Decoding Behavior, An Introduction

You've probably heard the phrasing "thinking with you heart and not your head" when talking about someone who has made a decision that maybe doesn't seem to be the most logical.  This saying speaks to just one of the many ways that human decision making can fail to make much sense.  The fields of behavioral economics and behavior change psychology were developed to try and understand some of these decisions. 

In my gamification class, the instructor started with behavioral econcomics and behaviorism.  Early psychology experiments such as Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's rat boxes aimed to showcase the effects of conditioning responses in relation to certain stimuli.  I've linked descriptions of these experiments if you want to read more about classical conditioning (Pavlov) or operant conditioning (Skinner) or are just unfamiliar with these experiments.  These two are examples of behaviorism, or influencing behavior through the use of a stimulus.  The basics come down to this:  Pavlov paired an instinctual response (dog salivating at food) with a non related stimulus (ringing of a bell).  Eventually, it could be seen that a dog would salivate at the sound of a bell, even when they were not presented with food.  Skinner, on the other hand, worked with a learned behavior and reinforcement.  A rat who was already trained to push a lever to receive food is introduced to consequences, positive or negative, that influence his behavior.  Positive reinforcement tends to increase an action, while negative reinforcement tends to decrease an action.  Much of behaviorism makes some sort of sense when you take a step back and look at it.  This is where it differs from behavioral economics.

The idea behind behavioral economics is that humans make "mistakes" consistently.  For instance, the concept of loss aversion was established in this field.  This is the idea that people have more concern about losses than gains.  People will therefore take more steps to avoid a loss than they would to achieve a gain of the same magnitude.  If presented with a choice between two options with the same odds, individuals will much more often choose the option that is framed in a way that avoids losses.  You can read a bit more on loss aversion here if you are interested.

I've been fascinated by the study of why we do what we do since I was quite young.  I think it is applicable to many areas of life and almost every industry of work.  It comes down to the fact that understanding motivation and behavior theories can help you understand people.  Now, of course, you can't always predict how people will act.  But, learning about many of these theories during my educationial career have helped me be a better communicator, leader, moderator, support for my friends and family and also a more patient person when others act in ways that I don't understand.  It's also helped me vastly during my struggle with my nerve pain and now recovery from back surgery.  I think it's important to say that I'm nowhere near perfect in my utilization of these theories in my own struggles.  I am much harder on myself than I am on anyone else and can be known to throw theory out of the window sometimes and just be frustrated and upset with my progress or pain.  But that is beside the point....

Coming back to my gamification course, I want to touch upon some of the takeaways of behaviorism.  I plan to do a series of blog posts specifically on behavior change theories at some point, but don't want to get sidetracked just yet!  My professor highlighted three key things that we should take with us from our learning of behaviorism.  They are:

1. Observation:  We should look at what people actually do.
2. Feedback Loops: These tend to motivate behavior as a reaction loops back to affect itself.  It often looks like this: action → feedback→ response
3. Reinforcement: Learning occurs by the reinforcement of stimuli.

Reinforcement especially, tends to deal with punishments or rewards.  Rewards bring in the idea of motivation, the next concept that was discussed in my gamification course.  In another one of my graduate courses, I covered motivation in depth and plan to have my next post cover this subject!

For now, I'll end this post here, just giving you a taste of the types of theories that I plan to get into later. 

-Vicky