Sunday, August 06, 2006
NEED TO ALTER YOUR MATE A BIT?
I ran onto this article that is better written than I could possibly write it. If you really want to change the behaviour of a spouse, this is about the only shot you've got as far as I've seen... To me, it was hilarious, and yet extremely wise, it makes sense....if a gorilla or wolf or other wild animal can be trained..why not an adult? Yet..for reasons you will understand at the end, plus reasons she doesn't mention, I do NOT recommend EVER telling the other person what you've been doing with this. HOW TO TRAIN A HUMAN ADULT .
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3 comments:
You are so right - somethings are better left untold, lol. I haven't decided if its my age, or what but I really have no desire to change my spouse. After all, if he was perfect, he might not want my imperfections, hee hee
A few notes of this from my psych daze...
1. Intermittent reinforcement creates more persistent behavior than continuous reward. That's why gambling can be so addictive.
2. In one experiment, dogs were rewarded for identifying a triangle and shocked if they responded to a circle.
Gradually the forms where changed so the triangles resembled the circles and vice-versa; at a certain point the dogs would have a nervous breakdown.
Inconsistent reward/punishment systems, like when spouses don't act with a unified set of expectations for kids, or one spouse rewards a kid sometimes and punishes them another for what the kid thinks is the same behavior, can create result in kids that go bonkers.
3. B.F. Skinner was doing an experiment with pigeons, rewarding them when they exhibited specific behaviors (like the animal trainers in the article.) One night a lab assistant left the reward mechanism turned on and it would reward the animals at intervals automatically with no one monitoring what they were actually doing.
When they returned to the lab the next day, the pigeons were each doing some weird idiosyncratic movement, all different and random, that seemed to be based on whatever position they were in when the reward came. Causing speculation about the basis of superstitions :-)
Marbella has been training me for years- A cookie here, a cookie there, yep, lots of cookies, if only I could remember what she trained me to do. oh well, I get lots of cookies.
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