Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 150
Persistent head-banging and dead lab rats
B
ack in the days before
the wheel, I studied
psychology. So I remember snippets from that
— enough to get me into
trouble, at least. And of late,
my life demonstrates one of
the concepts I learned back
then. It was “operant conditioning” — based on the
premise that reinforced behaviors tend to continue,
while those that are punished or are not reinforced
tend to gradually end.
Makes sense, right? If every time you reach for a
cookie you get a vicious
electric shock, you will stop
reaching for the cookie.
The difference between
individuals is the “gradually end” part. I mean, how
many shocks will it take
before you stop reaching?
With some people, it might
only take one zap or, at
most, two. With others, who
shall remain nameless, the
learning process could be
quite a long one, accompanied by the smell of the hair
burning off my arms.
Of course, how good the
cookie looks and how masochistic you are both figure in.
But there’s a little twist
to operant conditioning that
makes a world of difference
in how long you keep repeating a behavior.
It’s called “intermittent
reinforcement.”
And it’s deadly.
Jim
WALKER
DON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY
What if, every great now
and then, you get the cookie and don’t get the shock?
If this is the case, you may
never stop reaching for the
cookie, despite all the times
you do get shocked.
And they will nickname
you “Twitchy.”
This is the whole principle behind gambling. Think
about it. If you absolutely
never won anything when
you played the lottery, and
only gave away your hardearned money, you would
stop playing, eventually. But
because you won the $90
jackpot two years ago and
get the occasional $2 payback, you will keep playing
until you are too old to remember how.
Those who use intermittent reinforcement against
you, whether they do it consciously or unconsciously,
are cruel and evil taskmasters, indeed. And there are
websites devoted to using
this technique in both business and romantic manipulations.
Yes, apparently, I should
have done my homework.
But it’s never too late to
wake up and join the dark
side.
Now, the key experiment
illustrating the power of intermittent reinforcement
was done with rats:
They put three rats in separate cages. Inside the cages
were levers that, when depressed, dispensed pellets
of food.
In the first cage, the lever
delivered a pellet of food every time it was pressed. The
rat soon learned it could depend on the lever to dispense a pellet each time it
wanted one.
(I’m betting this rat got
fat, but that’s a separate issue.)
In the second cage, the lever never dispensed any pellets. The rat soon learned
that this was not a way to
get food, so quickly began
to ignore the lever, which
had no meaning to the rat.
(Even I would receive that
message.)
But in the third cage the
lever dispensed food —
some of the time. This rat,
rewarded once by the lever, pressed it again and got
nothing. It pressed again,
and got nothing. But on the
third try, a pellet of food
was dispensed. So the rat,
still hungry, pressed the lever again, but nothing happened.
Nothing resulted for 20
more presses of the lever,
and then a pellet was finally
dispensed.
Do you know what happened to this rat?
Over a period of time this
rat became obsessed with
pressing the lever. This became so overwhelming that
the rat wouldn’t walk away
and play on its treadmill or
with other items in the cage.
The rat wouldn’t even try to
drink.
(Of course, here we’re
talking about water, not
scotch. The frustrated rat
would have surely turned to
the single malt for solace if
it could.)
This obsession with pressing the lever resulted, in some
cases, with rats actually dying
from exhaustion or dehydration. In other words, the rats
got so focused and obsessed
with intermittent reinforcement that their attachment to
the levers was all-encompassing and unhealthy.
Sound familiar?
Now, they say that the
definition of insanity is to
keep repeating an unsuccessful behavior and expecting a different result. But I
submit that this kind of insanity is a result of intermit-
tent reinforcement.
And they’ve hired me as
the poster boy.
One last, surprising, result of the rat studies is that
a rat that was always rewarded with a pellet of
food when it pressed the lever would, very soon, give
up on the lever if it stopped
providing food.
In comparison, the rat that
was intermittently rewarded
would continue pressing the
lever almost indefinitely.
So how long will you
continue to bang your head
against the door that rarely opens? How many times
will you break your heart
on the rock of false hope?
How many times will you
press that lever before you
notice that life is passing
you by while you are obsessed with meager, irregular rewards? When will you
realize that you deserve far
better?
What?
Oh, don’t ask me.
I’m still working that bar,
hoping for a treat.
Comment at jwalker@
the-signal.com or @
DontSeriously or @
SCVSignal.
