Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Whenever I read Darwinians and atheists, I find myself in agreement with their arguments. As Galileo said, the role of religion should be to determine how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go. Put differently (and in a way that doesn’t presume there is a heaven), only critical thinking will help us discern the nature of reality so that we can base our conduct on actuality rather than fantasy, but the question of values and how we should behave is separate from that.

What I cannot understand is the Darwinians’ and atheists’ confusion about consciousness, a problem that B. F. Skinner solved 75 years ago. What is especially perplexing is the fact that Skinner’s account of consciousness is a perfect analogy to the Darwinian account of life. I don’t know why E.O. Wilson calls Skinner (but not Darwin) a “greedy reductionist” for believing that all operant behavior evolves under contingencies of what works just as anatomy, physiology, and instinctive behavior evolve under contingencies of survival and reproduction.

Skinner called his behaviorism “radical,” (i.e., thorough or complete) because he rejected then-behaviorism’s lack of interest in private events. Just as Galileo insisted that the laws of physics would apply in the sky just as much as on the ground, Skinner insisted that the laws of psychology would apply just as much to the psychologist’s inner life as to the rat’s observable life.

Consciousness has nothing to do with the so-called and now-solved philosophical problem of mind-body duality, or in current terms, how the physical brain can give rise to immaterial thought. The answer to this pseudo-problem is that even though thought seems to be immaterial, it is not. Thought is no more immaterial than sound, light, or odor. Even educated people used to believe, a long time ago, that these things were immaterial, but now we know that sound requires a material medium to transmit waves, light is made up of photons, and odor consists of molecules. Thus, hearing, seeing, and smelling are not immaterial activities, and there is nothing in so-called consciousness besides hearing, seeing, and smelling (and tasting and feeling). Once you learn how to see and hear things that are there, you can also see and hear things that are not there, just as you can kick a ball that is not there once you have learned to kick a ball that is there. Engaging in the behavior of seeing and hearing things that are not there is called imagination. Its survival value is obvious, since it allows trial and error learning in the safe space of imagination. There is nothing in so-called consciousness that is not some version of the five senses operating on their own. Once you have learned to hear words spoken in a way that makes sense, you can have thoughts; thinking is hearing yourself make language; it is verbal behavior and nothing more.

What would really be startling and, in turn, would make me question my scientific worldview would be if the mind were capable of doing even one thing that the senses can’t. If we could, for example, smell things in our imagination even though our bodies were incapable of smelling, that would change everything. If there were a sixth sense that was not merely an example of the five senses, I’d believe in a mind that was different from “private behavior.” But there isn’t.

In my imagination, you are disappointed by the simplicity of Skinner’s explanation of consciousness. You intuit something beyond or beneath hearing, seeing, etc., in your own consciousness. Your intuition is wrong, but your disappointment is real. I think one of the main reasons people resent science is that people think about complicated things long and hard, sometimes for centuries or millennia, and then science’s explanation is ludicrously simple. How the stars go? The earth is spinning. When the thing explained is you or something you care about, a simple explanation can irritate.

Skinner said, late in life, that one of the humilities of old age was that, after having a good idea, he would realize that he’d already had that idea in 1953. One of my humilities is that, after having a good idea, I often recall that Skinner had that idea in 1953.

So the main point of my previous post wasn’t that many women think they’re tired when they’re angry; my main point was that you can only describe your emotions as you were taught to describe them by the people observing you (what Skinner calls the verbal community). Still, a commenter asked what I think is the boys’ analogy to tired girls.

Anger is the emotional state in which observing damage (to the object of one’s anger) operates as a reinforcer. Damage doesn’t have to mean a broken arm; it can mean a loss of face, a disappointment, or a look of concern.

I think many Americans are less upset by angry boys than by angry girls, so boys are more likely to learn that they are angry when they are angry. On the other hand, society’s relative comfort with boys being angry and with being angry at boys means that many boys don’t learn to disguise their anger, and they are therefore more likely to incur punishment for anger. This in turn makes boys more likely to avoid authority figures and to express anger when they are not being watched. Women are therefore more likely to comfort themselves with food and napping when angry, and to hurt people while acting manifestly within social norms, while men are more likely to avoid self-monitoring when angry and to express it in ways that breach social norms. Parents who recognize, accept, and manage their children’s anger produce adults who recognize, accept, and manage their own anger.

So, I’d say that many boys think they are bad when they are angry, but they recognize that they are angry. Other boys are taught that they are confused, and then they seek order through obsessive-compulsive behaviors when angry.

Boys are more likely to be mislabeled as tired when they want to snuggle. Tired or weak. Some men can snuggle only when they think they are tired. One of the many things I love about Janna is that when I come home at the end of the day and want soothing comfort, she provides it without metacommunicating that I should man up or stop complaining or, worst of all, take care of her. How did I go from purveying Southern machismo as a child to feeling comfortable with my own dependency needs? I’d say a lot of it had to do with the times I grew up in, with feminism to thank for redefining the role of men, and a lot of it had to do with my high school girlfriend, who tolerated my disgust with my desire for physical comfort without construing me as weak for wanting it. If your first love was someone who genuinely liked you, you are blessed. Last love, too.

The maps on my computer and phone tell a different story depending on how far in or out you zoom. At the closest level, the story is about the state of the yardwork around my house (somebody should trim that overgrown bush in the front yard). Then there’s a story about what a cool neighborhood I live in, surrounded by restaurants and retail. Then there’s a story about how far my commute is, and a story about the pioneers who settled down when they got to the mountains even though there is no navigable waterway, and then a story about how far away the ocean is. You get the idea.

People narrate events in a way that, without their knowing it, supports their happiness or unhappiness, that supports their sense that things are going well or badly. (Happiness when things are actually going badly is an opiate that keeps you from improving things; unhappiness when things are actually going well keeps you from enjoying things.) When it comes to unhappiness, psychotherapy can be construed as changing the narrative to one that remains true to reality but connotes a different meaning. One way to think about that narration is to consider the zoom level patients are using, rather than just to consider what they are making of the different events. (Zoom can be considered an example of what systems theorists mean by punctuation, although punctuation typically refers to the question of how far back in time the narrative goes—who started the conflict.)

A man is obsessed with whether his wife is cheating on him. He sees only the wistful smile on her face as she contemplated lunch with a business associate. He does not zoom in for details of the smile; he does not zoom out for an assessment of her character or their marriage.

An employee repeatedly reprimands people for not doing their jobs. She sees slackers and sinners, supported by a zoom level that highlights work not done. She does not zoom in to consider her feelings about the work or her associations to slacking; she does not zoom out to consider the relative unimportance of the work to the overall functioning of the business or to consider her confusing role in the organization (maybe she thinks that being there longer than others means that she is in charge of them).

All the major theoretical orientations have zoom buttons for going in or out. Psychoanalysis zooms in on affect or out to personal history; behaviorism zooms in to specific behaviors or out to occasioning environments; cognitive-behavior therapy tends to zoom only in, to thoughts and patterns of thinking; systems theory zooms in to role-relationships or out to roles in larger systems.

So when you’re unhappy, try hitting the plus or minus button on that little scale on the side of your visual field. You could change your perspective without even changing your seat.

“He depends too much on the opinions of others for his self-esteem.” How many times have you heard this or its equivalent? A significant number of psychotherapies take something like this as their goal; they try to promote self-esteem independent of the esteem accorded to the patient by other people. “She turns to others instead of feeling self-confident.” Same deal: the therapist wants to help her feel good about herself regardless of what other people think. (Of course, these same therapists are all-too-often quick to praise their patients, apparently unaware that they are selling dependence on the therapist as a kind of methadone treatment for the addiction to other people.)

George Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, had this to say on the subject: “independence, as we rather arbitrarily call one of the more arduous and dignified forms of our dependence.” She meant that the relational posture we call independence is not, after all, independent of other people but is instead one that requires the “independent” person to avoid appearing needy, and since we are an extremely socially needy animal, maintaining that appearance can wear you down. Independence means you can’t ask your friends if you talked too much at dinner; you can’t express feelings of being hurt when you are left out of plans; you can’t make your partner feel important. In other words, independence means you won’t get corrective feedback; you will be left out of plans; and your partner will either be someone who doesn’t feel a right to be important or who starts to look elsewhere for that feeling. That’s the arduous part. It’s “dignified,” because, as Skinner teaches us, “dignity” just means that the things that drive you are kept hidden from other people.

Instead of trying to feel good about yourself, you should spend more time with people who feel good about you. This is not easy to do, because those people are not easy to find. One reason they are not easy to find is that many people were raised by people who don’t particularly like human beings (especially the basic human qualities of sexuality, aggression, humor, and insight), so many of the people you come into contact with won’t like you if they get a glimpse of your sexuality, aggression, humor, or insight. You imagine the best you can do is to surround yourself with people who tolerate you, and you feel bad about yourself. These people feel good about you, but they don’t really know you.

Two people I can pretty much guarantee will get you and like you are George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy. Spend time with them and their kind; find yourself in their work; experience their fondness and humor.

You can also cultivate people who will like you by liking them first, not their affability and politeness but their basic human qualities. This will change the norms of whatever group you’re in and make it more likely that your own sexuality, aggression, humor, and insight will be appreciated.

People who don’t like your basic human qualities will snap at you or otherwise disapprove of you for gravitating toward people who like you, or for expressing affection for other people’s human qualities. But you can manage such punishers in the same way you manage people who simply don’t like you: ignore them and concentrate on better people.

Another problem is that you might confuse self-praise with feeling good about yourself, and you might confuse other people’s praise with being appreciated. This will make you pursue people who praise you rather than people who appreciate your sexuality, aggression, humor, and insight. Praise often communicates that you are such a loser that you need the praise to make you feel good. Its function is often to cultivate obedience to group norms rather than to offer social approval for the basic human qualities that groups often marginalize. Praise is like alcohol; it can take the edge off, but it’s not going to make you a better person like acceptance and appreciation can. We’ve all met people who praise themselves; they’re not much fun compared to people who appreciate themselves. If you want to foster the latter and not the former, appreciate rather than praise other people.

True self-esteem is, as Skinner said, the feeling you get when you have skills. An important set of skills involves negotiating social terrain, but if you do it at the expense of your sexuality, aggression, humor, and insight, you’re not really solving the problem. So go ahead. Let other people know you need them, and spend more time with the ones who don’t exploit that knowledge or act superior about it.

You often hear that a student who reads the assignment to get a good grade is extrinsically motived, and one who doesn’t care much about the grade is intrinsically motivated. Similar language describes the behavior of athletes, professionals, and just about everyone making an effort. Generally, it is considered better to be intrinsically motivated, lest one be accused of shallowness or lacking in persistence.

There is no such thing as intrinsic motivation.

When we can identify a reinforcing consequence or schedule that maintains a behavior, we use the extrinsic label. When we can’t identify the reinforcing consequence or schedule, we use the intrinsic label. It’s that simple.

Nothing anyone does in relation to a soda machine will be labeled intrinsic motivation. The person can joyfully feed quarters into the slot, poetically describe the sound of the coins dropping into the mechanism, and dance circles of ecstasy after each quarter is deposited; we know she wants a soda. But the same person reading a book for school, delightedly turning pages, sharing well-written passages with her roommate, and cherishing the book itself appears to be intrinsically motivated when we have good evidence that she doesn’t care too much about the grade. Rather than look for other reinforcers, we invent an internal explanation (she loves learning).

Schedules of reinforcement are also important. If someone puts quarters in a slot machine, he will be rewarded, largely or minutely, at random and often enough to create a persistent behavior. The soda machine provides a soda nearly every time. If he walks into a casino, puts a dollar in a slot machine, and nothing comes out, he will not be too upset, even though he just lost out on a payout of $100,000. If he then walks over to the soda machine and puts in a dollar and nothing happens, he will bang the machine, maybe kick it, and pull the coin return lever several times, even though he only lost out on a soda. If a behavior is consistently reinforced, extinction is quick (and experienced as frustration). That’s why you get mad at your loving spouse more quickly than at your officemate when neither notices your new shirt or your clever remark. When behavior is reinforced intermittently, as in a casino, it takes a lot of failures before you stop trying (extinction is slow), and the process is experienced more as despair or longing than frustration.

A stranger to the situation would describe the person at an unyielding soda machine as extrinsically motivated by whatever’s in the machine and the person at an unyielding slot machine as intrinsically motivated since the person doesn’t seem to expect anything from the machine.

The main reason we can’t identify reinforcers, according to Skinner, is because it is undignified to get caught working for a reward. Erving Goffman and Keith Johnstone would say it is undignified because it is something that children can’t avoid, and adults get status-enhancement (Johnstone) or avoid stigma (Goffman) by acting in ways that children can’t. Children obviously stare at the cake all through dinner and wolf down their dessert. Adults lose face if they get caught doing either. The name for the mutual agreement to disguise our motivations at dinner is “table manners.” (I acknowledge that “table manners” also describes behavior that makes the meal more appetizing to other diners.)

The main problem with the concept of intrinsic reinforcement is that it doesn’t give the teacher much to do to build skills. Mainly, the concept makes teachers shame students who reveal what reinforces their behavior. But if teachers know which reinforcers are effective, they can use the knowledge by arranging for the reinforcement to depend on approximations of the skills that will serve the student later. Or the teacher can create conditioned reinforcers by associating, say, passing the ball with, say, winning to create a reinforcer the teacher can control.