Think Of The Skinner Box As A Slot Machine.

Positive Reinforcement can also be serious punishment. But trainers say it’s “all positive”?

Can you truly understand pleasure if you’ve never felt pain? Can you truly understand Positive if you’ve never experience negative. Can you understand love if you’ve never felt hate. I could come up with a thousand of those. Isn’t that Yin and Yang? That’s positive and negative reinforcements. Consequences actually. They are intertwined – one needs the other to exist.

Negative reinforcements are important in our lives – and it has a bright side. They are the things that we avoid, the things that cause an emotional reaction, they keep us safe, keep us from doing stupid things. They keep us alive and part of survival of the animal and the species. The things that make you want to make the world a better place – that can also be called the “fight” part of fight and fight. You want to write the wrongs in the world. Do your part! Negative consequences are powerful in shaping your behavior.

I don’t see chance anymore, I see possible consequences – negative and positive. There can be only one outcome and it’s a consequence. So when I watch a person playing a slot machine, they are thinking chance. All I see is a win – positive consequence. Or nothing – negative consequence. Operant conditioning creates anticipation, training creates expectation. Think about that and understand that anticipation can be for good or bad too. It’s those variable schedules of reward that keeps you gambling – that machine is rewarding and punishing you and it’s a cycle. It’s those little wins, those little positive consequences that become the positive reinforcement that makes you a gambler. And wouldn’t that be a self punishing behaviour?

Skinner did these very experiments on his pigeons in a lab. Kept them hungry and underweight to food motivate them. He used food as a reinforcement – not reward – to get the pigeon to perform new behaviors on a variable schedule of reward. He wasn’t modifying behaviors – he was creating abnormal behaviors. He did this experiment to figure out what makes a human being sit at a slot machine and feed it til they are broke. He turned pigeons into pathological gamblers to understand the mechanism that makes us want to gamble.

And he used negative reinforcements to achieve this. Why? None of this really exists in a lab, there are no real negative consequences for a mouse that’s never seen or experience the outside natural world. If you take a lab grown mouse, put it in a cage with a hungry cat. Do you think the lab raised mouse would know that the cat is a thing to flight from? How could it? The mouse was never taught to flight the cat.

That piece of food in your hand is a reinforcement – do you understand what it’s reinforcing? Making a decision between something in the field and a piece of food in your hand. It’s the slot machine analogy – you’re doing that to your dog – rewarding and punishing. Where do you come in to play? Something in the environment is more important than you are and you’re bribing the dog with what you think is a “Positive Reinforcement”. In reality, it’s a secondary reinforcer called an inducement – food and affection. The carrot part of carrot and stick. It’s not a Positive Reinforcement like you’re being told.

Welcome to trauma bonding. And codependency. Addiction is a form of codependency – no? Drugs, smoking, alcoholism? Internet Junkies. Ever hear the phrase “once an addict, always an addict? Welcome to Operant Conditioning.

We learn to suppress our addictions – we don’t want to face up to the cause of the addiction. We know about our behaviours – but not about its causes. If the cause of a behaviour isn’t addressed, the addiction is only suppressed. It’s a suppressed behavior. That’s why you can never touch it again – it’s still there under the surface – you’ve become indifferent to it. And generally, it takes a deep dive to understand stuff in the past – and that’s a journey that many will flight from. Avoid the trauma that lead to the addiction is a good example. Put a drink in front of an alcoholic – what’s the result? The question has to be – just how indifferent is the alcoholic to booze?

Body building becomes a form of addiction. Full respect to anyone that will dedicate the time and effort. Some people get their exercise every day. 10 mile run, workout at the gym, etc. That’s a form of addiction. People become addicted to the feel good chemicals, they like the positive consequence – and tend to keep doing it to get those positive consequences. It’s a good time to get in your own head and sort stuff out undistracted cause you feel good.

The world is full of positive and negative reinforcements. You don’t need to apply them punitively. We are nothing more than products of our environments – shaped by the positive and negative consequences. It’s those consequences for your own actions that become the positive and negative reinforcement that becomes part of your Operant Condition. Your own personal library of fears and wants and needs. Everything you.

Negative and Positive Reinforcement – fear and desire. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have while dreading losing what you do. For 99% of our species, that is reality. The Matrix 4.

I’ll shut up now.