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Discuss the view that human behaviour is determined by past experience

The view that human behaviour is determined by past experiences is called determinism. This approach is based on an opinion that every thing that we as humans experience is predictable and that all events are fixed.
Within this approach are various types of determinism, which are endorsed by different psychologists.
Skinner believed in environmental determinism. He stated that humans behaved the way they did because their actions had either been rewarded or punished in the past therefore causing certain behaviour to be repeated and unwanted behaviour avoided. This can be explained by the following – A child touches a bee and gets stung; the child will not touch another bee.
Freud reinforced the psychic deterministic approach by stating that it is the unconscious mind that causes human to act a certain way i.e. criminals unconsciously want to get caught because they want to be punished, whereas a criminal will argue he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Above all the deterministic view is that all behaviour has a cause whether it is environmental, unconscious or otherwise. This goes against the idea that we as humans have control over the way we act and are able to decide what we do. Most psychologists accept determinism all be it in varying degrees.
Perhaps the exception that all humans are affected by determinism is in the case of severe mental illnesses such as Obsessive Compulsion Disorder and insanity which is why in a court of law if a person has committed a particularly hideous