Behaviour is learned, and what has been learned can be unlearned

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from where behaviour comes from. Very little of what a person does is settled at birth. Manners, tempers, work habits, the way someone speaks to those they love, the way they handle money or conflict or boredom: these are acquired, mostly by imitation and repetition in a particular setting, and often without the person noticing they were being taught. Something acquired that way, the argument runs, has no special claim on permanence. The mechanism of change is therefore not mysterious. A behaviour persists because something keeps cueing and rewarding it, and it weakens when the cue or the reward is removed and a different response is practised in its place. This is why people behave differently in a new job, a new country or a new relationship, and why those who deliberately rearrange their circumstances, the company they keep, what lies within easy reach, what they have committed to in front of others, succeed at changes they had previously failed at by effort alone. Willpower is not the only lever available, and when it is the only one used, failure says something about the method rather than about the person. Proponents add that the ordinary evidence is in everyone's hands. People quit, reconcile, learn patience, become punctual, stop drinking, take up responsibility they used to avoid. The changes are usually slow, often relapse before they hold, and are easier to see over years than over weeks. But a claim that people cannot change has to explain away every such case as illusion, whereas the claim that change is possible and difficult explains the successes and the failures together, without discarding anything.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents answer that this confuses behaviour with conduct in a setting. Change the setting and of course the conduct changes; return the person to the old pressures and the old behaviour returns with them, which is why so many changes hold only as long as the scaffolding does. They add that the hardest patterns, how a person reacts under threat and what they reach for in distress, are precisely the ones least touched by rearranging incentives, and those are what people mean when they ask whether someone has really changed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] What is acquired is the form a disposition takes, not the disposition. Children raised in the same house under the same instruction do not come out behaving alike, which is the thing a purely learned account has to explain and does not. [Rejecting P2] Circumstances cue behaviour but do not select it. The same circumstance draws different behaviour from different people, so the explanatory work is being done by whatever makes them differ. [Rejecting P3] Rearranged circumstances alter behaviour while they are in place, and the premise quietly converts that into a lasting alteration of the person. [Rejecting C] If difficulty is always a fact about method, no amount of failure could count against the thesis, which makes it unfalsifiable rather than well supported.