Behaviorism

How well are you trained? Who trained you?

photo by Pixabay

Behaviorism

“I am my own man.”  Then again, maybe not so much. Did I create myself?  Of course not.  Did you create yourself?  Of course not.  Then where do you and I come from, and why are we different? Or similar?

Way back when, I took a psychology course in college concerning behaviorism. I didn’t even know I was interested in psychology, but the course fascinated me.  If you’ve never studied it at all, you should.  There’s a video link below that makes a good introduction.

I especially remember videos of canaries. Canaries were in a cage in the lab, and could get a seed to eat, when they performed certain actions.  They soon learned that if they pecked a button with their beak, they got a seed. But then the ‘stimulus’ was revised, and they got a seed when they pecked, but no more often than once every ten seconds.  The canaries learned to wait approximately ten seconds between pecks. If the researchers changed the prompt to one seed after three pecks, the canary learned that, too.

And this is how we train pets. We teach them to sit with treats.  It takes a little while, but a dog learns to sit when you say sit.  They do it because there’s a treat involved.  Behaviorism calls this stimulus/response. Your pet can be trained to do almost anything it is physically capable of doing, with proper training.

OK, so what about you?  What about me?  Are we who we are, do we behave the way we do, think the thoughts we think, based on some innate personality traits?  Or are we simply trained? There are libraries full of books considering this question, but I’ll spend just a few words considering compensation.  In other words, on what basis do you get paid, and how does it affect your behavior?

There ae various ways to get paid, hourly, salary, piecework, commission, and tips, for example.  And a person might get some combination of more than one of these.  If you have work to get done, and take your job seriously, does it really matter what form of compensation?  Yes.

In my career, I’ve done some form of all the compensation possibilities that I’ve listed.  I was a teacher.  I got a salary.  I got paid the same, whether I worked hard at it or not. I like to think I was a good teacher, but did I go way out of my way, did I spend way more time than was required?  To some extent, yes.  But with no additional compensation for expending more time and effort, I didn’t do as much as I could have.  I didn’t stress to a great degree that I had students who learned little and kept failing.  But what if my pay was commensurate with the students’ grades?  Would my outlook have changed?  Yes. I might have leaned on the failing kids more.  I might have simplified my lessons to make passing easier.  I might have had the better students tutor the slower students.  That’s great for the slower students, but the better students are to some extent being taken advantage of.  They could spend that time doing projects to increase their own learning.

There are varying outlooks on educational techniques; my only point here is, how you pay the teacher will influence how they teach.

Many people, perhaps most, are paid hourly.  That means they are paid to exist for an hour.  They aren’t being paid for what they get done, or how well, but simply to be at the job for an hour. I was an employer, and I can state with little fear of contradiction, that hourly pay is the worst way to pay someone. Perhaps all you want from a night watchman is for them to exist at a guard station all night.  Paying him to exist hourly makes sense. But if you want someone to DO something, you should pay them for doing it, not for how long they spent doing it. That way, the employee gets paid the same, whether they take two hours, or all day. That way, they get the work done in the shortest possible amount of time.  Otherwise, and I can tell you from experience, it’s amazing how long some people can take to do work that should only have taken two hours.

Many car repair shops pay mechanics a specific amount for specific work.  If the shop manual says replacing a starter should take one hour, the mechanic will get paid one hour’s pay to replace it.  If they take only a half hour, they still get an hour’s pay.  If for some reason it takes an hour and a half, they still get an hour’s pay.  Good mechanics can make great money, poor mechanics, not so much.

Salesmen often work on commission.  If you are reasonably astute, you can tell when a salesman is selling to you on commission, and when they’re not. If they show no concern with whether you buy the product or not, they are on straight salary or hourly.  If they really try to sell you the product, they are on commission.  It can be subtle, but generally you can tell.  And you can always ask.

These days, there is an effort to eliminate tipping in restaurants and elsewhere. I’m for tipping.  But it shouldn’t be automatic.  If the service was poor, leave a small tip. If it was great, a large tip. Pay for what you get, rather than pay for a person to exist for an hour. That’s fair for you and fair for the server. No, a server can’t count of a great tip, even when they provide great service, but I think it averages out for the best.  My understanding is that most servers WANT to maintain tipping rather than get a higher hourly wage.

We know that the way a person gets paid affects the efficiency and quality of their work.  Strictly speaking, that’s behaviorism. But there are other stimuli besides a paycheck. Almost everyone experiences positive reinforcement form positive social interaction. Being complimented on the quality of your work matters to you, does it not? It may incentivize you to keep on making the extra effort, even if it doesn’t show up in the paycheck.

If you are in a public space, a store or some such, and you hold the door open for someone, you expect a ‘thank you”. How big a deal is it, really, whether you get thanked or not.  Yet, it matters.  Stimulus/response.  You keep holding doors open, because you keep getting thanked (praised). If people stopped thanking you, you might be less inclined to hold doors open.

All this is to examine why we behave the way we do.  I suggest that far more of our behaviors, and even our outlooks on life, come from the responses we get to our behaviors. We seek reward, monetarily or emotionally or both.   Our dog Toby responds to praise almost as much as he responds to a treat.  So do we all.

Consider all media.  It’s rare, with the possible exception of Substack, for any media to present you with anything out of pure egalitarianism.  Media costs millions, even billions, to operate.  Where is the money coming from, and why are they spending it on the media?  Because they want to influence YOU.  And me. Ultimately, influencing you and me will make them their money back, and then some. Yes, it can be innocuous stuff, like a commercial selling you a car.  Notice, if you will, that the commercial is rarely about the features of the car; it’s about how the car will make you feel about yourself. There are car commercials to make you feel good about being an environmentalist.  Others to make you feel confident picking up women. Others to make you feel independent and offer freedom from life’s hassles.  If you’ve never done it, watch commercials and determine who they’re selling to, and how they’re going about it. Generally, they’re appealing to ego in some way or another, and not so much displaying the plain realities of their product.

Yes, that’s stimulus/response. You watch, they appeal to your ego some way or another, and you spend your money the way they want you to.  Or, VOTE the way they want you to.  Either way, we are being sold to.  Never forget it.  They are investing BILLIONS of dollars to get us to behave, including our thoughts, the way they want us to.

I’ve asked this question many times before:  How many of your thoughts are your own, generated organically from within your own mind?  How many have been implanted there by people who know how to push your buttons? No car manufacturer advertises their cars in an effort to make sure you get the car that’s best for you.  They advertise to get you to buy their car, whether it’s the best car for you or not.  That doesn’t make them evil.  But it does mean you have to be conscious, ALL THE TIME, of who is influencing you, and why. Nobody is selling toothpaste because they care about the nation’s teeth.  They sell toothpaste to make money. And clothes.  And phones and phone plans. And energy.

And belief systems. There’s big money to be made in belief systems. We have a natural tendency as social animals to join, to want to be part of something.  We want to belong.  It’s more important, even, than a paycheck. It is less important, perhaps, what we join as it is that we join. If an organization can get you to believe in them, they can benefit greatly. They know that there are people who can be locked into a belief even to the point of no longer considering any other possibility.  They can be locked into a belief, even to the point of feeling threatened by anyone who has a contradictory belief.

Imagine, if you can, a world in which there are no media. No one is trying to sell you anything. What would your opinions be then, on your own, with no one selling you anything? We are being stimulated incessantly, and we are expected to respond incessantly.  But we don’t have to.  Your mind can be controlled only to the extent that you allow it.  You are nobody’s pet dog.  Or are you?

---

Comments