You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (22 page)

Milgram showed when you can see your actions as part of just following orders, especially from an authority figure, there is a 65 percent chance you will go to the brink of murder. Add the risk of punishment, or your own harm, and chances of conformity increase. Milgram’s work was a response to the Holocaust. He wondered if an entire nation could have its moral compass smashed, or if conformity and obedience to authority were more likely the root of so much compliance to commit unspeakable evil. Milgram concluded his subjects, and probably millions of others, saw themselves as instruments instead of people. When they became extensions of the person doing the terrible act, their own will was put aside where it could remain clean of sin. Conformity, therefore, can be manufactured when the person looking for compliance convinces others they are tools instead of human beings.

The restaurant employees hoaxed by Officer Scott would later say this was what happened to them. Officer Scott’s demands started small and bumped up incrementally, just like Milgram’s shocks. By the time it was uncomfortable, the situation had grown in power. They feared retribution if they didn’t follow new orders, and once they had crossed the line into territory their morality couldn’t condone, they phased out of their own personality and into the role of an instrument of the law.

Be aware: Your desire to conform is strong and unconscious. Sometimes, like at a family dinner, the desire to keep everyone happy and to adhere to social conventions is a good thing. It keeps you close and connected to the norms that make it easier to work together in the modern world. But also beware of the other side—the dark places that conformity can lead to. Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others. Even in simple situations, like the next time you see a line of people waiting to get into a classroom or a movie or a restaurant, feel free to break norms—go check the door and look inside.

You’ve been there.

You get serious about losing weight and start to watch every calorie. You read labels, stock up on fruits and vegetables, hit the gym. Everything is going fine. You feel great. You feel like a champion. You think, “This is easy.” One day you give in to temptation and eat some candy, or a doughnut, or a cheeseburger. Maybe you buy a bag of chips. You order the fettuccine alfredo. That afternoon, you decide not only will you eat whatever you want, but to celebrate the occasion you will eat a pint of ice cream. The diet ends in a catastrophic binge.

What the hell? How did your smooth transition from comfort food to human Dumpster happen? You just experienced an extinction burst.

Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when you can’t have it. Food, of course, is a powerful reward. It keeps you alive. Your brain didn’t evolve in an environment where there was an abundance of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of it and then go back to it over and over again. If you take away a reward like that, your brain throws a tantrum.

Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles of conditioning. Conditioning is among the most basic factors shaping the way any organism—including you—reacts to the world. If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.

If you want some chicken nuggets, you know you can’t just snap your fingers and have them appear. You must engage in a long sequence of actions—acquire language, acquire money, acquire a car, acquire clothes, acquire fuel, learn to drive, learn to use money, learn where nuggets are sold, drive to the nuggets, use language, exchange money, etc. This string of behaviors could be sliced up into smaller and smaller components if we wanted to really dig down into the conditioning you have endured in order to be able to get nuggets in your mouth. Just driving the car from point A to point B is a complex performance that becomes automatic after hundreds of hours of practice. Millions of tiny behaviors, each one a single step in a process, add up to a single operation you have learned will pay off in reward. Think of rats in a maze, learning a complicated series of steps—turn left two times, turn right once, turn left, right, left, get cheese. Even microorganisms can be conditioned to react to stimuli and predict outcomes.

For a while in psychology, conditioning was the cat’s pajamas. In the 1960s and ’70s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner became a scientist celebrity by scaring the shit out of America with an invention called the operant conditioning chamber—the Skinner Box. The box is an enclosure with a combination of levers, food dispensers, an electric floor, lights, and loudspeakers. Scientists place animals in the box and either reward them or punish them to either encourage or discourage their behavior. Rats, for example, can be taught to push a lever when a green light appears to get a food pellet. Skinner demonstrated how he could teach a pigeon to spin in circles at his command by offering food only when it turned in one direction. Gradually, he withheld the food until the pigeon had turned a little farther and farther, until he had it going round and round. He could even get the pigeon to distinguish between the words “peck” and “turn” and get the pigeon to perform the corresponding behavior just by showing it a sign. Yes, in a sense, he taught a bird to read.

Skinner discovered you could get pigeons and rats to do complicated tasks by slowly building up chains of behaviors through handing out pellets of food. For example, if you want to teach a squirrel to water ski, you just need to start small and work your way up. Other researchers added punishment to the routines and discovered it too could be used like the pellets to encourage and discourage behavior. Skinner became convinced conditioning was the root of all behavior, and he didn’t believe rational thinking had anything to do with your personal life. He considered introspection to be a “collateral product” of conditioning.

Some psychologists and philosophers still hold to the idea you are nothing but a sophisticated automaton, like a spider or a fish. You have no freedom, no free will. Your brain is made of atoms and molecules that must obey the laws of physics and chemistry, so some say your mind is thereby locked into service to the rules of the universe. Everything you have thought, felt, and done in your life was the natural mathematical aftermath of the Big Bang. To this wing of psychology, you are the same as an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines that only appear to give rise to consciousness. You may take comfort in knowing this is a hotly contested idea, one that goes back to the Greek philosophers who imagined the unconscious as wild horses pulling a chariot helmed by your upper-level reasoning. Whether or not you have free will, conditioning is real, and its impact can’t be ignored.

There are two kinds of conditioning—classical and operant. In classical conditioning, something that normally doesn’t have any influence becomes a trigger for a response. If you are taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet, which then causes the water to become a scalding torrent, you become conditioned to recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while lathering up. That’s
classical
conditioning. Something neutral—the toilet flushing—becomes charged with meaning and expectation. You have no control over it. You recoil from the water without ever thinking, “I should recoil from this water else I get scalded.” If you have ever been sick after eating or drinking something you love, you will avoid it in the future. The smell of it, or even the thought of it, can make you ill. For me, it’s tequila. Ugh, gross. Classical conditioning keeps you alive. You learn quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy, just like an amoeba.

The sort of complex behavior Skinner produced in animals was the result of
operant
conditioning. Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations become greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment. You go to work, you get paid. You turn on the air-conditioning and stop sweating. You don’t run the red light, you don’t get a ticket. You pay the rent, you don’t get evicted. It’s all operant conditioning, punishment and reward.

This finally brings us back to the third factor—extinction. When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away. If you stop feeding your cat, he will stop hanging around the food bowl and meowing. His behavior will go extinct. If you were to keep going to work and not get paid, eventually you would stop. This is when the extinction burst happens, right as the behavior is breathing its final breath. You wouldn’t just not go to work anymore. You would probably storm into the boss’s office and demand an explanation. If you got nowhere after gesticulating wildly and screaming, you might scoop your arm across his desk and leave in handcuffs.

Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded. You lock your keys in your apartment, but your roommate is asleep. You ring the doorbell and knock, but your roommate doesn’t come. You ring the doorbell over and over and over. You start pounding on the door. If your computer freezes up, you don’t just walk away, you start clicking all over the place and maybe go so far as to bang your fists on the keyboard. If a child doesn’t get any candy at the checkout line, he or she may throw a giant tantrum because in the past such behavior has gotten candy. These are all extinction bursts—a temporary increase in an old behavior, a plea from the recesses of your psyche.

So back to that diet. You eliminate a reward from your life: awesome and delicious high-calorie foods. Right as you are ready to give the reward up forever, an extinction burst threatens to demolish your willpower. You become like a two-year-old in a conniption fit, and like the child, if you give in to the demands, the behavior will be strengthened. Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it bursts.

To give up overeating, or smoking, or gambling, or
World of Warcraft,
or any bad habit that was formed through conditioning, you must be prepared to weather the secret weapon of your unconscious—the extinction burst. Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer. Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing. Don’t freak out when it turns out to be difficult. Habits form because you are not so smart, and they cease under the same conditions.

When you want to accomplish something big, something that will require a lot of time and effort like a start-up business or a short film, your instincts might tell you the more people you can afford to hire the better the work will be and the faster you will reach your goals. The truth though is when you join the efforts of others toward a common goal, everyone has a tendency to loaf more than if each was working alone. If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background.

To prove this, psychologist Alan Ingham ruined tug-of-war forever. In 1974, he had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope. The rope was attached to a rather medieval-looking contraption that simulated the resistance of an opposing team. The subjects were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their effort. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured. They were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less strenuously on average.

This version of social loafing is sometimes called the Ringelmann effect after French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann, who discovered in 1913 that if he had people get together in groups to pull on a strain gauge, their combined efforts would tally up to be less than the sum of their individual strength measurements on the same instrument. Together, Ingham and Ringelmann’s work introduced social loafing to psychology: You put in less effort when in a group than you would if working alone on the same project.

When the lead singer at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again, going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed that the second time is always louder? Why wasn’t everyone yelling at the top of their lungs the first time? Some really cool scientists actually tested this in 1979. Bibb Latane, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins at Ohio State University had people shout as loud as they could in a group and then alone, or vice-versa. Sure enough, the overall loudness of a small group of people was less than any one of them by themselves. You can even chart this on a graph. The more people you add, the less effort any one person does. It arches away like a perfect ski slope. You do this all the time, but you don’t do it on purpose—well, except when you just mouth the words to the song everyone else is singing. In all of these experiments, the trick was to keep people from realizing what was going on. As long as you think you are part of a group, you unconsciously put in less effort. No one realizes it, and no one admits to it.