Random Rewards are Powerful... and Dangerous

 There’s a proven psychological effect in which a randomly-issued reward will generate a stronger “reward” impulse than a consistently-provided reward. Even if the consistent reward is more frequently provided and the rewards dispensed by either method are identical.

This is an important thing for all humans to understand. It’s

Important for introspection and reflection on the behaviors of others as individuals and on the flow of society as an aggregate of individuals.

It’s important to understand this effect and how it drives impulses in us, and around us. It’s important to understand how it alters our behaviors because, in my, granted very limited in scope and depth, observation is that people who understand and move through life with purpose tend to be more successful.

It doesn’t matter how one measures success - whatever goal you are seeking is more achievable when you understand yourself, understand the path between where you are and the goal, and when you understand those with whom you will interact along the path. 

The question then becomes - does their purpose align with their happiness or not? This is not a question that can be answered by anyone other than a person’s own internal emotional barometer. Those closest to them can, surely, identify when things induce unhappiness but the inner peace of happiness can only be identified and differentiated from contentment and inert apathy by the beholder.

Which brings us back around to the specific psychological effect of random rewards. If one is on their journey toward success and that journey is contra to their own happiness then the intermittent positive rewards along the path will induce a form of short term happiness that can be deceptive toward the long-term health. These short-term flares of dopamine can seem greater, and truly be more addictive, than a sustained level of happiness brought forth by a parallel journey whose goal is happiness.

It’s important to understand this effect on psychology and how it can alter your own views on the world to bring you short term positive feelings but it’s also important to recognize how it can undermine your long term well-being.

The classic example of this is an experiment with rats. Rats were given levers. One lever did nothing. One lever always dispensed a treat. One lever would randomly dispense a treat. Rats literally worked themselves to death pushing the random lever to get the next treat instead of just going to the treat lever.

A more overt and obvious analogy to the rats and the levers can be found with humans and slot machines. The “the next pull is a winner! I can feel it!” concept is this physiological effect working on the mind of the one playing the machine.

But overt gambling isn’t the only place this happens.

One example can be found in friendships.

A long, sustained and constantly-positive friendship is a valuable thing to have but they are often pushed aside when one of the friends gains a new romantic partner because the NRE (new relationship energy) is a disruptive, randomly-presented reward that gives a similar emotional comfort to the long-term relationship. 

It’s normal for NRE to disrupt a person’s life and existing relationships in almost all ways. Eventually the NRE interactions settle down into a “standing wave” of predictability and the psychological effect of randomness in the reward ceases, allowing the steady positive interactions to become ingrained in the return to normalcy. 

There are, however, people who get so distracted by NRE that, when it starts to become supplied regularly, they lose all interest in the steady-supply and MUST chase the “high” of the next random provider of attention.

This is a detectable pattern and one that can cause harm to everyone involved, hence the reason why it’s important to understand this psychological effect when it is present in others…

In a milder relationship example this can be found when an individual finds that they are always the one reaching out to others and that their efforts are often left unanswered for days or weeks at a time but, when the party finally reaponds, they feel obligated to keep trying; to keep the thread of friendship alive because the random responses push those psychological buttons.

This is why it’s important to understand this phenomenon in ourselves; we need to know when to let go of people who are nothing more than random reward distributors to us. We need to have the strength to see imbalances energy and walk away from it when it is unhealthy to us… and, in extreme cases, we need to be able to see a random reward giver as the abuser they are (not all random reward givers are abusers but it seems to be a psychological tool that all abusers instinctively know and utilize to their benefit). 

I want everyone I know to find their path to success and I want them to find a path to happiness and I desperately want for those paths to not conflict. I want them all to understand their own reactions to stimuli so that they can navigate our world and the interruptions to the paths we walk in the best way possible.

Most importantly, I want to make sure I always understand my own behaviors to ensure I never use this trick against anyone else. I don’t want to be a villain and the things that stick to my mind the most are those when I accidentally harmed others through my own ignorance or carelessness. I hope that being aware of mental processes like this one will help me better-attain that which I want from life while also allowing me to be a better person overall.

And no, despite the content about relationships, there is NOTHING in this post related to my relationship with my lovely wife. We’re good. I just think a lot about a lot of things and sometimes have to write them out to ensure they leave my squishy skull fat’s priority processing queue.

The Friend Collector - Part III - fiction

College was a new world for John.

The Friend Collector - Part II - fiction

John outlines that he spent the next few years in limbo. 

The Friend Collector Part I - fiction

The article series was well researched. It wasn't merely a relation of the case facts; it was a study of the criminal behind the crimes.

Conundrums

It's amazing how one can exist in a near permanent state of non-life. A state of mere subsistence and animalistic survival instincts. It's amazing how one can trudge through that existence and still fight to continue it.

While, simultaneously, others can have much, much more to their lives and dread each waking moment for the pain and suffering and boredom that it brings.

The universe holds such wonders, even when one is contained to the insignificant spec that is our world. Yet, our lives and modern barriers prevent us from experiencing them. It's almost as if all the wonders of the world exist to tease those who cannot experience them into wanting to hold on for the possibility that, someday, they will be able to afford to experience some of the wonders rather than the duldroms of their daily lives.

We spend our lives; each minute, each second, wanting to do things that we can't and failing to recognize many of the things that are right there in front of us.

And yet, as horrible as that sounds, we can't be blamed for it. Our very minds, due to aeons of evolution, have been wired to search for more and not be content. That has been a survival mechanism that drove our species to expand and seek more resources so that we can expand our tribes and make our lives better.

This mechanism is what causes the poor, and the rich alike, to be dissatisfied with what they HAVE and to always want more.

I want more. I want more things and I want more experiences. I want less boredom. I want more meaningful interaction.

You want more. Whether you will admit it or not you want more of something.

If you don't want more I want to know how you achieved the state of inner peace that you have..... because that is something I want more of, too.

Tiers of Relationships

My observations have led me to develop a way of examining how people matter to each other.
I have organized this into tiers.

Over time I have defined and redefined the tiers and reordered their numbering system.

Here is the current version, based on my many years of watching human behavior and experiencing it for both sides of a human friendship.

Tier 6 - Both you and the other party have near continuous thoughts of each other and have an active desire to keep each other thoroughly entrenched in each-other's life. The other person is a top priority in each of your lives and schedules are altered to make time for one-another as needed. This relationship, when a friendship, spans distances through active use of modern technology.
Tier 5 - You and the other person both actively engage with each other and enjoy each-other's company but failure to align schedules is acceptable. Physical distance can cause this relationship to slowly degrade.
Tier 4 - You enjoy this person's company and expect to see them at events and gatherings. You never invite them because you assume that they already know or that someone else has already invited them. You don't tend to notice if they are missing from an activity and assume they are popular enough to be at some other activity instead.
Tier 3 - If this person talks to you or is engaged in a conversation you find interesting you will enter into a conversation and enjoy it. You don't generally start conversations with this person. You never actively invite them and they don't invite you. It is possible you do not even know the other party's name.
Tier 2 - You recognize this person and will convey general greetings and small-talk as needed.
Tier 1 - You recognize this person but do not generally acknowledge them in any way.
Tier 0 - Neutral - you have never seen or met this person before
Tier -1 - See Tier 1, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.
Tier -2 - See Tier 2, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.
Tier -3 - See Tier 3, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.
Tier -4 - See Tier 4, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.
Tier -5 - See Tier 5, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.
Tier -6 - See Tier 6, but in a repellant direction instead of an attractive one.

There may be professional research that defines these, or a similar, relationship structure. I have done no active research on the subject, only observation and classification.

Learned Helplessness

I'm just now getting to write about something I experienced a few weeks ago that caught my attention.

It was something about ME that startled me and made me realize exactly how significant simple, tiny, insignificant, helpful technologies are teaching us to be helpless.

We all use technologies that make our lives easier and simpler. Sometimes those technologies are the phonebooks in our cellphones. Sometimes they're the automatic door openers at the grocery store. Sometimes they're the automatic transmission in our car or the auto-dimmer or the intermittent windshield wiper settings or cruise control or.. or… or.

You get the picture. I use most of these technologies quite frequently. Most of the time I don't even notice that I use them.

What I did notice, though, was not one of these technologies but the absence of one.

A few weeks ago I was attending a meeting in a large public building.
During a break in the meeting I used the rest room.
What caught my attention was that I paused for a fraction of a second wondering why the faucets did not turn on when I put my hand under them. Yes, really. I hand't even looked down at the sink, I just placed my hands under the faucet and expected the faucet to turn on.
The fact that I had to wonder, even if for less than a second, why the water hand;t turned on made me realize that I am being conditioned to be helpless.

This will never happen to me; I think too much. I look around too much. I want to know how EVERYTHING works…. but it could happen (and I am sure it already is) to others.

I am frightened by a world where there are people who are so helpless that they wouldn't know HOW to turn on the water in the public restroom if it didn't have automatic faucets.

You may laugh but I ask you this: how many of the people you contact daily/weekly/monthly/annually could you call if you didn't have the phone book in your cellphone? How many could you email if you lost your PDA (or other contacts list)?

Think back to ten years ago - how different was your list of people you could contact without assistance then?

Now imagine a world 15 years from now when the people who are 15 have NEVER known a time where there were no cell phones…. NEVER known a time where there was no internet…. NEVER known a time with no automatic faucets and toilet flushers…
This will be the time when automatic faucets and toilet flushers are as inexpensive as the manual ones; what will be put into houses automatically?

Now think of a world 30 years from now when the kids born 15 years from now have NEVER known a world where you had to flush the toilet or turn on the faucet yourself.

What will people be able to do for themselves in that world that lies 30 years in our future?

Perception of Value

I like Halloween.
I like Halloween because, even as an adult, I like to play "let's pretend" in my own mind.
I'm not much of an actor, but I enjoy the process of theatre.
Because of that I enjoy costuming.
Halloween is the one time of year that I can wear costumes out and about without anyone thinking it odd.

$100 is a lot to spend on a costume. Even if it were a costume I REALLY wanted I probably wouldn;t spend $100 on it at the Halloween store.

But I am CERTAIN I have spent more than that on all of the components that are making the costume I am going to wear this year.
One piece alone (not quite finished yet) has a $5 piece of PVC tube, 1 $10 piece of PVC tubing, a $5 PVC tube cap and a few PVC couplers ranging in price from $.90 to $2. There is, in this piece, a motor, some lights and a couple of switches. All in all, this one piece will probably have cost me $50 when I am done with it. Does this bother me? A little. A VERY small amount. Why? Because of perception.

By buying the pieces one at a time and assembling them I FEEL like I am saving money. I FEEL like each expenditure is insignificant (and, really, each ONE is; it's the summation that isn't).

I find it interesting that, even knowing that perception is the key to value, that I am still perceiving something that is A LOT of work AND costs more as being less wasteful than spending $100 on a costume at the Halloween store. Granted, this costume is not available in any store so I CAN'T just purchase it, but if it were I would have to examine the cost versus the amount of work.... and I would probably still choose the harder and more expensive route. Sigh.... at least I'm consistent in my behavior.

Filled with Rage

Recently work has been VERY tough.

Here's a quick outline of HOW tough:
I was hired to manage ~500 laptops in one building, ~175 laptops in another and bring an over-arching technology management philosophy to all of the buildings in my organization unit (staff management, develop a centralized budget, etc).

Less than two months after I started working I was dumped a third building with ~350 laptops on me AND a hostile environment to work in because the person who left had wanted my job and did not get it... resulting in MANY people in that building having negative feelings toward me without ever having met me.

Rough math based ONLY on what I have listed above shows that, 2 months after I was hired, my job increased in workload by 52%. I got no pay raise.

Combine that additional workload with the fact that ALL of the equipment is an additional year older AND a last-minute decision dumped an unexpected 7.5 person-weeks of work onto my department and you can see why I am filled with rage. Everyone wants 100% service with only 25% manpower.

How am I handling this? Badly. I am filling with more and more stress each day and I will continue to do so until the last of the laptops have finished with their annual servicing and are no longer needing to be queued for the work.

I will continue to be over-stressed until I can move into the phase of the year where I can work on trying to streamline and improve the work flow for NEXT year's annual service.

There are three things I am trying to do to manage the stress right at this moment:
1. I am writing about my problem in an effort to vent out some of the stress.
2. I am planning to watch some cached sitcoms (How I Met Your Mother is fantastic - if you have not watched it you MUST).
3. After I watch an episode I will take the dog for a walk to the nearby Stone Cold Creamery store and get an ice cream.

I am also planning to have a talk with some of the people further up the chain to explain to them that a 52% increase in normal day-to-day workload PLUS the added project that they thrust upon us at the last minute is the reason that we are having such significant problems keeping up with the demand of the other employees. I will also point out that we're ahead of the schedule laid out last year in the buildings that I was SUPPOSED to be working on from the point that I was hired.

And, of course, I have developed some plans for how to fix things... and am working on other improvements, too.


The morale of today's post: rage happens; how we deal with it is what makes or breaks us. I am trying to deal with mine in a constructive manner (mostly - ice cream doesn't really count) because it is what is best for me and for my users in the long run.

Let's hope that the people further up the chain see and acknowledge my efforts (AND that I was unfairly given a 52% increase in workload less than 2 months after my hire date).