First, if your manager is engaging in some kind of grossly unfair or illegal practice, you should consider contacting your human resources department or your local government's equal opportunity employment commission (EEOC) for advice. If yours is simply a case of either poor management or poor communication, I may have a few insights for you.

  Keep in mind that your employer has objectives she is trying to achieve. In her effort to meet those objectives she must assign certain tasks to those who work for her. If there are errors in her system, it is possible that she has delegated tasks inefficiently or inappropriately. So you could be doing the best job that can be done, but if they are not the right tasks, her objectives will not get met and she will get pressure from her superiors to fix the problem.

  In his book Performance Management, Aubrey Daniels states that managers spend 85 percent of their time "either telling people what to do, figuring out what to tell them to do, or figuring out what to do because people didn't do what they told them to do."

  You could argue that it is your employer's job to figure out what to tell you to do, but the fact is, you probably know more about your job than your boss does, which means you can be a source of valuable information to your employer on what specifically needs to be done to get the right results. With this in mind, it may be helpful to sit down with your manager to clarify which tasks have higher priority, how much time she wants you to spend on various tasks and the measurable outcomes she expects. Aubrey Daniels calls this "pinpointing." Pinpointing is the process of being specific about what people do. Pinpoint the behaviors and the results. You could even develop a data sheet that shows how much of what tasks you are required to do, including a place to write how much of that task you did. For example, a salesperson might be expected to makes sixty sales calls per week. Developing a tool like this with your employer can help you do your job better as well as communicate that performance to your employer.

  If you are expected to do tasks that don't produce the results your employer wants, pinpointing behavior and results can reveal that. Pinpointing behavior and results can expose problems in the system. Perhaps there are certain tasks you could be doing that aren't now being done. Perhaps your tools need to be upgraded. Perhaps your workload is unreasonably large.

  The bottom line is this, your performance is important to your employer. Your employer wants/needs certain things from you. If she isn't getting what she wants from you, then the hostility, badgering and micromanagement make sense, even if they are poor ways to correct the problem. When employers don't get what they want, they usually punish the employees. So you need a way to put in concrete terms what she wants and whether or not you are giving it to her. If you can develop a way to demonstrate to your employer how well you are doing the job you are expected to do, then the two of you can become partners in investigating the problems when the desired results are not achieved.

Love,
Miss Behavior

  The discussants in the animal rights discussion group would spend a lot of time scolding, reprimanding and insulting this troll. The more discussion that gets wasted on the troll, the more successful the troll is. Children are experts at this. When mom and dad are too busy to pay attention to their child, the child has the option of breaking something, making a mess, picking a fight with a sibling, etc. These behaviors work better to get the parents' attention than, say, quietly drawing a picture. So the simple answer to what to do about a troll is simply, don't respond. But some trolls are more clever than others. They may spend some time in a discussion group going along with the discussion and gradually introduce more and more subversive comments in their messages. Eventually, this kind of troll, like a wolf in sheep's clothing, will have cleverly derailed the group's discussion by first taking the time to build rapport with the group's participants. Why do they do it? The radio show This American Life on NPR once featured the report of an informal survey in which the surveyor asks people whether they would prefer to have the super power of flight or invisibility. The consensus among the respondents was that invisibility is a useful tool for those desiring to commit treacherous or mischievous acts. As one respondent put it, people "want to be invisible so that they can shoplift, get into movies for free, go to exotic places on airplanes without paying for airline tickets and watch celebrities have sex." The anonymity provided by the internet grants millions of people with the power of invisibility. People can do things on the internet that would be severely punished in offline social settings. So to understand the motivation of trolls, ask yourself, what would you do if you could become invisible? What should be done? Trolls take advantage of a common weakness among humans. Humans in our society seem to have no ability to ignore undesirable behavior. People like to say that they "won't be talked to that way." They seem compelled to "defend their honor" or "set someone straight." Because of this, it is not likely that trolls will ever go away. For an interesting example of this phenomenon, visit www.landoverbaptist.com. This website lampoons Christianity by presenting itself as a legitimate church; however, it is actually a parody cleverly designed to get a reaction. Articles and offerings such as "Accept Christ and get a free Playstation 2" and "If you are unsaved, you are not allowed within a 10-mile radius of our church.Kindly leave, and be about the Devil's business" draw a lot of attention from other Christians complaining about their un-Christian approach to evangelism. Ironically, the creators of landoverbaptist.com manage to get people to abandon their values in order to defend the source of those values. Click on the link at the bottom of the page that says "Read The Mail We Get" and you will see many instances of people engaging in very un-Christian behavior to defend Christianity. Here's an example from one of those letters: "I just read a few of your articles and i must say: You Mother ----ing, ---- ----ing sons of a ------- . I am a devout baptist and know what you people are, you're psychotic cultists!" (Note: some of the original content of this message was replaced by dashes, but I am sure you get the idea.) People spend a lot of time and effort, and work themselves into a ferocious temper, responding to this troll- like website all the while giving the creators exactly what they were after in the first place.

Love,
Miss Behavior

  The history of science begins with philosophy, when great thinkers of the past-Aristotle, Plato, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)-pondered that question, as well as other questions regarding the nature of matter and energy, the nature of the cosmos, the nature of death and so on. The old answers to these questions appeal to supernatural entities that controlled aspects of the world. Evil gods caused suffering in the world; ministering angels attended to innocent people; thunder was the sound of wars in the heavens.

  Human thought has moved through many stages in its evolution toward answers to these kinds of questions. Science is the product of this evolution. Human thinkers eventually began devising explanations of things based on observations of natural phenomena. Then they began testing their explanations and what we now call the scientific method was established as a trustworthy method of answering questions.

  About a hundred years ago, the tools of natural science were applied to questions regarding why people do what they do and some interesting answers were discovered. One answer is now known as the Principle of Reinforcement. Behavior produces outcomes. When these outcomes better your situation, you will likely engage in similar behavior when your situation again needs bettering. For example, when you haven't eaten in a while, you probably go to the kitchen or a restaurant because doing so in the past has resulted in finding food.

  Another is the Principle of Extinction. When a behavior no longer produces its normal beneficial consequences, the behavior stops occurring. For example, say you used to stop by the coffee shop on your way to work every day and the waitress there was always very friendly to you. Then the waitress moved to a new city and now you no longer stop at the coffee shop. If you were wondering whether it was the coffee or the waitress that determined your behavior of stopping at the shop, when the waitress was no longer there, you stopped going. That means that the waitress was likely the reason you stopped. (Should have asked her for a date when you had the chance.)

  Another answer discovered in the science of human behavior is the Principle of Punishment. When behavior results in an outcome that is detrimental to you, you will likely avoid engaging in that behavior in the future. For example, when you call your girlfriend on the phone and she immediately complains that you don't call her enough, you may avoid calling her for even longer periods of time.

  These are some basics. Of course, the answers get much more complex. What happens, for example, when one behavior produces one effect that is immediately beneficial to you, but it also produces another effect that is detrimental to you in the long run. Smoking cigarettes is an obvious example of that. You may smoke because of the immediate physical sensations produced by the nicotine, or because you can legitimately avoid work by taking several "smoke breaks" throughout your workday. Later, you will suffer poor health, yellow teeth, bad breath and maybe even cancer. Given these opposing effects, what determines whether or not you will smoke? Answers to these questions can get complicated and that is why the science of human behavior continues its work of discovering answers to questions like that.

  So, does that answer the question about what determines human behavior? Not quite. There is one other thing to consider. Obviously, not everyone agrees that the environmental outcome of behavior is what determines the behavior. Others would say that there is some underlying process we don't know about that determines behavior and that the outcomes produced by behavior are simply external evidence of these internal processes. This is a valid point and it may be true that there is something else going on with behavior that we don't know about. It is definitely true that we don't understand much of the physiology that underlies how environmental factors influence behavior. When someone experiences reinforcement, what happens in the brain or in the sense organs? Do these physiological events determine whether a given consequence is punishing or reinforcing? How, exactly, do the physical effects caused by nicotine influence smoking? These are questions that we continue to seek answers to.

  The bottom line, however, is that environmental factors, directly or indirectly, do determine behavior. The physical mechanisms by which this occurs is not always known, but neither are they necessarily important. When I need to teach a child to read, I may not know what happens in her brain as she interacts with letters on a page, but I don't have any useful way of affecting what happens in her brain either. What I do know is that when I excitedly praise her when she pronounces a word correctly, she pronounces it correctly again the next time she sees it. I may not know the physical processes involved when a man becomes angry and beats someone, but I do know that when I teach him anger management skills (alternative behavior to productively improve his situation) he stops beating people. Regardless of what happens in a teenager's body when she seems to be experiencing "depression", I do know that by enriching her environment with opportunities to achieve success, her "depression" disappears.

These examples highlight a very important aspect to determining human behavior. With these accomplishments, I am using what I know about what determines behavior to predict and control that behavior and the result is a useful outcome for the person whose behavior has been controlled. The child's verbal behavior comes under the influence of words on the page. The situation that once produced violence in the man now produces the use of anger management strategies. The teenager's emotional behavior has been altered by an increased aptitude for achieving success. These are practical outcomes of changes in behavior. In pre-scientific times, solutions to emotional and behavioral problems were bizarre and even torturous. Hundreds of years ago, physicians cut holes in people's heads to let the evil spirits out. A few decades ago, physicians cut holes in people's heads and sliced up their brains in a procedure known as a "frontal lobotomy".

  Fortunately, the science of human behavior has allowed us to devise humane solutions to difficulties with human behavior. While our understanding of the details may not be complete, the proof that environmental factors determine behavior lies in our ability to alter behavior, especially to the benefit of humans in need, which was the reason people started asking these questions in the first place.

Love,
Miss Behavior