Picture a transparent box, with a little hole in one wall.
At the other side of that wall, we have a bar.
When the pigeon inside the box pecks that bar, the construction will either deliver
a reward, a pellet of food the pigeon likes a lot, or no reward at all.
Once the pigeon was conditioned, meaning, once the pigeon understood that pecking the
bar could release a reward / reinforcement, three different tests were run.
On the 1st run, no food was released, at all & the pigeon stopped pecking the bar completely,
as expected.
On the 2nd run, food was always released.
The pigeon pecked the bar moderately.
So, it pecked the bar every now and again, but wasn't particularly interested in it.
Now, on the 3rd run and this is where it gets interesting, food was released intermittently
(meaning irregularly).
And the pigeon lost his fucking shit, went crazy & pecked the bar 'frantically and incessantly.'
It was desperate, not knowing when the next reinforcement would be released, fearing the
prior release of food might have been the last, while hoping that wasn't the case.
Now, what happened?
During the 2nd run, the pigeon took the food for granted, but when in the 3rd run the reward
was not guaranteed and received in an unpredictable pattern, the pigeon couldn't resist, what
we call, intermittent reinforcement.
We humans are affected by this just as much, if not more, than pigeons and other animals.
We want what we can't have.
What we can have, all the time, therefore doesn't interest us.
We don't appreciate it figuring it'll always be there and you can have at it, whenever
you feel like it.
You can observe this when dangling a string just out of reach of a cats paws.
That cat will give chase doing everything in its power to get the string.
Then, when the cat finally has the string in its grasp, when the prize has been won,
the effect wears off and the cat quickly loses it's interest.
We call this the Cat-String Theory.
The pigeon experiment was carried out by B.F.
Skinner and the term intermittent reinforcement originated from his theories on Operant Conditioning
& Behaviourism.
Studies in psychology I am personally very intrigued by and thought of as an interesting
topic for this video.
Especially seeing as it all has to do with why some of us become pathalogical gamblers,
betting money we can't afford to lose, why some of us quote on quote nice guys are ignored
by the hot chicks, because we're being nice to them all the time, instead of being cocky
funny with a push-pull approach, being nice one second, then challenging & cocky, but
in a fun way, the next.
It's why some of us are literally addicted to our phones, we can't put it away, we're
constantly checking our social media to get that reward, a new text message from Susanne
rolling in, a new reply to our great comment on YouTube, a new e-mail and sometimes the
responses we get aren't satisfying enough and/or negative, and thus not rewarding, so
we check again minutes later hoping for a reinforcement.
It's why we teach our dogs to go fetch the ball by petting them on the head and give
them a snack from time to time, when they do get the ball or the newspaper or whatever
else we consider a desirable outcome.
I mean, I saw a product that guides you through teaching your own goldfish how to play football
with the groundbreaking work Skinner has done.
Sure, most parents might not take the same approach in conditioning behaviour on their
kids as they do with their goldfish, but according to these theories, there isn't a huge difference
in psychology.
I strongly believe that when we understand our own behaviour and why others act in a
certain way, we can help ourselves avoid getting addicted to bad habits, we can have a more
positive outlook on someone acting irrationally, as we might even be able to predict such behaviour
beforehand, not only for ourselves, but for the people surrounding and thus influencing
us.
I'm not uploading intermittently on purpose, so I can be your drug and get you addicted
to my videos, but these videos take a long time to make and when I am finished with it
I want to publish it as soon as possible, so I can get my positive reinforcement, which
is all the great comments I receive from you guys.
So let's recap if you were a pigeon and I were to quit uploading you would stop checking
my channel completely.
If I uploaded every day you would take me for granted.
But if I upload intermittently, you will not only appreciate it, you won't be able to wait
for more.
That being said I want to commit to a time schedule and try to publish one video every
monday ... As always thanks for watching and subscribe
for an upcoming review of Psychocybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
Talk to you soon.