Richard H. Pfau

The book "Your Behavior" is aimed at (1) helping readers understand and change their behavior, and (2) helping to move psychology beyond the outdated thinking that now dominates it. Here's some background:

I came into psychology with a solid grounding in the "hard sciences" having completed technical studies at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, three years of engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, and several years work at the U.S. Naval Engineering Experiment Station helping to silence submarines and other ships. Apparently as a result, at the end of B.A. studies in psychology at the University of Baltimore, I felt that psychology was a "soft science" still in the Middle Ages. That feeling, for the most part, persists to this day.

After graduating, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps for work in the Kingdom of Nepal, to obtain experience with behavior in a very different culture--a culture different from those of Europe and North America which dominated psychology. That experience led to graduate studies in science education at the University of Pittsburgh, more work in Nepal and eleven years in Africa (in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Uganda, and Namibia) interspersed with teaching at the University of Connecticut and private consulting as a human resource development specialist. From 2003, I then began to work full-time on the studies and research that led to the book "Your Behavior."

That is, given my dissatisfaction with the state of psychology, I set out to develop a more unified, up-to-date theory or model of human behavior. While researching what affects human behavior and the huge number of theories and models that have been developed concerning what we do, I found that systems theory and Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) expressed what I was trying to achieve. (The reasons why are discussed in Chapter 9 of "Your Behavior"). In particular, when I discovered PCT, it became clear that I had found a unifying framework and model that met what I was striving for, and that I could do no better than to share its perspectives with others.

"Your Behavior" is the result. As a counterpoint to parts that deal with ways that people use to influence what you do, my next book will focus on how to influence the behavior of other people.