Intermittent Reinforcement and Rat-like Behaviour
March 27, 2008 by adifferentvoice
In an unthinking state, we are animals, rats, programmed to respond to a positive stimulus, and to go and seek it again afterwards.
B F Skinner conducted numerous experiments, mainly with pigeons and rats, but sometimes with humans, to demonstrate the effect of reinforcing a response using operant conditioning. In all the experiments there was a reward for a positive action – a connection that is now used in popular “positive reinforcement” training of animals and small children. In a series of experiments rats were required to tap on a lever to get food. In some experiments food was always provided in response to the tap. In other experiments food was only provided randomly. Skinner found that the rat tapped the lever with increased frequency when the reward could not be anticipated but was intermittent. The situation is likened to the gambler who becomes addicted to his gambling because he wins occasionally, or even the drug addict who has unpredictable, occasional ecstatic responses to some drugs on some occasions. Intermittent reinforcement breeds addiction. Here is Skinner’s account of how he discovered that intermittent reinforcement was a better reinforcer than regular rewards. It all begins one pleasant Saturday afternoon:
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“One pleasant Saturday afternoon I surveyed my supply of dry pellets and, appealing to certain elemental theorems in arithmetic, deduced that unless I spent the rest of that afternoon and evening at the pill machine, the supply would be exhausted by ten-thirty Monday morning.
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Since I do not wish to deprecate the hypothetico-deductive method, I am glad to testify here to its usefulness. It led me to apply our second principle of unformalized scientific method and to ask myself why every press of the lever had to be reinforced. I was not then aware of what had happened at the Brown Laboratories, as Harold Schlosberg later told the story. A graduate student had been given the task of running a cat through a difficult discrimination experiment. One Sunday, the student found the supply of cat food exhausted. The stores were closed, and so, with a beautiful faith in the frequency-theory of learning, he ran the cat as usual and took it back to its living cage unrewarded. Schlosberg reports that the cat howled its protest continuously for nearly forty eight hours.
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Unaware of this, I decided to reinforce a response only once every minute and to allow all other responses to go unreinforced There were two results: (a) my supply of pellets lasted almost indefinitely, and (b) each rat stabilized at a fairly constant rate of responding.
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Now, a steady state was something I was familiar with from physical chemistry, and I therefore embarked upon the study of periodic reinforcement. I soon found that the constant rate at which the rat stabilized depended upon how hungry it was. Hungry rat, high rate; less hungry rat, lower rate. At that time I was bothered by the practical problem of controlling food deprivation. I was working half time at the Medical School (on chronaxie of subordinations) and could not maintain a good schedule in working with the rats.
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The rate of responding under periodic reinforcement suggested a scheme for keeping a rat at a constant level of deprivation. The argument went like this: Suppose you reinforce the rat, not at the end of a given period, but when it has completed the number of responses ordinarily emitted in that period. And suppose you use substantial pellets of food and give the rat continuous access to the lever. Except for periods when the rat sleeps, it should operate the lever at a constant rate around the clock. For, whenever it grows hungrier, it will work faster, get food faster, and become less hungry, while whenever it grows slightly less hungry, it will respond at a lower rate, get less food, and grow hungrier.
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By setting the reinforcement at a given number of responses, it should even be possible to hold the rat at any given level of deprivation. I visualized a machine with a dial which one could set to make available, at any time of day or night, a rat in a given state of deprivation. Of course, nothing of the sort happens. This is fixed-ratio rather than fixed- interval’ reinforcement and, as I soon found out, it produces a very different type of performance. This is an example of a fifth unformalized principle of scientific c practice, but one which has at least been named. Walter Cannon described it with a word invented by Horace Walpole:serendipity the art of finding one thing while looking for something else.”
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Note that Skinner keeps the rats “deprived” and it is this deprivation that leads them to continually seek the rewards that are now only intermittent. In human terms, the rats are kept unsatisfied, always wanting more.
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Emails, and blogs are all perfect enviroments in which to breed addictions. You send an email often without knowing how the email will find the recipient. They may be very busy, inattentive, bored, manipulative, frightened, or a host of other states. You write a blog post not knowing who will read it or when. You write a blog post not knowing whether anyone will comment, nor whether their comment will be positive or negative. You write a comment on a blog not knowing when the blog owner will respond if at all, or whether someone else will respond. The response in all cases is unpredictable.
In Transactional Analysis terms, positive responses to emails, lots of hits on a particular post, warm and friendly responses to blog posts, nice responses to comments are all positive “strokes”, and everybody likes positive strokes. Everybody has an optimum number of strokes that they like to receive, but the intermittent reinforcement schedule that is the essence of internet interaction means that their optimum is upset by the addictive response that takes over. It is also the case that many if not most or all people receive less strokes than they feel they need, so are already hungry or “deprived ” and ripe for conditioning.
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Blogs are particularly fertile breeding grounds for anxiety: the visible nature of all the responses to the posts encourages competition for scarce strokes, or a rewarding reciprocal stroking arrangement is easily upset by acquisitive newcomers eager to grab their share of the attention. Oh, it is all quite horrible!
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Phone calls and face to face conversations are much less likely to encourage addictive behaviour – or at least it is possible to screen for the intermittent reinforcement more effectively with a healthy helping of self knowledge. Watch out for anxiety – it is the marker of a relationship where reinforcement is only intermittent.
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The possibility for intermittent reinforcement is always there, but the probability is less with telephone or face-to-face interaction than with internet communication. I think this is because if we receive a negative message following a positive message from the same sender, we are more likely to give the internet sender the benefit of the doubt and assume that we have misunderstood their tone or their message. This is much harder to do when facial gestures, body language, and tone of voice all serve to reinforce the intention in face-to-face interaction and to a large extent, telephone interaction. It is hard to sound warm on the telephone or face-to-face when you intend to be cold. Or at least, I can nearly always tell the difference.
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Intermittent reinforcement rears its ugly head in families where either parent or both parents does not allow the child to attach securely to it. Where the parent sends mixed messages – sometimes cold, sometimes angry, but occasionally funny and affectionate – the child will show signs of anxious attachment as a result of the ambivalence of the parent. Such children are programmed, like rats, to continue to seek the intermittent reinforcement of attention/love that they need from their parents in order to develop. Addictively tapping at a lever, never quite knowing when the reward will arrive, becomes second nature, and as adults these children may seek out partners who replicate their parents patterns, which means their children are likely to have attachment problems, and so the horrible cycle continues.
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I found this quite chilling account by a man of his techniques to ensnare a woman using intermittent reinforcement, and I am quite sure he is not the only person alive who has knowingly or unknowingly used this “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” approach. In such a de Sade-esque intentional manner, it stinks to high heaven since it is about power and control, not love, and real emotional intimacy is completely absent, but this man does not care.
“I get results when I take control. It is instant death when you hand over “control” to a woman.My secret is to give women “intermittent reinforcement.” This actually is a psychological phenomenon commonly documented in experiments involving rats.The goal of the experiment is to have the rat press a lever as many times as possible. The rat is given a pellet of food after it presses a lever. If the rat gets a pellet every time, it soon gets satiated and stops pressing the lever.If, on the other hand, the rat does not receive a pellet every time the lever is pressed, but receives a pellet intermittently, the rat will increase the frequency with which it presses the lever.The analogy is fairly obvious: how do we get women to “press our lever” as many times as possible?Easy, give her attention intermittently and unpredictably. Don’t give her a pellet too often. Take control of when she receives one. Don’t be at her beck and call.”
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Other people, far less monstrous, may be scared of a particular relationship or may not have realized that they bear the scars of early anxious attachment and are scared of intimacy, and so pull someone in only to push them away when it becomes too frightening – a situation that should be resolved with open communication and meaningful commitment.
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Beware intermittent reinforcement. If you have enough self-awareness, watch out for anxiety, it is your friend telling you that something is amiss.
Links: Wikipedia - Reinforcement and operant conditioning:John Bowlby and Attachment Theory: 
