Skinner Box

On my cab ride up to work today, as the impending snow storm began to fall outside, I began to think about how quickly my "Hell Week" flew by. It got me to think about how our predisposition of any event or moment can often be the worst part or most agonizing aspect -- even when you know what to expect. 

In a New York Times article published December 6, 2008, Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist who uses brain-scanning technologies to decode the decision-making systems of the human mind, conducted a study centered on the effects of fear, perpetuated by the current economic environment, on our decision-making. He writes, "...while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the [Skinner] box intact." 

Experimental psychologist B.F. Skinner developed the Skinner box in 1950 to test the operant conditioning learning behavior of laboratory animals through their association of flashing lights and levers with either rewards or punishments. At its simplest form, a green light would yield the rat a reward and a red light would yield an electroshock. The animal would quickly learn to associate the green light with good and the red with bad. 

Dr. Berns conducted a similar study with human participants in an MRI. An excerpt from his article follows: 

"We attached electrodes to the tops of [participants] feet. Although not unbearably painful, the shocks were designed to be unpleasant enough that the individual would prefer to avoid them altogether. 

The kicker was that they had to wait for the shocks. Every trial began with a statement of how big the shock would be and how long they would have to wait for it: a range of one to almost 30 seconds. For many people, the wait was worse than the shock. Given a choice, almost everyone preferred to expedite the shock rather than wait for it. Nearly a third feared waiting so much that, when given the chance, they preferred getting a bigger shock right away to waiting for a smaller shock later. It sounds illogical, but fear -- whether of pain or losing a job -- does strange things to decision-making." 

Which is a nice introduction to my inspiration for this entry. Haven't we all, at some point or another, sat with dreaded anticipation of an event or moment and in hindsight realized it was never as bad as we were dreading? 

It is the anticipation of what's to come, you can include the fear of uncertainty in this, that causes us more misery, frustration and stress than the actual act/deed itself. At the onset of this week, I was miserable at the thought of having to work the entire week the 8 hour shifts until 11 p.m., culminating with three graveyard shifts this weekend. I sit here on Sunday night half way through my final shift and feel like it wasn't really all that bad.

Translate this to me losing my job and having to make sacrifices, like this graveyard shift, lack of weekends and sleep deprivation, and somewhere down the line I'll sit and feel "like it wasn't really all that bad." Perhaps anything in hindsight seems OK to us, but with foresight we would be less inclined to make those sacrifices and we'd miss out on some incredible learning experiences. Can we really come to appreciate the green lights/rewards without suffering through the red lights/punishments? What is winning without some sweat? What is triumph without some work? 

I believe that success without adversity lacks challenge, perspective and appreciation.