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Motivation
Follow the Action: Behavior Speaks More Truth Than Words
More often than we think, the outcome we keep getting is the one we are after.
Posted December 16, 2019 Reviewed by Davia Sills
“Actions speak louder than words,” goes the saying. Yet whether this is true or not depends on what we take “louder” to mean. In some ways, words are, in fact, "louder" than actions—they account for much of the noise in our environment.
To quote Mark Twain: "Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often." In these times of social media, words dominate our interactive space, and their power is readily amplified. Historically, we often hold on to the beautiful or profound words of great artists and thinkers while willingly papering over their loathsome actions.
A better way to interpret this line is that actions often speak more truthfully than words. This intuitive idea applies in many realms of life. For example, in detecting one’s state of mind, or whether one is lying, body language tends to tell us more than do words.
In politics, one is well advised to "follow the money," as the money trail will lead us to who, and what agenda, is truly behind the outcome or policy being pursued. The saying, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget,” often attributed to Joe Biden, reflects a similar sentiment. Your stated priorities, your PR, and your spin may tell one story, but your budget—where you spend your money—tells a truer tale of what is important to you.
The principle applies in the realm of self-understanding as well. If you want to know what you like, believe in, and find important, then look at your behavior. You may surprise yourself.
Often, what we tell ourselves we value is not what our actions bespeak. When you see a gap between your words (or thoughts) and your actions, trust the actions, not the words. As they say in Hollywood, “Don’t believe your own bullshit.”
Another useful derivation of this principle is this: To understand the true goal of a certain action, look at the actual outcome. Quite often, you can discern where someone truly wants to be by looking at where they keep ending up. This principle, however, only applies under three conditions.
First, it applies better for those specific, non-incidental types of outcomes that are unlikely to be stumbled upon by chance or mistake. One may stumble upon a nice pebble on the beach during a sunset stroll, but one does not commonly stumble upon a nugget of gold lest one goes searching for it with dedication. Thus, if someone ends up finding gold, then it is safe to assume that finding gold was the goal to begin with. Likewise, if someone ends up in a position of great social power, chances are that power was their actual deep motive to begin with, regardless of their stated aims and preferences. As a rule, you don’t stumble onto great power.
Second, this principle holds best for patterns, not anecdotes. That is to say, one failure to achieve a stated goal is probably just that—a failure. But a pattern of repeated failure to achieve a stated goal may mean that the stated goal is not the true goal. More often than we’d like to admit, our stated goals are in conflict with—and a cover-up for—our true, unstated ones. For example, if peace is not achieved despite repeated attempts, then perhaps the two sides are benefitting from, and thus seeking to maintain, the state of war, regardless of their claims and declarations to the contrary.
Third, the principle holds in environments where people actually have adequate choices and options. If people are powerless in their environment, then the outcome is more likely due to environmental conditions, and attributing it to personal goals, wishes, or values is unwise. Thus if I'm a patient in the hospital and a nurse wakes me up every four hours to check my vitals as part of hospital procedure, then we cannot conclude that it is my wish to be awoken and poked repeatedly. On the other hand, if I find myself repeatedly in stormy relationships, then odds are that being in the middle of a storm is my true aim, regardless of how much I purport to desire calm.
Understanding this principle helps clarify and predict future behavior. For example, if we accept that the deep goal of those who achieve a position of great power is to be in power, then we can predict that once in power, they will inevitably seek more of it and will try to hold on to it as much as possible.
This is why the saying "power corrupts" is not entirely true. Often, it’s the opposite: Corruption empowers. People who are corrupt are so because that’s an efficient way to get power, which is what they were after all along. Moreover, understanding that people in power are mostly interested in power helps explain why power structures are generally much better at perpetuating themselves than at solving the problems of the powerless.
In therapy, clients often benefit from reflecting on how the outcome they repeatedly get—noxious, troubling, and contrary to their stated aims as it is—may be the actual intended goal of their actions. If you feel that your romantic partners repeatedly mistreat you, then your goal may be to feel mistreated. The question, then, is not, “Why am I failing to find good love?” But rather, “What is it about being unloved that I find gratifying?”
Interestingly, as I’ve described elsewhere, behavior does not only reflect our values and attitudes but may help create them. A change in attitudes, values, or habits often begins with—and is facilitated by—a change in behavior. In other words, to paraphrase Gilbert Gottlieb, for teeth to evolve, a species needs to start biting. To paraphrase William James, if you want to develop courage, stop running away.
In sum, we may conclude that over time, under conditions of relative freedom of choice, and with regard to non-incidental outcomes, actions tend to speak more truthfully than words. More often than we’d like to admit, the true goal of people’s behavior is not the declared or stated outcome, but the actual one. To understand people (including ourselves) better, we are thus well advised to use behavior as our guide. To understand what we’re truly after, we may want to look at what we’re constantly getting.
