Training People

In psychological terms, conditioning is a fascinating thing to study. Most people are familiar with the story of Pavlov's dog, who was trained to salivate at the ring of a bell, because Pavlov would always ring a bell before feeding it, thus associating the bell ring with food.

Conditioning can be done to humans as well. This is largely how we train our children, usually by rewarding good behavior and punishing bad. But in a more subtle, we are exerting a certain conditioning force among all people.

Humans are creatures of habit. Whatever it is we do, we tend to do repeatedly. But within humanity, individuals are limitless in their individual tendencies. So whenever we act a certain way, people expect us to continue acting that way. A person who is not taking things seriously will rarely, if ever, take things seriously.

Because this assumption goes in all directions, we are training people to treat us a certain way while they are training us how to treat them. The things we choose to say and do, the way we react to others, every one of those things shapes our view of others and their view of us. With every new experience and reaction, we learn what is acceptable and what is not, and gain a fuller and clearer understanding of that person.

There is so much fertile ground for character depth and stories to tell in this area. You can explore how relationships change as they grow deeper. You can explore how people may find themselves drawn to similar people because they have been preconditioned to like them. You can write about people who are so erratic that nobody knows how to treat them due to their lack of consistency.