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Two of the most well known concepts in Psychology are Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning. The first of these is attributed to a fellow named Ivan Pavlov, who was, interestingly enough, not a psychologist, but a physiologist, but I digress.
Pavlov is the fellow you have probably heard of who ran experiments on dogs. His famous experiment entailed fitting dogs in captivity with an oral tube to measure their rate of salivation and then subjecting them to two sensory stimuli: first, the sound of a bell, and second, the sight and scent of meat powder.
Of course, the salivation rate of these dogs increased when the meat powder was presented. This is what is known as an unconditioned response; that is, an innate response. This is a way the dogs responded without having been trained to respond this way.
But, over and over again, as this exercise was repeated, the presentation of meat powder followed the ringing of the bell, a sound the dogs were not exposed to at any other time during the experiment. This was the sequence over and over again, until there came a point at which Pavlov only rang the bell and the salivation rate of these dogs increased without the meat being presented.
The salivation rate increasing in response to the presentation of meat powder is an unconditioned response. The same thing happening in response to the ringing of the bell is a conditioned response; conditioned as in learned.
If one can find a friend who is game, one can duplicate this experiment. One can have the friend sit in a room with no especially attention-grabbing stimuli, ring a bell and then shine a flashlight in the friend’s eyes.
What is the unconditioned response to the bright light in the eyes? Shrinking pupils, of course. So if one does this a few dozen times, in this order, one will reach a point at which one can ring the bell without shining the flashlight in the friend’s eyes and those pupils are going to shrink anyway.
If one instinctively responds a certain way to stimulus B, and stimulus B has a tendency to follow stimulus A, one can expect to learn to respond much the same way to stimulus A. There are many ways this particular concept manifests.
A cat who consistently hears a can being opened in the kitchen right before being given food soon begins to come trotting into the kitchen at the sound of the can opening.
A young man who responds to pornography by becoming aroused and resorts to looking at pornography whenever he is bored soon finds himself becoming aroused in response to the boredom as well. I can personally testify to this one.
A child who responds to being spanked with fear, sobbing and the need to escape, when the spanking is usually preceded by shouting, shortly finds himself responding this way to the shouting as well whether it is followed by spanking or not. I am sorry to say I can also testify to this one.
Someone who grows up in a situation which leaves him consistently at the mercy of authority figures whom instinct compels him to trust but who are abusive learns to associate trust with abuse and regret. Years later, after growing up and having outgrown that instinctive trust, the conditioned association between trust and regret remains and this fellow has difficulty cajoling himself into any situation which depends on trust, including social situations, dating, and intimacy.
A woman who happens to be white is called to undergo vetting for jury duty, but since the defendant in the case in question happens to be male and black and the woman was raped years earlier by someone who likewise held both characteristics, she is disqualified from sitting on the jury.
But in order for Classical Conditioning to produce a conditioned response, it must have an unconditioned response to begin with; a response that is already part of the behavior of the animal in question. Operant Conditioning is different, and for this, it causes me more concern. This manner of conditioning is actually able to introduce new behavior. This school of thought was pioneered by B. F. Skinner who was able to use it to train pigeons to play ping pong; a behavior far from typical of pigeons.
Operant Conditioning relies on three main concepts: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment. Of these, the first is best understood by the general public. When a certain act coincides with a favorable stimulus, that act tends to be repeated. A dog who rolls over on command, and afterward is rewarded with a dog biscuit, is more likely to remain willing to roll over on command. A mouse fitted with an electrical lead which provides a charge to the pleasure center of the mouse’s brain whenever a certain button in his cage is pressed subsequently presses that button until exhausted by the exertion. One who has ways to make a workout routine fun tends to have a lot less difficulty finding the necessary motivation to keep that routine going. One who enjoys videos made by a certain YouTuber tends to seek out additional opportunities to do so. An act that has a tendency to be followed by positive stimuli tends to be repeated. That one’s pretty straightforward.
Now here, personally, I have to hand it to people like J. K. Rowling, Gary Paulsen, Beverly Cleary, Sidney Sheldon, and of course Peter David. These people contribute to literacy by writing books that are fun to read. When people enjoy reading, they do more of it, and subsequently, their skill for it is honed, their literacy is reinforced, which opens the door for them to branch out into reading other subjects and being exposed to new ideas. But reading about a certain subject is different from watching videos about it, because reading depends on mental exertion. Reading depends on thought. People who do more reading also do more thinking, and so get better at both. But I digress.
Punishment is also usually well understood.
A cat which accidentally sits on a hot stove will never repeat the mistake, but neither will it ever again sit on a cold stove. A shepherd who has noticed a wolf stalking his flock kills one of his sheep, seasons its carcass with a drug and leaves the carcass for the wolf to find. The wolf finds it, consumes it, and soon finds itself in a state of severe nausea. It subsides, but the wolf never hunts the flock again.
An action which leads to an unpleasant outcome or no discernable outcome tends not to be repeated.
Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, is usually not so well understood. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the same as punishment. It is what takes place when a behavior which ends or avoids an unfavorable situation has a tendency to be repeated. A woman begins nagging her husband to take out the trash whenever it accumulates past a certain point, but stops nagging the moment he does, and he begins taking it out with less and less delay, until one day, he takes it out just before she begins. A father wants his son to clean the plate and puts pressure on him whenever he begins to complain about being full, but stops as soon as the plate is clean, and the son learns to associate finishing the food with ending or escaping pressure, and later in life, develops a tendency to eat in response to stress.
A smoker tries to quit, but goes into withdrawal. In the midst of it, he or she knows that lighting up will end the symptoms and is tempted a great deal with this. If this smoker does it once, the experience of lighting up coinciding with the end of the withdrawal symptoms serves as a negative reinforcement and this makes quitting more difficult.
A father with a tendency to abuse his son, when that son finally moves away, puts pressure on any of the rest of the family who remain in contact with him to take his side about spending time with the old man, but stops as soon as they do. The rest of the extended family learns that taking the father’s side is a way to escape or avoid such pressure, and so begin to take his side habitually. Sadly, I can also testify to this one.
People participating in a campaign of persecution of another group find themselves hating themselves for doing it, and especially detest this state of self-loathing, but soon discover that they can escape this state by devaluing the lives and identities of the other group and hating them instead. This they find far preferable. This exemplifies negative reinforcement.
Unfortunately, sometimes, one can be misled by one’s own operant conditioning into misapplying it with others:
A father wants his teenage son to do something, so he nags, and the son does it. This shows him that nagging is a good way to get his son to do what he wants him to do, and so the behavior of resorting to nagging whenever he wants the son to do something is positively reinforced.
The next time he wants the son to do something, he nags him again, and again he does it. Thus, the behavior is positively reinforced further.
But one of these times, as soon as he finishes doing one thing the father has nagged him into, the father makes the mistake of immediately starting to nag him about something else. So the son carries out the new task, and the father immediately nags him about something else. Each time the son completes one task, the father starts nagging him about another.
Now the reason this has worked to get the son to do things so far is that, as soon as he has done them, the nagging has stopped. The lesson to the son here is that "Doing what my authority figure wants ends or prevents the nagging." This approach only works so long as it has this result; so long as it ends or prevents the nagging. But the father is not seeing this. Completely unaware, he is teaching his son that nothing stops the nagging, and in the process, he is removing his son’s motivation. If nothing stops the nagging--if he is nagged just as much whether he carries out the task in question or not--then there is no point in trying. The act of carrying out the task in question does not end the unpleasant stimulus.
So the next time the father wants the son to do something, he nags him and the son responds a little more slowly than usual. The father responds by putting on a little more pressure than usual and the son picks up the pace again, and as soon as the first task is done, the father drops back to a normal pressure, unaware that this is a crucial step.
The day comes when the father starts nagging and the son does not respond, but the father puts on a little more pressure and the son responds, but then the father has more things he wants the son to do and so keeps on the added pressure. The first few times, this works, so this behavior is reinforced for the father.
But one day, the son also learns that, just as nothing stops the nagging, nothing stops the added pressure, and so he loses his motivation here as well.
Little by little, this cycle repeats with higher and higher levels of psychological pressure until the son stops responding altogether and develops a reputation for being lazy and unmotivated. Here we have what is known as learned helplessness. Next thing you know, the father is on the news explaining why he has to discipline his son with a cattle prod because, allegedly, "He doesn’t respond to anything less."
Learned helplessness also manifests in the elephant who is chained to a stake in the ground while very young and very small. He tries to pull it out and free himself, but he isn’t strong enough. Eventually, he stops trying, since acts that lead to a negative outcome or no outcome tend not to be repeated. As the months go by, if the elephant is properly cared for, he grows, and one day, he is strong enough to pull the stake out and free himself, but he still doesn’t because he has learned not to try. He has been trained to be helpless.
Sometimes, Operant Conditioning scares me.
In a nation pervaded by an attitude of white supremacism, any people who happen to be white but don’t share the attitude run the risk of having this violence brought to bear against them whenever they make this known, and so are pressured to conceal it. That’s punishment. If one of these sorts begins to have thoughts that go against this sentiment, this individual runs the risk of giving those thoughts away with something he or she says or does, and so is pressured to suppress them, and if possible, to replace them. If such a person finds himself or herself the object of suspicion for dropping such hints (an unpleasant state), but then manages to conceal the hints in question and escape the unpleasant state, such is negatively reinforced.
I don’t know about any of the times more recent than this, but in the 1950’s, in China, one thing the government did to control the population was to require the entire literate population to keep diaries to submit to party members for regular examination. Any time the party member in question found in the diary any thought that conflicted with the party's philosophy, the keeper of that diary faced severe punishment. The image of this punishment then dominated this keeper’s thoughts any time it occurred to him or her to write anything that the party would not approve of, and to escape this image, that individual would learn to exclude such sentiments from his or her writing. In time, with these individuals practicing more and more the act of guiding their written reasoning away from such thoughts, they also became ever more adept at guiding their actual reasoning away from them.
In the Korean War, US Soldiers captured by the North Koreans and the Chinese were, of course, confined, but permitted to correspond with their families through the Red Cross. Sometimes, though, the Chinese army was not very expedient about getting that correspondence to the Red Cross. Of course, they insisted on reading it first.
US Soldiers in Chinese captivity soon learned that their letters tended to get through more quickly when they contained sentiments about how the US or democracy really isn’t all that great or how the Chinese aren’t so bad, or things along those lines. That is, such sentiments were rewarded, and positively reinforced, motivating the soldiers who came up with them to come up with more such sentiments, and of course, the more they did it and were rewarded for it—the more it was reinforced—the better they got at it.
Often, these soldiers were confined in cells by themselves with no human contact except the people who brought them food and the occasional Chinese psychologist who would come around to ask about such sentiments in their correspondence and then ask the soldiers to expound and elaborate. In this, the soldiers learned that coming up with advantages to the Chinese approach and disadvantages to the US approach meant an escape from solitude, and so it was reinforced, providing additional motivation to these soldiers to practice finding such caveats.
As these behaviors were reinforced more and more, they came to characterize the soldiers in whom this happened. The more the soldiers were rewarded for finding advantages with the Chinese system and disadvantages with the US system, the better they got at it, until eventually, it became automatic and their loyalty to the US dissolved. Here we have what western historians of this period typically refer to as "brainwashing" but which Chinese historians and psychologists more often euphemistically dub "re-education."
My real concern here, though, is how this ties in with deconversion. This is a problem whenever a nation has an established religion. It cannot do so without subjecting those who don’t practice it to the status of second-class citizens, and as a result of this, those who do practice it are confronted with the prospect of becoming second-class citizens in the event that too many doubts arise. Thus, they learn that examining these doubts could result in punishment and misery, and this image is dispelled from their minds every time these doubts are. Thus, the act of suppressing the doubts in question means escaping the thought of second-class citizen treatment, and so is negatively reinforced.
"These points can't possibly be cogent, because if they are, I become a second-class citizen."
But the forces of Operant Conditioning are also found in many countries that lack an established religion but which still have large or forceful percentages of their population who practice one in particular. The practitioners of this faith, every time they consider leaving, are confronted by the notion of being alienated and ostracized by friends and family. This notion is escaped every time doubts about the faith are buried, and so the act of burying these doubts is negatively reinforced and becomes habitual.
"These points can't possibly be cogent, because if they are, I will be ostracized and alienated by all my friends and family."
"These points can't possibly be cogent, because if they are, it will mean that I have wasted years of my life."
There are some, though, with even more on the line. There are those in their fifties and sixties and older who have made a career out of their faith and no longer know how to do anything else. It is a recurrent conclusion in the books of Michael Shermer that it is extraordinarily difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it, and I’m using male pronouns here because, unless I miss my guess, it happens to men much more often.
Even after one has examined one’s faith, and indeed, the idea of faith in general, and found they don’t hold up under scrutiny, one is strongly compelled to maintain the guise in order to earn a living. There are a number of clergy, theologians and apologists who don’t believe but who don’t dare let on. To have a living, they have to live a lie; a terrible position for anyone to be in.
"Those points can't possibly be cogent, because if they are, I have to admit that my financial empire is built on a lie."
"Those points can't possibly be cogent, because if they are, I have to choose between living a lie and living on the street."
What can be done? This is not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know. As the nonreligious following in the west grows and organizes, we should be able to come up with solutions to this problem. We should have advice we can offer people in this situation; maybe even organizations which can help. One in such a situation is currently confronted with the notion of losing both affluence and solvency. That’s not right. Surely there are things we can do for them to spare them the latter alternative. Honesty should not equate with poverty.
This ties in with a more politically focused concern of mine. It’s something I explain in my video about educational expenses. Since the 1970's, at least in the United States, as time has gone by, educational costs have slowly-but-consistently inched their way skyward. Financial aid in the form of grants and scholarships has also become gradually less and less available and the lost ground has been made up by loans instead. Both trends combine to produce an incrementally larger percentage of professionals in debt and the amount of that debt also continues to climb. There are bound to be many professionals in any given field motivated by greed who are going to stick to the high-paying corporate positions no matter what, but there are also bound to be plenty of others motivated instead just by the desire to make a difference; people who would be quite content with lower paying positions with small organizations and charities if not for all that debt.
The desire to get one’s debts paid off or to avoid getting into debt in the first place is the desire for freedom. In such a situation, the more high-paying the job, the more it helps one to make progress on paying off one’s debt, which places one in a position to equate wealth with freedom and thus, the most greedy are the first to achieve independence. Thus, greedy behavior is rewarded and reinforced, and generous, altruistic behavior is punished.
It is one serious reinforcement when greedy behavior is reinforced with money, but it is quite another when it is also reinforced with freedom, resulting in a conditioned association between the two. The greater the debt at graduation, the stronger the motivation afterward to take steps to make oneself more appealing to the more high paying prospective employers.
There is a direct positive correlation between just how high paying any given prospective employer in this country is and how right-leaning their dominant political attitudes tend to be. Thus, the more any given professional leans to the right, the more this professional tends to be hired by such firms. The more right leaning the professional, the less time it takes him or her to get all that debt paid off. So one is strongly motivated to bias one’s views to the right in the hope of gaining one’s freedom.
If it is difficult to get someone to understand something when his or salary depends on him or her not understanding it, it does not bode well to have more and more people in this situation where their salaries depend on not seeing the absurdity of things like supply-side economics. How charitable and rational can we expect such people to be when being charitable and rational impedes their debt payment? That is, effectively, a punishment. When escaping from the notion of taking longer to pay off one's debt is the consequence for not being charitable or rational in one particular case, this is negatively reinforced.
"Those points can't be cogent, because if they are, I have to work years longer to get out of debt."
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