A Social-Psychological Exploration of Advisor-Student Relationships in University Settings

We live in an age of incentives. The transactional nature of human response to incentives has infiltrated every realm of the society. Actions are understood in a simplistic fashion, as incentivized. Behavior is comprehended as a product of reinforcements, which reward socially desirable behavior and punish undesirable behavior. Underlying motivation is assumed to be a unitary concept, where actions are driven by a desire to gain, or an expectation of yielding something 'fruitful'. Overall, human behavior has been subject to stringent assumptions, which simplify modelling of human behavior and empirically verify testable hypotheses based on these assumptions. Two disciplines which reaped the benefits of modelling human behavior in such a fashion are economics and psychology. Prebehavioristic psychology had a foot in two domains. It looked for and found the subject matter of study in physiological and extended physical world, but attempted to explain this behavior with the help of states of consciousness and the world of thought, which was not as tangible and which could not be verified to be as concrete as the experience it was trying to explain. There was an epistemological ambiguity where the answers to questions about physiological processes were explained in terms which belonged to a world which was different as compared to the world where the problem originated. Behaviorists found the solution to resolve this epistemological ambiguity by resorting to find answers to physiological questions in the physical world itself.