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A guy I knew missed a lot of sports on television. If his team scored while he was in the kitchen, he would stay in the kitchen. If his team was losing, he would experiment with listening from the bathroom.
You could call this a compulsion—an anxiety disorder—but Skinner would call it a superstition. Skinner rewarded pigeons every minute or so regardless of what they were doing. The effect of the reward was to reinforce (i.e., strengthen) the behavior the pigeon happened to be emitting right before the reward. The pigeon would do that thing again more frequently than it had in the past, so the next reward had a better chance of reinforcing a sequence of behavior that included the initial one. Over time, pigeons develop a 60-second-long sequence that they repeat and get rewarded for. Skinner likened this behavior to religious rituals that arise regarding the lengthening of days, the return of spring, the sunrise, and so on.
Science is the opposite of superstition. Science is a culture devoted to unearthing causal versus chance connections by emphasizing critical thinking rather than anecdotal evidence. A scientific pigeon would sample what happens when the ritual is abandoned. Does the reward still come? The scientific pigeon would insist on a sufficient number of trials before drawing conclusions. Regardless of the statistical evidence, the scientific pigeon would insist on a natural (versus supernatural) non-tautological working model of why the reinforcement occurs before concluding there’s a causal connection.
Some people say that superstitious, overly fearful behavior served humans in the wild because it overemphasizes frightening stimuli, which kept our ancestors alive (and, for another thing, but not a topic for this post, superstitious rituals strengthened tribal communities, which also kept people alive). However, it seems unlikely that over-reacting to bad things is a good survival strategy. After all, one thing we know about aversive stimuli (as I posted here) is that punishment does not, in fact, reduce the tendency to engage in the punished behavior. If giving up on a blueberry patch because a snake was there is such a good survival strategy, then all animals would be more permanently responsive to aversive stimuli. Instead, all other animals keep going back to the blueberry patch once the fear caused by the snake wears off. Only humans, with our verbal behavior, can formulate a rule that might supersede the tendency to keep trying once the initial fear wears off. Only humans care more about what other members of the species think of them than they do about blueberries.
The downside of verbal behavior is not that it has not yet replaced animalistic tendencies to over-react or under-react to bad outcomes. Its downside is that it can create social contingencies that overrule geographical contingencies. Most people are far more concerned with the approval of their community than they are with whether vaccines really work. This is what Skinner meant when he said that the difference between rats and humans is that rats learn from experience. Only humans turn heuristics into commandments. Only humans elevate superstition into faith.
Consider the confusion around self-esteem. Many people seem to think that self-esteem is thinking well of yourself, so they counsel parents and therapists to compliment their children and patients. This leads to the absurdity of everyone thinking they are good drivers, good-looking, and good therapists. These myths are sustained by blaming those who don’t like your driving, your body, or your cooking rather than trying to improve. But self-esteem, as Skinner said, is the feeling you have when you employ a skill, so parents should be teaching their children how to do things, not telling them that they already know how to do them. Most kids will settle for praise, and parents should not be surprised when praised children don’t bother to actually learn how to do things (so praise effort or focus and not outcomes). Language, the greatest source of our successful problem-solving, is also an impediment. This problem is also obvious, by the way, in psychotherapy outcome research, where treatments are evaluated according to what the patient says about her depression or anxiety. This promotes treatments that make you think you’re better even if you’re not.
Language is responsible for all the unproductive behavior that makes sense only if people think they are not their bodies. This is called the existential dilemma in some circles, the conflict between a finite body and infinite imagination, a real-world and the capacity to imagine a different world. Only humans experience dissatisfaction with themselves, because only humans imagine being different. As Karen Horney wrote, “It would hardly occur to a cocker spaniel that he is really an Irish setter.” The fear of death is responsible for this rejection of the body, according to Ernest Becker and others. Many people, even those trying to lose weight, eat according to what they deserve rather than according to the laws of physics, because they are comforted from death anxiety by attending to the sphere of ideas (which don’t die) more than to the sphere of things (which do). If you can get your friends to compliment your looks and if you can avoid anyone who won’t, that’s just as good as being attractive, right?
Language and ideas do not deteriorate; everything else does. From this perspective, the anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers reject science because verbal and anecdotal reactions from people near them are more important to them than remote evidence from scientists. It is more important to them because it says what they want to hear, which is largely that they are not defined by their bodies’ chemistry, nor is their planet by its geology.
