Put a Little Thought Into It

     Popular culture always has new trends; sometimes the trends are just old trends resurfacing a new. I read an interesting article in the Economist extolling the virtues of NOT thinking. The gist of the article was that a return to instinctual action could yield better results than thinking. For anyone that has sat pondering should I, shouldn’t I ad-infinitum... maybe there is some logic there. I know sometimes just doing something than reacting to what happens works better than thinking about  the "possible" outcome. Later I flipped through a copy of the Atlantic and again the topic of non thinking was front and centre. The featured article was about BF Skinner style behaviorism, the ultimate Psychological paradigm of non thinking and just acting, making a millennial resurgence. All this non thinking discussion struck a chord with me as I fall on the scale of over thinking. Maybe I have been wrong this whole time???

      BF Skinner is one of the most maligned and vilified of the 20^th centuries Psychologists. Most people that have taken Psychology 101 know him as the man who trained pigeons using incentives or what he later called operant conditioning. It’s a simple process: reward pigeons, with say food, the behaviors you want to see more of and punish, with say electric shocks, the behaviors you want to see less. Where he flubbed up, or so say his detractors, (and I was surprised to find out Noam Chomsky was at the lead of them) was by discounting human consciousness and self talk as a vital component in human decision making. He believed that most of our actions were just habitual in their origin and derived from previous learned habit.The Atlantic article I mentioned applied Skinner’s thinking, using new technologies like smart phones, to tackling modern world problems such as weight loss. The idea being that if thinking of the long term gain, a thinner body somewhere down the road, is not enough why not use immediate incentives in the short term to achieve the goal. The program devised was to connect over weight populations by social media using smart phones as a support group. This group would provide instant feedback for each other and give positive reinforcement when you stuck to your eating and exercise goals and negative when you do not.  Positive and negative reinforcement are strong opiates in the mind even having an addictive quality. Apparently the results have been HUGE. Literally, people are training themselves to take on better habits and in time maintain those habits without external incentives. 

         As a person with a seemingly never ending self dialogue the idea of tricking my brain into doing positive things seems interesting. With some thought (there it is again...) though it does seem like a partial band aid to conscious choice. Socrates much used quote: “know thy self” comes into play here.  Shouldn’t people be dissecting the underlying reasons for bad habits and behaviors rather than just trying to deprogram them? Is action all that really matters – and shouldn’t one try be acutely aware of the thoughts and underlying structures that make up those actions? All these musings, and the very concept of behaviorism, makes me wonder if the human animal is not so far off from our genetic primates in that we are just biological vessels looking for the next body high. Even if that high comes from something as seemingly arbitrary as the buzz we get from positive reinforcement. If this is true, can the same programming that works on pigeons and rats be almost as effective on humans? Surely not when taking into account the uniquely human abilities of self reflection and envisioning how present actions will affect us later. Then again, though? Here’s another angle on these issues. A guy takes one look at a girl in a club... two minutes later they’re making out. Now without entering his mind I don’t think there was a lot of mental ping pong going on. Another example - one of the hardest shots in basketball is the totally wide open jump shot where there is time to think about it. The best thing to do is just shoot without a moment’s reflection and let practiced behavior take over. All of us are filled with so many learned behaviors that even the devout thinker has to realize that they are still able to do all their thinking while doing a litany of learned behaviors.  Literally, we are petri dishes of learned behaviors that are both positive and negative.

      Maybe we really are just the accumulation of our habits and it’s these habits that drive what we perceive and our self talk? One thing stopping me from believing this though is my love of the toughest question of them all, and that one that yields the least societal rewards, that of WHY? Even if we can use behaviorism to build a litany of positive habits that only answers the how of living good. The question of why we couldn’t do this on our own still lingers. Existentialism has long been my philosophical creed and it basically runs counter intuitive to behaviorism. The idea is that we are all totally responsible for our choices as we are totally free... our bodies, genes, and personalities can’t stop us from making our own choices and being responsible for the outcomes. Existentialism is a philosophy of ownership for ones actions.With that philosophy backing my position behaviorism sounds to me like the continued medicalization of behavior and another method to escape personal accountability. I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to build positive habits, using these techniques, but if one cannot answer why they didn’t have these habits in the first place than a serious issue remains. Everyone's chooses their epistemological systems of belief, through conscious thought or handed down acceptance, and though new uses for behaviorism are interesting they don't gel completely to me. I have a need to understand, for myself why I act and this stops me from putting my faith in this system, interesting as it is...

   Maybe you see it different than me though? Should one question why good behaviors are adopted or just be happy they are there?