STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Dizzy · Marc Jacobs

I have a theory, please discuss

esquiress · Marc Jacobs

lol, dizzy, it sounds like you’ve been doing your own B.F. Skinner experiments! Skinner was a behaviorist psychologist who did a really famous food pellet experiment with rats. Skinner was all about "operant conditioning," meaning "the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organism’s tendency to repeat the behavior in the future."

And here are the details of his rat-pellet experiment:

Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a "Skinner box") that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a foot pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.

A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.

What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior. A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.

Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will "pop" right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!

Schedules of reinforcement

Skinner likes to tell about how he "accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example, he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before "Purina rat chow" and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered schedules of reinforcement!

Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior (such as pedal-pushing), he gets a rat goodie.

The fixed ratio schedule was the first one Skinner discovered: If the rat presses the pedal three times, say, he gets a goodie. Or five times. Or twenty times. Or "x" times. There is a fixed ratio between behaviors and reinforcers: 3 to 1, 5 to 1, 20 to 1, etc. This is a little like "piece rate" in the clothing manufacturing industry: You get paid so much for so many shirts.

The fixed interval schedule uses a timing device of some sort. If the rat presses the bar at least once during a particular stretch of time (say 20 seconds), then he gets a goodie. If he fails to do so, he doesn’t get a goodie. But even if he hits that bar a hundred times during that 20 seconds, he still only gets one goodie! One strange thing that happens is that the rats tend to "pace" themselves: They slow down the rate of their behavior right after the reinforcer, and speed up when the time for it gets close.

Skinner also looked at variable schedules. Variable ratio means you change the "x" each time -- first it takes 3 presses to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 and so on.

In both cases, it keeps the rats on their rat toes. With the variable interval schedule, they no longer "pace" themselves, because they no can no longer establish a "rhythm" between behavior and reward. Most importantly, these schedules are very resistant to extinction. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you haven’t gotten a reinforcer for a while, well, it could just be that you are at a particularly "bad" ratio or interval! Just one more bar press, maybe this’ll be the one!

This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know whether and when you’ll win again.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t want to date a rat.

laken1 · Hermes

Sweet Potato Queen rule - treat em like shit & don't give em any. That's how you hook them.

I just joking of course but it's kinda true.....

I have another book that I need to pull & send to you Dizzy- it's something like "it's not me, it's YOU" - a dating book that is so hysterical & actually is right on & sounds a lot like your theory.

blink · Coach

laken1 wrote:

Sweet Potato Queen rule - treat em like shit & don't give em any. That's how you hook them. I just joking of course but it's kinda true..... I have another book that I need to pull & send to you Dizzy- it's something like "it's not me, it's YOU" - a dating book that is so hysterical & actually is right on & sounds a lot like your theory.

Worked for me. I got played just one too many times when I was single, when I started acting like I didn't care, I got attention. It actually took a lot of effort and restraint. I am glad I met my husband soon after I tried this method.

blubirde · Chanel

Esquiress, I just read that whole dang post and it was awesome. I love Skinner now. He's my new favorite scientist. (To be fair, I didn't really have one before so it was a short list.)

Anyway, Dizzy, for me, the harder I "tried," the weirder I became. My normal behavior is not pleasing behavior. That's not to say I don't want my friends to be happy or I won't say nice things but it's all natural. I say it if I want. I do the things I want. I don't do them to garner a reaction. When I would date, on the other hand, I would avoid acting like me because I always though ultra-charming and super-nice me was better than normal me, which is totally not true. And more importantly, if I started to slip and forgot to listen as closely to his story or whatever, I got negative feedback.

That's my theory as to why guys you don't like always like you. Mainly because we don't feel the need to impress them so we act completely normal around them. That's also probably why we like guys that don't like us in that way, because they act like themselves. The guys we don't like try to hard and seem to easy to please. I imagine boys that we really like see us in much the same way as we see guys who really like us.

I think your inconsistent experiment is awesome and I think you should post weekly findings.

Kelly · Hermes

Dizzy, I think you may be on to something. I hate it, but if I guy is inconsistant I'm hanging off of his every word - because you just keep hoping for the sweetness to shine through for a minute. Plus, if he's nice I tell myself that he's almost "redeeming" himself for if he was rude before. I imagine its the same for guys.

joy0302 · Kate Spade

I think too that they don't always want something that comes easy for them. Guys often want a chase. This doesn't have to be someone who is totally rude to them, but just someone who isn't readily available for dates everyday, or hanging on every word. I also think sometimes when guys think that we are completely falling for them too soon it turns them off and they run for the hills.

That would also help explain why guys that we don't like chase us. They think that we are playing hard to get, when in reality it is more like back off jerk it is not ever happening for you!!! We are turned off by this because it is too easy for us. That plus the fact that rarely do our stalkers resemble in any manner George Clooney!

Dizzy it seems like you have had lots of time to think... have you been daydreaming in class by any chance?!!