Behaviorism

Most of our behavior and feelings are caused by beliefs, which are the result of the meaning we give meaningless events. And meaning requires consciousness. When conditioning does happen it is because the faculty of consciousness that we do possess is not being used. 

Anything that occurs repeatedly (or even once if the incident is traumatic enough) at the same time that something else is causing an emotion will itself get conditioned to produce the same emotion.

That’s how making mistakes, being criticized, not meeting expectations, being rejected, and a host of other non-scary situations get conditioned to produce anxiety and how other stimuli get conditioned to produce other emotions or actions.

Whenever our parents criticized, judged or evaluated us as children, they almost always were annoyed, frustrated, or angry with us. The meaning young children give this type of parental behavior is that their parents no longer love them, so their parents could leave them, and so they could die. That meaning is what causes the fear. The “neutral stimulus” that gets conditioned is the criticism, judgment or evaluation.

We are not making a distinction between the real cause of the fear (the meaning we give to our parent’s behavior) and a neutral event (being criticized) that is happening at the same time. In other words, consciousness is absent from this situation, resulting in a conflating of two separate events into one.

Thus it isn’t that consciousness is not relevant to understanding human behavior, it’s that automatic processes (such as conditioning) can determine human behavior only when consciousness is absent.  When consciousness is present, conditioning doesn’t happen.

Most of the “programming” that runs us is the result of a conscious (or at least semi-conscious) process, namely, forming beliefs by giving meaning to events. The other programming (conditioning) happens automatically when we are not conscious of what’s happening. Luckily, if that happens, we can de-condition that type of programming by making a conscious distinction we failed to make earlier.

To the extent we are at all robotic, it is because we are not using our consciousness effectively. If we do, we have the ability to act and feel pretty much however we desire.
See Are we robots?
@ http://www.mortylefkoe.com/robots/#
and Demo of Lefkoe Stimulus Process
@ http://www.mortylefkoe.com/anna-charlotta-demo/#
Listen to Survival Strategies Session
@ http://www.mortylefkoe.com/book-resources/survival-strategies/#

Nothing can keep you from being at the head of a large and successful enterprise if you have held daily the idea:
“God prospers me.”
 ECH

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.