Behavior Modification

BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION: EVERYBODY NEEDS A GOOD BM



It will comes as no surprise to analytical psychologists that behavior modification, or BM as it is affectionately referred to in the trade, was the brainstorm (BS) of an extortionist turned psychologist who never graduated from the Anal Stage (contrary to popular belief, the Anal Stage is not the name of a local improvisational theater company where new talent can get up and make asses of themselves). Behavior mod is a relative newcomer to the psychologist’s satchel of tricks, but the technique is actually centuries old.
The basic principles of behavior modification were laid out by Helios Agamemnon (600 A.C.-220 D.C.), the founder and first President of Agamemnon’s Columns, a highly successful column enterprise in ancient Thebes. Agamemnon (no relation to the playwright or shortstop of the same name), had been in the square wheel business as a young man, and had gone through Chapter Eleven proceedings when the round wheel was invented and became all the rage. Shortly after declaring bankruptcy, Agamemnon suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a private neuropsychiatric institute. During his hospitalization he had a great deal of time to read magazines, such as Time (then called Chronos), and realized that his countrymen had conquered everything that was left to be conquered (except their weakness for baklava, feta cheese, and handsome young boys), and would soon have to find other forms of amusement, and other places to spend huge amounts of coin.
Coming as he did from a religious family (both of his aged parents were elders), it didn’t take long for Agamemnon to realize that soon the consciousness of the masses would turn to appeasing God, in the hope that the slaughter that had been committed to attain material wealth could now be atoned for by building lavish places of worship. These temples (Christianity had not yet been born, nor had Jesus for that matter) needed something to hold them up. Until then they had not been held up by anything other than an occasional burglar.
Agamemnon realized that the column would be just the thing to stick between a floor and a ceiling. Not only would it keep the floor and ceiling apart, creating more living space, but it would also provide a base around which young children could play tag, and upon which dogs of all ages could relieve themselves. He immediately began stockpiling columns, rows and rows of columns and columns. Agamemnon’s cousin twice removed (he was twice removed from Hercules Bar and Grill for flirting with the bouncer) was assistant editor for a local paper, and allowed Agamemnon to write a column on columns, affording him the opportunity to publicize and popularize the concept of the column.
Before long temples were being erected everywhere, and the need for columns turned Agamemnon overnight into a prosperous entrepreneur. Agamemnon was realistic enough to realize that the temple building craze could not last forever. Temples are big things- you can only fit so many on a block before you run out of room. He knew if his business were to continue to grow that he would have to move out to the suburbs and rural areas with his idea. The countryside was fertile ground. The few temples that were there didn’t even have roofs. Greeks were sun worshippers, and a roof made it difficult to get a good tan. It didn’t rain often in Thebes and its environs, and the natives considered a mouthful of rain while praying a small price to pay for a full body tan. Agamemnon hired a small staff of handsome young salesmen, who were instructed in line dancing, and drinking retsina without gagging.
Agamemnon found it difficult to motivate his salesmen. A carpet salesman can easily carry around carpet samples. A column salesman is looking at a serious hernia. One can easily imagine the reluctance of the salesmen to load several styles of two- ton columns into their vehicles each morning, and to carry these columns into the temple to show the rabbis.
Agamemnon provided as a perk to his employees a free membership to Hercules Barbell and Gorilla, small gym for large men (owned incidentally by the same Hercules who twice removed Agamemnon’s cousin from his other establishment). The salesmen were so exhausted from carrying columns around all day that they had little interest, and less energy at the end of the day to lift weights. These guys may have been lazy, but they weren’t dumbbells.
It was at this time that Agamemnon received the inspiration for what is now known as behavior modification. The idea came to him in a dream during a RUM state (his favorite stage of sleep). (For more information about the RUM stage, see my essay on Dream Interpretation). In the dream Agamemnon saw large cactus plants and neon lights. People in leisure suits and plaid pants were pulling levers and drinking alcohol as bells rang, lights flashed, and waitresses in push-up bras freshened the drinks of the lever pullers.
As this was before Freud’s time (his best time was between ten A.M. and noon, and the dream took place at 6 A.M.), and since Freud had not yet been incarnated anyway, Agamemnon did the next best thing and went to the Oracle at Delphi. This oracle was known for telling people about their past and for this reason had earned the nickname The Historical Oracle. It is a little known fact that this same oracle had formerly been known as the Oracle at Delphus, and had changed his name to Delphi after being diagnosed by Hemophilius, the bleeding heart liberal psychiatrist, as a multiple personality.
The Oracle, having recently returned from a junket to the American Southwest for the Fifth Annual Convention of Oracles, Soothsayers and Financial Planners, immediately recognized the symbolism of the dream as representing Las Vegas, the very place where the convention had taken place (yeah, I know, we’re dealing with a time warp here. Let it go. This is what is known as poetic lice sense). The Historical Oracle had cleaned up at the Keno parlor at The Mirage, a hotel that wasn’t what it appeared to be, and had taken in a show starring Wayne Newton, and his daughter Fig.
Agamemnon knew at once what he needed to do to motivate his sales force to carry those columns from temple to temple. Lifting weights was clearly not the solution. A free trip to Las Vegas for the salesman with the highest bookings might do the trick.
Thus was the basic idea of behavior modification born. If you want someone to do something that will benefit you, you offer him a small trinket, which is no skin off your nose, but seems like a big deal to him, and then you sit back and watch as the poor schmuck scrambles to earn the trinket. Agamemnon also had the clever idea of posting the sales records of all his employees on one orange column, and pasting stars next to the names of the big winners. Stars have always inspired men. These and several other clever ploys are among the arsenal of modern day behavior mod techniques, making Agamemnon the true father of the BM movement.
The earliest recorded work with behavior modification in this country was done with rats. This was immediately transferable to marriage counseling, since by the time most couples found their way to counseling, one spouse or the other considered their partner to be a rat. These techniques were also found to be useful in schools, where teachers often considered their students to be brats, a type of human rat, as well as a tasty sausage-like thing.
Leonard Skinnard, one of the first researchers into behavior modification principles, who was later to become a rock group and have a plane crash, found that a rat would continue to press a bar (or lean on a bar if he were alcoholic) at a high rate if you gave it a pellet of rat food (or a shot of Jack Daniels) every so often. The level of performance would be particularly high if the rat had no idea when the reward was being dispensed.
Skinnard published his results in the Journal of Rodent Behavior. This article had minimal impact, as very few rodents were able to read. The article was picked up by Breeder’s Digest and read by millions in doctors’ waiting rooms around the country. Within a short time wives from El Cajon to Kennebunkport were feeding their unsuspecting husbands pellets of rat food at irregular intervals, which drove many of these men to spend an inordinate amount of time leaning on bars, creating a new industry that came to be called chemical dependency treatment.
Incompetent teachers who continued to teach only because they had seniority and had to wait a few years for their pension and Social Security to kick in, were quick to latch on to behavior modification. These once well-meaning pedants had long ago lost the ability to inspire students to learn for the sheer pleasure of learning, and saw in behavior modification a means of controlling a classroom of uninspired youngsters, who in their boredom had turned to devising schemes for offing their teacher without getting caught.
The principle works as follows. You ignore negative behavior and immediately reward positive behavior. This means that if a child sets fire to another child, you ignore the fire setter, but give smiles and praise to the child who grabs the fire extinguisher and douses the fire. This can become complex however. If the child set on fire were a troublemaker whom you had been trying to expel, then you would reward the behavior of the child who started the fire, and ignore the behavior of the child who grabbed the fire extinguisher.
Let us consider the case of Miss Elsie Crumcake, a social studies teacher with sixty years of experience under her belt, and as many pounds hanging over her belt. Miss Crumcake decided to reward students who sat still and kept their mouths shut by going up to those students, smiling warmly, and putting her arm affectionately around the student’s shoulders. The classroom soon resembled the monkey house at the local zoo. Students were babbling and swinging wildly around the room in dire fear of Miss Crumcake getting close to them with her fetid breath and clammy hands. Miss Crumcake failed to understand that positive reinforcement is in the eyes of the beholder.
Although Elsie did not really understand why her behavior modification wasn’t working (nor had she ever understood why no one wanted to marry her), she intuitively understood that she had to try something different. Her next strategy was to ignore all negative behavior. This yielded similar results. At that point Elsie decided to reward positive behavior by allowing students to go home for the rest of the day. The results were remarkable! All negative behaviors expired within one day, as did Miss Crumcake’s teaching contract.
One sees evidence of behavior modification at work in countless everyday situations. Women have long understood that one of the most effective ways of getting their husbands to comply with their requests is to withhold sex until the behavior of the husband shapes up. Like rats, men will work very hard for a reward that is meaningful to them. Parents have an intuitive understanding of the power of depriving their children of food until they comply with the parent’s demands. Of course there is always that one stubborn child who will eat paint chips off the wall before he’ll give in to his mother, but even these children tend to give in once they suffer the effects of lead poisoning
Behavior modification has been applied successfully in many institutional settings such as hospitals and prisons. Bruno Jackmeier was a three- hundred -pound monster of a man with limited intelligence, who was locked up at a federal penitentiary in Indiana for killing and eating his grandfather. Bruno had an unwanted behavior of twisting the heads off of other prisoners and hiding them so that prison personnel could not find the severed heads. The warden of the prison had minored in psychology and knew something about behavior modification. He discovered that Bruno had a passion for collecting pre-Revolution Hungarian postage stamps. The warden went on the Internet and found a stamp that Bruno did not yet have in his collection. As Bruno did not have good verbal comprehension skills, the warden got a male doll, which he dressed in prison garb, and then with Bruno watching, twisted the head off the doll. The warden then handed the head to Bruno, and showed Bruno the postage stamp. Bruno tried to grab the postage stamp from the warden’s hands, but several armed guards restrained the prisoner. The warden then indicated to Bruno that if he handed over the doll’s head, he could have the stamp. The technique worked like a charm. From that day on, every time Bruno twisted off the head of an inmate, he would bring it to the warden’s office, and in turn would get a new stamp for his collection. The problem of missing heads was solved immediately. Unfortunately Bruno was so pleased with filling in the missing stamps in his collection that he was twisting off heads at a much higher rate than he had prior to the intervention. It would appear then that the intervention plan needed to be tweaked for maximum results, but the warden was on the right path.
There is virtually no limit to the possible ways in which behavior modification can be used. We have looked at but a small sampling of these possibilities, which has been limited only by my lack of interest in the topic and the fact that dinner is ready. Remember, there is no such thing as a bad BM. Follow your instincts in planning your BM interventions, and remember the words of Agamemnon, the Father of BM, “Oy, these columns weigh a ton. Why didn’t I go into the shmatah business?”


This essay appears in Titters, Giggles and Tears:Volume The Second:Would Someone Please Turn This Volume Down! by Dennis Fenichel, available on Amazon and Barnes &Noble