Human Behavior for Technical People

What This Course is All About
Hello and welcome to this Pluralsight course about Human Behavior for Technical People. My name is Edin Kapic and in this course I will teach you how to interpret and understand human behavior in yourself or in other people and how to use this understanding to improve your interpersonal relations especially at the workplace. This course is meant to be taught to technical people such as developers and administrators. Why is that? It's because I'll use the skills that technical people just as yourself a really get at to, to address the explanation of the human behavior. Be warned, I'll use a lot of analogies comparing people to computers and I won't be politically correct all the times. It will mostly serve to highlight a point in the way that's better suited to a technical audience. In no way, do I expect you to take that statement for the face value, but to grasp the meaning behind them. Don't worry, I'll make these warnings repeatedly just to make sure you don't forget them.

Crash Course in Psychology
Hello, this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will walk you through some basic concepts about human psychology. It will serve as a basis to inter-use the definitions that will be used in other modules of the course and at the same time, cover some major branches of psychology. Psychology is the science of the mind and the behavior. It's a relatively young science because it has separated from the main branch of philosophy in the late 19th Century, but mankind has always asked itself about how our mind works and about why we behave as we do. From the ancient Greeks up to the mid-evil philosophers, _____ due to the things that today are taught by the psychology. The main difference between the two is that philosophy is centered on a high-level abstract constructs such as rational thinking, the free will, the meaning of the existence, and the reality around us, while psychology is centered on the low level and mid-level processes in our mind such as the behavior or the emotions.

Personality
Hello this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will introduce you to the idea of personality. We will see what personality is made of and we'll also see different classification of personality types. The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. In the theatre of ancient Rome, the mask was not used to disguise the identity of a character, but instead it was a convention and employed to represent or typify that character. In the same fashion today, we use personality as a description of unique characteristics of a single human individual.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Hello, this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will explain Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI, one of the most widely used classification personality. Myers-Brigs Type Indicator or MBTI has been developed in Florida by Isabel Briggs-Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs between 1942 and 1964. The origin of the indicator was when Katharine met her son-in-law and realized how different their personalities were. So she and her daughter went to develop a system of personality types. First, they were testing indicator within friends and relatives and then the sample was being expanded further with academic and corporate members. The basis of MBTI is a psychological type theory introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist a disciple of Freud Carl Jung, who published his book Psychological Types in 1921. He observed that people usually engage in one of two mental functions taking in information, which he called perceiving and organizing that information to come to conclusions, which he called judging. Even if people do both of those activities, they prefer to do more of perceiving or judging. In the same fashion, he modeled extroversion and introversion preference. MBTI has been conceived as a hand on approach to these theories of Jung. Jung's work was too academic and Isobel Briggs established a refine model of personality by organizing psychological type preference on a matrix, and by crafting a refining questionnaire that helps sort these preferences quickly and easily. By the time of Isobel's death in the 1980's, MBTI has already been entered worldwide use by companies, educators, and others to help make career decisions and to enhance understanding and communication.

Enneagram
Hello, this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will explain the Enneagram. Classification and personality that has been used in business management and spiritual context. The Enneagram means nine drawings in Greek. It is also the name of the figure that is used to explain the nine different personality types and the relationships between them. The origins of the Enneagram are not clear, but a first modern user of the Enneagram is created to the Russian spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdijeff in the earlier 20th Century. He used the Enneagram figure to explain his teachings on the laws that operate in the universe. The Enneagram was popularized by Bolivian Teacher Oscar Ichazo, who developed a theory of ego fixations on the top of the Enneagram figure. He began teaching Enneagram personality analysis called Protoanalysis in the 50s. A Chilean psychiatrist called Claudio Naranjo finally popularized the Enneagram in the early 70's in the United States. From there, other authors began publishing books on the Enneagram. Today, Enneagram is used in business, politics, acting, advertising, spirituality, and various kind of therapies.

Group Dynamics
Hello, this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will explain the dynamics of communication, power, and influence in groups. As groups are everywhere around us, knowing groups dynamics adds a valuable tool to your human behavior understand toolkit. Groups are the basic units of social organization. They can be small as a development team in a small project or they can be huge as the crowds in a football match. In essence, group is formed anytime when two or more individuals interact with one another. What is so fascinating about groups is that the behavior of the group can be predicted fully by understanding the individuals in the group. It almost seems that group have behavior of its own. Puzzling, right? Well, this question has puzzled scientists in the last couple of centuries. The father of modern group psychology is a German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin. In the 40s, he developed an explanation for the behavior of the individuals inside a group as a function of their own personality which you have seen in the previous modules, and the group environment itself. He even started the organizations and did the pioneering work about theory of leadership and management styles. Group dynamics, a term owned to Kurt Lewin, is a fascinating world of behaviors and psychological processes that happen in social groups. In the last decades, this field has been studied to provide insights for leaders, managers, sociologists, psychologist, and many other professional. Now as we are comfortable with basic notion of human behavior, let's go to know more about group dynamics and what happens there.

Stress
Hello, this is Edin Kapic from Pluralsight. In this module, I will introduce stress response and how to manage it. Stress is a common place behavioral situation in the modern life and it can have very damaging results to the stressed person and his or her surroundings. Stress in psychology is a persistent feeling of strain and pressure. While a small amount of stress is beneficial as it improves our motivation, when we speak about a stress usually we're referred to excessive amount of stress that is harmful. Human experience stress when they perceive that the mechanisms to cope with the stressful situation or stimulus are insufficient. In a way, stress is our red light that signals that a stress stimulus over powers our current capabilities. Animals suffer from stress too. When a pack of antelopes on a watering place is attacked by lions, they experience stress while escaping from the chase. However, when the threat is over, the antelopes are no longer stress and peacefully return to the watering place. They don't spend time thinking about future attacks or get anxious when near the water place. There is even a book about this phenomenon called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.