Queue Jumper Essay

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WRITE A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE OF A ZIMBABWEAN QUEUE JUMPER. Individual human behavior can be explained as arising from any one or a combination of several possible explanations as put forward differently by different psychological thinkers over a period of time spanning across centuries to the present day. From the early psychoanalytical works of Freud in the late 1800s and early 1900s, through the behaviorist approaches of Watson, Skinner and Thorndike in the late 1800s, as well as the social learning theory of Bandura, to the humanistic views of Maslow and Rogers, the variety of propositions regarding what lies behind individual human behavior is almost inexhaustible. It is the goal of this essay to carry out, using the various perspectives, and in psychological terms, a profiling of a Zimbabwean queue jumper. One of the earliest models of human nature that can be used in explaining overt behavior is the psychodynamic model propounded by Sigmund Freud. According to Zimbardo (1980), the dynamic approach in psychology is one that assumes that all behavior is driven or motivated by powerful inner forces, with great emphasis placed on the role of unconscious psychological conflicts that contribute in shaping human behavior and personality. Freud believed that the answers to what controlled daily actions resided in the unconscious mind despite alternative views that all our behaviors are conscious. When human behavior is analyzed from this perspective, actions are explained as being caused by biological and social drives, with overt or outer behavior attributed to inner forces, among which are to be found conflicts, tensions, guilt, anxiety and frustrations. Freud’s psychoanalytical model of human nature can, to a certain extent, be applied in attempting to explain the underlying influences behind the actions of a Zimbabwean queue jumper. The all-pervasive
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