While science has recently revealed that one’s genetic predisposition clearly plays a role in an individual’s characteristic way of responding to the world, most social scientists and psychologists feel that a large measure of the way we behave, think, and feel is determined by learning and conditioning, which comes about as a result of our upbringing and the social and cultural forces around us. And since it is believed that behaviors are largely established by conditioning, and reinforced and amplified by ‘habituation,’ this opens up the possibility, as the Dalai Lama contends, of
...more
