for the very practical aim of improving our understanding of why we act the way we do and why others do as they do.

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When broken down to four individual categories, the VIAO building blocks enable us to better understand how behaviours are formed and why we can clash with others when it comes to our behaviours, or why we might be confused by our own actions in certain circumstances. Through this lense we will propose ways to better understand the sometimes confronting or confusing actions of others and even ourselves. Such moments are often tense and stressful, leading to compromised decision making and often actions we later regret. By developing the tools to consider challenging circumstances in detail we can improve our responses to the very situations where often the most is on the line.

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Furthermore, we’ll explore how these concepts can help us explicitly identify or select what we truly believe and value in order to become individuals who live lives better aligned with this. By aligning what we truly believe and value with how we act we are likely to lead happier and more fulfilled lives - able to be understood and seen as consistent by ourselves and others through all seasons.

 

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Values – Intentions – Actions – Outcomes

Before continuing it is necessary to briefly justify the basic assumptions of this article regarding how we define the building blocks of human behaviour. These blocks will be discussed individually in greater depth later. The VIAO concept proposes that an individual will have their own system of values; prioritised preferences and beliefs. These values will dictate their intentions (intended outcomes), which will in turn lead to actions that ultimately result in outcomes (as intended or otherwise). Thus we have the flow of Values → Intentions → Actions → Outcomes (VIAO). Values and intentions are hidden from public view; they are internal. Actions and outcomes are external and can be viewed by others; often used to draw conclusions or judgements about underlying intentions and values. 

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We will now explore each of these components of behaviour in turn, analysing what they are, how they are formed and several vital implications. 

 

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Values – Breaking the Concept Apart

Values are the states of positive or negative predisposition or investment towards any concept, event or object. This broad definition often overlaps in meaning with words such as ‘beliefs’ and ‘prejudices’. Values influence what we prioritise and what we see as beneficial or undesirable. In this way, they can be seen to inform our intentions – whatever we intrinsically value (not necessarily things we are proud about) we will intend to achieve or promote.

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Upon close inspection, we suggest that the idea of values can be subdivided. Broadly, values can be seen to be divided into conscious (known) as well as subconscious (unknown or unknowingly developed) values. These might develop or be influenced intentionally by religion, heritage or some form of moral code, and/or unintentionally be influenced by society, the media or friends. Conscious values are those we are aware of and can actively identify or communicate to others. Subconscious values are those with which we are not always (often mostly not) aware of sufficiently to be able to identify and address. We have a tendency to focus consciously on values which align with societies accepted ‘moral code’ and be less consciously aware of values that might prioritise personal gain. A useful example contrasting this could occur if an employee of a business proposes and even believes that they value honest gain and devalue theft, yet when handling enormous amounts of moderately valued items (eg office stationary) purchased for the business find themselves valuing their own personal gain sufficiently to quietly relieve their business of several such items without thought. Of course subconscious values when thought about can become conscious, however frequently this does not occur.

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The employee’s example demonstrates self-serving subconscious values influencing their behaviour. However this is not the only type of subconscious value able to have influence. Within subconscious values we’ll create a further subdivision; into egotistical values and intrinsic variable. 

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Intrinsic variable subconscious values will refer to those values and beliefs affecting our behaviour that are held from heavily buried and rarely questioned assumptions of the world; a deep and basic moral framework, so to speak. The origins of such assumptions may often be in childhood – through experiences, teachings or other sources such as religion. (Yes, that’s partly why psychiatrists like dragging us onto couches and asking about our childhoods!) An example of this could be the belief that humans are inherently more valuable than animals or that showing vulnerable emotions in public is a sign of weakness. These assumptions vary between individuals more than egotistical values, as not all necessarily relate to self-gain. Yet these subconscious values are still extraordinarily hard to alter. They often significantly influence our actions and responses without us knowing; and we often incorrectly assume that others hold the same values; frequently leading to conflict.

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‘Egotistical’ subconscious values refer to self-serving and self-prioritising values such as demonstrated by the light-fingered employee mentioned earlier. Egotistical values generate self-serving motives and are often somewhat or fully hidden to our conscious minds (Footnote: For more on hidden motives we highly recommend the book ‘The Elephant in the Brain’ by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler). They are largely analogous with the priorities of the Freudian ‘id’.

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These values are the root causes of many fundamental differences where dispute resolution is unattainable for poorly understood reasons – as no one sets out to negotiate or discuss a concept or value that they incorrectly assume to be universal. Thus when (if) we search for the origins of our conflict such differences will likely not even be on our radar as a possibility. In moments of conflict, we often very quickly get to the point where we aren’t even interested in getting to the true root of the problem, we only care about being right on the issue at hand in order to win the fight! Even if they are able to be identified, such core values and assumptions are characteristically hard to change - especially as disagreements over fundamental values often trigger emotion which can act as a spanner in the works for cooperation or progression. (Footnote: For more on the role of emotion in blocking changes to values and beliefs we recommend listening to the podcast ‘You are Not So Smart’ episode 93; ‘The Backfire Effect - Part One’. This episode explores how when our core values and beliefs are threatened our amygdalas (the fight/flight region of the brain) activate the same primitive physical self-preservation responses that would be seen if we were under attack by a bear!)

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At this point we must also consider whether subconscious intrinsic values can change over time. It would seem that they can, albeit with considerable resistance. As an example: on occasion someone who sees humans as the only living creatures of value has, through what is often a slow process, ended up adjusting their values to consider animals as valuable or even equals (or vice versa).

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Having a diversity of values within an individual can frequently lead to experiences of conflicting values. These inconvenient disparities are unfortunately impossible to reconcile. As creatures living in a complex world it should be well known that values often clash – leading to conscious prioritisation of what we think we value most (eg. to save money or to save the environment). 

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In any human action it appears that there are usually multiple values at play. The balance between the dominance of competing values can constantly shift as in a dynamic war, a war where the prize being fought for, like a civil war for government, is the right to form an intention.

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Values Informing Intentions

Unfortunately the game doesn’t become any simpler with the introduction of ‘intentions’. Intentions reflect what we desire to happen in our environment as a result of our actions (or inaction). Intent is formed by values and (often) the status of the dynamic war between them. Importantly, this article will consider the intentions of a specific person at a specific time. The purpose of this is to highlight that intention can change over time and this influences behaviours and outcomes. 

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Values inform intentions and intentions are ‘pure’ - it is impossible for someone to simultaneously intend for both a certain outcome and an alternative to occur (though of course outcomes beyond our control can eventuate differently to how we intend). This statement still allows for people to have no specific intention due to apathy or uncertainty. It does not mean, however, that individuals cannot have conflicting intentions. The implication is that the dominating value in any situation can change over time, and thus if the dominating value informs the intention the intention can change with time as well. In fact, in such situations the balance of values is so precarious that intentions can change many times in several seconds! 

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Consider the example of a meringue pie being flung at your high school enemy’s (or brother’s!) face when you are in a position to intervene. Hopefully there is a value inside of you that should want to save anyone the inconvenience of being covered in pie. Yet there likely is also value linked to their displeasure; seeing a rival’s status drop slightly to our relative advantage. In such a circumstance someone could foreseeably first react by sticking out their hand to stop the flying pie only to reconsider before interception and call short the extension of their arm. (An alternative situation is that from the start the intention was to make it look like you tried to intercept but were simply unable to do so - we’ll give our imaginary friend the benefit of the doubt and won’t consider this alternative currently!) 

 

Through this analysis we see the problem with trying to assign a single intention to any person in any situation lasting more than a millisecond. Furthermore, we see one of the problems with passing judgements based on intentions of actions rather than outcomes of actions. If someone intended to do the ‘right’ thing 99% of the time but at the critical moment (interception point for the pie) intended (either largely consciously or unconsciously) to do the ‘wrong’ thing then how do we judge them? If the person being judged was given unlimited time to consider and take action, perhaps we could judge them on their final action without a second thought. However in a time-limited moment, such as caused by our flung pie, even a slight deviation among values we are prioritising can result in an outcome we are instantaneously regretful of.These are outcomes that if we could select for in a non time-limited manner (eg voting on a slip of paper in a private booth on the outcome of the pie-flinging) we would select not to happen. This is especially complex as we may genuinely not be aware of the influence of unrealised subconscious values and so testify quite honestly that we believe we intended to do the right thing. (For those of you realising that society cannot afford to be too lenient or open to manipulation please see our ‘judgement’ article preview below!) (Footnote: New thoughts and research are suggesting that there are actually important, self-serving reasons why humans have developed deficiencies of insight regarding true motivations, for further reading see ‘The Elephant in the Brain’ by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson).

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Intentions Informing Actions

Thankfully, it can be safely said that intentions perfectly correlate with actions (separating physical factors or our environment which affect the effectiveness of actions). This of course only holds true for intentions and actions matched together at the same precise moment, remembering that intentions and actions can change at lightning speed. For this reason we use actions to serve as evidence of previous intentions.

 

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Actions Informing Outcomes

Just like an equation, every action will lead to an outcome, though not every action will have the intended outcome. Sometimes actions fail to produce desired outcomes because of any of a number of external and/or internal factors. Internal factors often have influence from wavering (even over milliseconds) intentions and hesitation as previously discussed. Due to this article’s focus on more psychological aspects of behaviour rather than physical we won’t spend time exploring external influences here. 

 

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Next Level Implications

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When Values Don’t Align With Actions

A major implication of this model for considering human behaviour concerns the disturbing occurrence of when values don’t align with actions. This will probably be an unfortunately frequent experience for most of us.

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A notable phenomena of this framework is when conscious values do not align with subconscious values. Subconscious values can overpower conscious values; from easily and constantly to unconvincingly and infrequently - but potentially no less damaging. All a subconscious value needs to do, recall, is to rise prominently only at a point of behavioural significance (such as the critical intercept point in the meringue-pie-to-face example). 

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In such circumstances, the suspicion or realisation that we might not unwaveringly embody the conscious values which we hold dear (including those we perceive to be of great moral importance) can be quite shocking. Thoughts that we might not be as consistent or ‘good’ a person as we believed we were can lead to unhappiness, discontent and depression (through ‘cognitive dissonance’). We may be forced to face the uncomfortable realisation that we don’t truly know ourselves as well as we thought we did.

We are left to face the realisation that we have a dark side – that within us there are powerful selfish values and thus potential intentions that we can never be fully aware of and can never reliably control. It may be easy to ignore the importance of this concept, as it is easy to think that we would behave in ways true to our beliefs. Yet many self-professed or even widely acknowledged ‘good’ people have done terrible things they never would have thought possible due to such hidden incongruence of values and motivations. As just one example, the great Martin Luther King even had well documented extramarital affairs. It is for this reason that humanity places so much value on actions under pressure. As goes the quote by Robert McKee: 

‘True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature’

 

Note: The authors are not suggesting that Martin Luther King was proven through temptation and pressure to not be a great individual, the greatness of his accomplishments with the reality of his imperfection are merely used as an example of the powerful incongruence of values in even the best of us.

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What To Do About Unwelcome Subconscious Values

It’s all very well to point out this type of potential misalignment of values and associated influence on behaviour - but what can or should be done about it? Answering this question requires consideration of each type of subconscious value separately.

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For subconscious intrinsic values the idealistic answer is that, as best you can, you change them. Such a process involves assessment of held conscious values to decide which you do or don’t want to support and how these may clash with conflicting subconscious intrinsic values. This assessment may occur during deliberate times of thought, though may more likely occur when situations of conflict force us to consider the presence and effects of subconscious values. Unsurprisingly changing such core assumptions is a very hard task, it requires persistent effort and filtering through the conscious mind deep into our subconscious wiring. The key point, however, is that recognition of undesired subconscious values and avoiding simply ‘playing dumb’ to them, is required to open up any pathways for change. Oftentimes conversations with people of differing experiences and beliefs can lead to the challenging of basic values and assumptions to produce reflection, insight and ultimately growth - as long as we are open-minded. If we openly engage or seek out such opportunities, despite how uncomfortable doing so might be, we might save ourselves regretting actions triggered by unaddressed subconscious values. To make the most of these opportunities we need to be willing to fight through the significant mental challenges associated in order to achieve the benefits of refining our values. 

 

Now to consider subconscious egotistical values. Arguably these values can’t be removed, but they can be controlled and their influence diminished; ‘quieting the ego’ is a common phrase encouraging just this. Such a notion is congruous with the Alcoholics Anonymous line of ‘once an alcoholic always an alcoholic’. The most effective way to reduce the strength of egotistical values is to do something extraordinarily uncomfortable – shine a spotlight on them. If we are aware of our more selfish motivations and values and are frequently searching for their influences then we will hone our abilities to monitor and detect such values. We may never be able to rid ourselves of them completely but we can significantly increase our conscious control over them. To do so may be extremely challenging and uncomfortable but to not attempt this at all is simply dangerous and arguably negligent. We’re all a lot closer to being terrible people than we think – even the ‘best’ of us. Improved behaviour cannot wait until we have a perfect (internal, subconscious) self.

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‘We’ve all got both dark and light inside us. What matters is the part we choose to action. That’s who we really are.’

- J.K Rowling

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‘It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a solider to fight on a battlefield’

- W.B. Yeats

 

Preview: Judgements – Weighing Intentions and Outcomes

At many points throughout this article there have been issues raised that have significant considerations for our judgements of others. A large part of this centres around the question of whether to judge people on their intentions, actions or outcomes, and similarly whether actions can be used to assume intentions. This topic in itself is incredibly complex and has many considerations. Just as with human behaviour, there are many positives and negatives implicit within the various ways in which we make judgements of ourselves and others. In order to be fair to all parties and to have the most balanced and accurate view of the world we must have a basic understanding of this complexity. What do we gain or lose from judging others based on outcomes and what from judging based on intentions? How much weight is it appropriate to give either in any circumstance and how can we use the same concepts to demonstrate understanding and empathy when we still must stand strong on important rules and boundaries as well?

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This is a particularly meaty and important topic. For this reason we have another article on the way dedicated to it alone. If you would like to complete this journey of values, intentions, actions and outcomes then we encourage you to look up this article once it becomes available. For now we’ll just drop a thought provoking quote:

 

‘We judge ourselves based on our intentions but others based on their actions’ 

- Stephen M. R. Covey

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Conclusion

This article hopes to have broken down human behaviour into four important components. Each of these components can be reflected on and individually considered to increase our ability to form better understandings of the complex creatures that we are. By considering the relationship of these components, we shed light on important understandings which can help us become more well-considered moral agents ourselves; as well as becoming more effective and understanding in our interactions with others. 

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The concepts dealt with here do require effort to engage with - it is much easier to make broad assumptions about behaviour and avoid the difficult implications that arise from delving into effortful complexities.

 

Complicating this further, our brains are often wired to ignore complexities in favour of a subjective perception of the world around us that benefits our position and frames actions beneficial to us as true and proper. However, as is hopefully able to be appreciated, to not engage with such analysis can lead to reduced harmony and effectiveness in behaviour with others and even internally; resulting in compromised feelings of fulfillment or contentment. 

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Please take time to think about the ideas presented here and how they might apply in your life, just as the authors will. Consider whether you agree or disagree with any ideas and please share your thoughts and insights, we'd love to hear them.

 

Take care!