Mike+Tyson

=​​Mike Tyson= By Michael Sagherian

Biography
Mike Tyson was born June 30, 1966 to Jimmy Kirkpatrick and Lorna Tyson. Moving to Brownsville in Brooklyn at age 10 after his parents separated, Tyson witnessed a horrific and gruesome atmosphere of crime, drugs, and violence. He had never had a physical altercation at that point in his life, but after continually being bullied Tyson finally stood up for himself when another boy grabbed his pet pigeon and broke its neck. Tyson describes this as his first fight, and it was one that would spark both his continual fighting in the streets of Brownsville and also the development of his criminal behavior (such as robberies). Eventually, Tyson was arrested and sent to juvenile and soon after attended boarding school where he met his first boxing trainer, Bobby Stewart. After Tyson proved his dedication to boxing, Stewart put him in touch with boxing trainer Cus D’Amato, a man that would in time transform Tyson into one of the best boxers of all-time through his focus on spiritual energy, technique, and confidence in fighting.

Under the direction of Cus D’Amato, Tyson broke multiple records in the 1982 Junior Olympics, winning every bout by a knockout and one bout by a Junior Olympic record eight seconds. In the beginning of his professional career, Tyson won 26 of 28 fights by knockout and started to build a name in the boxing community. Unfortunately, his trainer and mentor Cus D’Amato died in 1985, leaving Tyson devastated and creating a large void inside of him throughout the rest of his life. After the death of D’Amato, Tyson went on to win the World Boxing Council (WBC) heavyweight championship in 1986, becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. He defended his title in dominant fashion for the next three years. However, after his divorce from Robin Givens in 1988, Tyson fired trainer Kevin Rooney, who many considered to be the one that saved Tyson’s career after D’Amato’s death. On February 11, 1990, Tyson lost his title in one of the biggest boxing upsets ever to Buster Douglas, and a year later in July 1991 was arrested for the rape of 18-year-old Desiree Washington. As a result, Tyson was sent to jail for three years, and while there, converted to Islam.

After coming out of jail, Tyson’s whole mentality towards boxing changed and he looked to at the sport as merely an opportunity to gain money. After regaining his WBC title in 1996, Tyson tried to defend his title against Evander Holyfield in the same year, but lost in an upset. In their next fight (1997), the fight was called after the third round when Tyson bit off part of Holyfield’s right ear in retaliation to Holyfield head-butting him throughout the match. This moment served as one of the defining moments of Tyson’s career, and in the years that followed he continued to lose both fights and money, as Don King swindled Tyson for much of his profits and savings. Finally, on June 11, 2005, Mike Tyson retired from the sport of boxing after deciding during the fight that he no longer had the ability to fight and should no longer embarrass himself or the sport. Mike Tyson remains one of the most controversial yet intriguing celebrities of all time.

Behaviorist Perspective
John Locke once proposed that humans are born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) into the world, filling in the slate as time goes on by letting their experiences in life shape the person they become. Locke’s theory opened up the possibility for the field of Behaviorism, and years later B.F. Skinner developed the Skinner Box, developing a theory of operant conditioning that is perfect for identifying important aspects of the personality of Mike Tyson. Operant conditioning claims that an individual’s behavior is shaped by the consequences of that behavior, as those rewarded for a certain behavior will be reinforced to repeat the behavior and those punished for doing a particular behavior will be less likely to perform that behavior in the future. The process by which an individual (or in Skinner’s case, an animal) learned to respond in accordance with positive and negative consequences was part of ‘shaping’ the individual. By this method, individuals learn to better emulate the target behavior in order to reach the consequences of that behavior.

In the eyes of Skinner, Tyson is not to be blamed for his actions, as he is merely a byproduct of determinism. There is no free will by this perspective, and as a result, Tyson’s personality has developed as a result of reinforcement throughout his life. As a child, Tyson grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he was constantly being robbed at gunpoint, humiliated, and beaten up in the rough, violent neighborhood. The constant humiliation he suffered was perhaps Tyson’s biggest fear, and as both a child and adult he worked to extinguish others humiliating him. Normally accustomed to backing down from fights, Tyson finally stood up for himself and fought for the first time when someone took one of his pet pigeons and broke its neck. Tyson describes his first fight as wild, but by eventually defeating his opponent he started to develop a strong reputation in Brooklyn. After the initial fight, Tyson was bullied and humiliated much less. As he consistently began to react to others’ attempts to humiliate him by fighting them and beating them, Tyson’s reputation grew even stronger, and as a result he was no longer picked on or bullied. Little to his knowledge, he was validating Skinner’s theory of negative reinforcement. This theory states that if an aversive event ends as a result of a behavior being performed, then that behavior will be performed in the future. In this case, Tyson learned to avoid an aversive event, people humiliating him, by performing a consistent behavior that would get rid of the aversive event, fighting and beating them. As a result of his initial success, Tyson repeatedly retaliated to humiliation by fighting and beating up those who insulted him, and by being humiliated less and less the more he victoriously fought, he reinforced the act of beating people up as a way to rid of humiliation. Shaping is also clear here. Initially, Tyson describes himself as a poor and wild fighter. As a result, his reputation was getting better but was not at its highest point. However, as he fought more and more, he began to become a better fighter. As he became a better fighter, he dominated people more in fights and thus more resembled the target behavior (dominating, victorious fighting).

This negative reinforcement helped Mike Tyson develop into the great fighter that he was. As Tyson declared in an interview, he wanted to decimate everyone he stepped into the ring with. His reason for this was that he never wanted to be humiliated again, and by losing to others he would ultimately be humiliated. As a result, when Cus D’Amato began training him, Tyson trained diligently and frequently in order to better develop his target behavior of dominant, victorious fighting. Over time, as his behavior more and more resembled the target behavior (as he became a better fighter), Tyson began winning more and eventually won numerous boxing titles, both as an Amateur and Professional. His driving force was never to just become a great fighter or to be the best at his sport, but continually throughout his career his motivation remained to avoid humiliation (avoid the aversive event).

This attempt to avoid the aversive event of humiliation eventually became his undoing as well. The complications caused by Tyson’s negative reinforcement began when he was sentenced to three years in jail for rape in 1992. Publically embarrassed and humiliated by having to go to jail, Tyson no longer had control in avoiding the aversive stimuli of humiliation. It was on his track record permanently and he couldn’t throw a victorious punch in order to prevent it. As a result, Tyson began to experience extreme states of neurosis due to his sudden lack of control to prevent the event. When released from jail, this lack of control led to his downfall both in and out of the ring. He could no longer fight to avoid humiliation because he was now permanently humiliated for his incarceration. As Tyson describes, he no longer had a passion for boxing or for being a champion. This was because his main motivation for fighting (avoiding humiliation) had been extinguished, and as a result no longer being able to avoid embarrassment, he fell into a state of learned helplessness. When facing Evander Holyfield in the famous fight of 1997, Holyfield repeatedly head-butted Tyson in what Tyson describes as “an attempt to hurt him.” Tyson, by his own word, saw this as Holyfield intentionally trying to hurt him, and as a result, he “became insane” and “didn’t care about boxing anymore.” The drive to avoid humiliation reached an extreme, one outside of his learned response of precise, calculated, and technique-driven fighting. Instead, Tyson bit off a piece of Holyfield’s ear in retaliation, ending the fight and receiving even further national humiliation for his actions. This fight served as the symbol of the ultimate end to both Tyson’s prominent form of operant conditioning and his successful career. By this point, Tyson’s aggressive behavior and fear of humiliation had already been greatly integrated into his personality.

Cognitive Perspective
​The Cognitive aspect of personality is another perspective in which to analyze the life of Mike Tyson. Specifically, Albert Banbura’s Social Cognitive Learning Theory serves as a scope in which we can accurately understand Tyson. Bandura stressed the combined importance of the “inner person” and the demands of a situation, and as a result we can see how the combination of Mike Tyson as a person and the environment surrounding him influenced his personality.

Mike Tyson developed his own self-system, in which he was influenced by external forces of reinforcement and also internal processes of his own expectations, anticipated reinforcement, and goals set. By using prior reinforcement early in his life, Tyson’s behavior continually changed as a result of his knowledge and expectations, showing the roles of both the environment and his own free choice in the development of his personality.

Many of the reasons behind Tyson’s behaviors throughout his life can be traced to the anticipated reinforcement he would receive. His criminal behavior early in life serves as a perfect example. Tyson envied the criminals around him, seeing that they acquired much material wealth and respect throughout the ghetto community. He saw their flashy clothes and mopeds and wanted all the great and luxurious things they had. Over time, he realized their money was earned by robbing people. As a result, Tyson began getting involved with these criminals, adopting the role as the one who went through victim’s pockets as one of the other kids held them at gunpoint. Soon, Tyson had the material wealth he had dreamed of having. Thus, he integrated the pattern of reinforcement into his knowledge, learning that whenever he robbed someone, he could anticipate being reinforced by the money and wealth he obtained.

This and other facets of Mike Tyson’s life were learned through what Bandura coined as observational (vicarious) learning. In this method of learning, one learns to perform a behavior merely by watching others perform it with no need to do it themselves first or be rewarded or punished for it. However, if the person being observed is rewarded (as shown in the Bobo Doll experiment) for the behavior, it does make it more likely that the behavior will occur (although the reward is not necessary for learning). Through this observational learning Tyson developed many of his behaviors—much too his detriment. In childhood, Tyson didn’t really know his father and his parental situation at home was unstable. It reached a point where his parents fought so much that they had to separate, his mother moving to Brooklyn and taking Tyson with her. He evidently learned much from his experience in observing his mother and father fight, as Tyson’s future relationships would also be strained, resulting in numerous horrible breakups and divorces. As his one-time wife Robin Givens stated, Tyson was a manic depressant that was verbally abusive to her and pure hell to live with. By mimicking the behavior of his parents he once saw as a child, he had recreated the same unpleasant atmosphere and relationship issues that they had.

Also a demonstration of Tyson’s observational learning was his sexual nature and the way he treated women. Tyson states that he was always intrigued with sex because his mother and her friends were very promiscuous when he was a child. He also claims that everyone in the house talked in a sexually, insulting, and vulgar manner when speaking to one another. By living in such a sexually charged household, Tyson observed much behavior that he would later replicate. Sex became an obsession to him at one point, interfering with his boxing career as his high level of sexual involvement drained both his time and energy dedicated to boxing. He specifically points out sex as one of the main reasons he lost in an enormous upset to Buster Douglas, a loss that marked the beginning of his downfall as an elite boxer.

Ultimately, Tyson’s move to the violent and criminal area of Brooklyn as a child resulted in his shortcomings as a human being. Merely by being surrounded by criminals and observing them robbing others, Tyson began to become an unfortunate victim of observational learning. Whether they were rewarded or punished for their criminal behaviors was irrelevant—just the observation of them doing it was enough to get Tyson to follow suit. However, observational learning was not the only concept of social-cognitive learning theory that Tyson could be understood from. One concept, self-efficacy, can explain the eventual retirement from boxing by Mike Tyson. Self-efficacy is an expectancy about how competently one will be able perform a behavior in a given situation. For much of his life, Tyson displayed positive self-efficacy, walking into the ring with extreme confidence while believing completely that he would win the match. In this case, the expectancy was being able to fight dominantly in that specific situation (i.e. each particular boxing match). However, after getting out of jail, Tyson had lost his dominant ability and focus as a fighter. As a result, he lost the complete faith and belief that he could win when he stepped in the ring with other elite boxers. As Bandura stated, once one no longer has a feeling of self-efficacy, that person is less likely to even try the behavior. This was evident in Tyson’s case, as by his own admittance he didn’t have the ferociousness or confidence he had before, and as a result became so much less likely to attempt the behavior of fighting that he gave it up all together. After losing to Kevin McBride on June 11, 2005, Tyson finally called an end to his boxing career—and ultimately, an end to his positive self-efficacy towards fighting in the ring.

Discussion
No matter what perspective is used to analyze the life of Mike Tyson, it is clear that the environment surrounding him in both his childhood and adult life greatly influenced the person he became. Tyson himself points specifically to his family life, rough childhood, and death of his mentor, trainer, and friend Cus D’Amato as major impacts throughout his life. Tyson often refers to the multiple voices inside him that constantly conflict with one another, demonstrating his complexity as a human being and leaving many eager to learn about who Mike Tyson really is. The explanation of his personality through two perspectives shows different possible aspects that influenced the person he became. However, it also shows the importance of understanding the dimensionality of the human mind and personality, as no one theory can fully explain the essence of Mike Tyson. To be accurate in the assessment of an individual, multiple aspects and approaches to personality must be assessed, and as a result, psychologists can form a much more complete picture of what makes a person who they are.