ACTIVE AGENT AND/OR PASSIVE VICTIM
The three major psychological views of man – the behaviouristic, the psychoanalytic, and the humanistic – differ most importantly on the issue of whether man is to be conceived primarily as passive or active. These two positions are often referred to as the “pull” and “push” theories of motivation. The pull theory finds most of man’s motivation in the environment, in external forces such as rewards and punishments; the push theory finds most of man’s motivation from within the individual, in internal forces represented by urges and growth tendencies. All three viewpoints recognize that man is both an active agent and a passive victim of motivational forces. The key difference is how man is seen primarily. If placed on a continuum from passivity to activity, the order of the three viewpoints would be behaviourism, psychoanalysis, and humanism. In the humanistic model there is a wholehearted (èñêðåííèé) belief that we will learn far more about man if we view him as an active agent rather than as a passive victim of external forces. The other two models of man, however, are gradually placing more emphasis on the importance of man as the single most important determiner of his behaviour in order to explain how so much of human behaviour is initiated by man.
5. Make up 6 wh-questions on the text “Active agent and/or passive victim’; make sure that you can answer them.