Mormonism and Intermittent Reinforcement

[drumdude]

There is a paradoxical aspect to human psychological behavior, known as Intermittent Reinforcement. If you measure a test subject’s response to a consistent reward, you get a certain level of effort out of them.

Paradoxically, if you decrease that reward, and make the outcome uncertain, the response doesn’t decrease; it actually rises dramatically!

Put formally:

Intermittent reinforcement is the delivery of a reward at irregular intervals, a method that has been determined to yield the greatest effort from the subject. The subject does not receive a reward each time they perform a desired behavior or according to any regular schedule but at seemingly random intervals.

How does this tie into Mormonism? In my opinion, you see Mormons driven by this mechanism constantly. They’re playing the Las Vegas slots with their time, treasure, and talent, and they don’t care what the odds are.

The Mormon family praying for a loved one to recover, which happens at the same rate as medical statistics dictate.

The Mormon apologist who thinks he can use dowsing rods to find water and gets it right a couple times out of dozens of attempts.

The Mormon Bishop who constantly accuses young people in his ward of masturbation and every once in a while gets lucky when one confesses.

The young men’s president who stays late every Saturday scrubbing toilets, preparing lessons, paying extra tithing, all with the hope of becoming a general authority someday being dangled in front of him.

So many people outside the church don’t understand why anyone could be so devoted to such an insane religion as Mormonism. But human psychology is at work here. The lack of evidence and reward within Mormonism is not a bug, it’s a feature. The more uncertain and unsure someone is about the church, the more likely they are to put in maximum effort towards furthering the church’s goals.

[Physics Guy]

I think this is a serious point, but it's broader than Mormonism. A lot of worthwhile pursuits offer intermittent and unpredictable rewards.

Reward intermittency may well be an effective sign that you are onto something, but haven't mastered it yet, so it's worthwhile keeping on trying hard. Reliable rewards, in contrast, probably tend to indicate that you already have all you need to keep those rewards coming in, so it's worth seeing whether you might even be doing more than you need to get them. If you slack off a bit, you might not lose much, and you could direct your freed-up resources to developing some additional gig. Let the chickens look after themselves for a while, now that they're laying predictably, and get to building that pigpen.

I see this in myself and in my family with time management. Professors have job security and lots of freedom, but you have to be a pretty driven person to get the job. We tend to be our own worst bosses, with unlimited expectations and no-one else to blame for our failure to meet them. So pretty much every academic is an ideal mark for time management coaches. We're always looking for some technique or practice or philosophy that will somehow get us getting more done.

Time management is a complex problem with a lot of adjustable parameters to twiddle. Do you reserve two hours every morning for writing your book and squeeze in e-mail over lunch? Do you fill your calendar with lots of little slots so that you can keep on making steady progress on many things in parallel while working on each one at highest efficiency, or do you focus on priorities by clearing large blocks of time for deep thinking? Do you add precious hours to your day by getting up before dawn or do you make sure that you get lots of sleep? Do you stay in close touch with your students or subordinates to keep them moving along or do you let them struggle more independently while you think up the next projects?

Lots of things work a bit, for a while. Some things do seem to help consistently, but they're never enough. You can't just conclude that it's random, and then settle on the approach that comes out as least ineffective on average, because you're never trying exactly the same set of conditions for long enough to distinguish signal from noise with confidence. External factors outside your control don't stay constant for long enough over any short term, and you can't afford to keep trying exactly the same thing for ten years, to get enough data on how well it works, because you don't want to waste that much of your life on something that didn't work well.

So you keep tinkering and retinkering, occasionally you try something radical, chasing the will-o-wisp. You chase it madly, because it flickers and wanders. If it steadily shone, you'd walk up to it.

Everyone chases wisps like that. I may be after that breakthrough paper, or that bumper year of multiple good papers; I'm after other things, too. I want things for my children. I wouldn't mind some serenity. I'd take enlightenment if it turned up. Lots of people are looking for a romantic relationship, or a better job, or a brilliant investment. We all tend to pursue intermittent rewards, trying and trying again with small tweaks or bold changes.

I get the impression that Mormonism promises material and tangible "blessings", even if they're not spelled out in detail, and that Mormons might often be trying to reach their personal or material goals with priesthood powers and covenants. So Mormonism might be somewhat more about chasing intermittent rewards than other faiths or pursuits. It's a universal pattern, though, and it might even be smart. The world is complex, with many different things you can try, but there really are tricks that work well if you find them, rocks you can bang to make sparks and start fire. There's no straight path to finding them, sadly.

[msnobody]

Let’s keep ‘em in by appealing to the ego, giving them a more prestigious calling.

[Philo Sofee]

I think this is a serious point, but it's broader than Mormonism. A lot of worthwhile pursuits offer intermittent and unpredictable rewards.

Reward intermittency may well be an effective sign that you are onto something, but haven't mastered it yet, so it's worthwhile keeping on trying hard. Reliable rewards, in contrast, probably tend to indicate that you already have all you need to keep those rewards coming in, so it's worth seeing whether you might even be doing more than you need to get them. If you slack off a bit, you might not lose much, and you could direct your freed-up resources to developing some additional gig. Let the chickens look after themselves for a while, now that they're laying predictably, and get to building that pigpen.

I see this in myself and in my family with time management. Professors have job security and lots of freedom, but you have to be a pretty driven person to get the job. We tend to be our own worst bosses, with unlimited expectations and no-one else to blame for our failure to meet them. So pretty much every academic is an ideal mark for time management coaches. We're always looking for some technique or practice or philosophy that will somehow get us getting more done.

Time management is a complex problem with a lot of adjustable parameters to twiddle. Do you reserve two hours every morning for writing your book and squeeze in e-mail over lunch? Do you fill your calendar with lots of little slots so that you can keep on making steady progress on many things in parallel while working on each one at highest efficiency, or do you focus on priorities by clearing large blocks of time for deep thinking? Do you add precious hours to your day by getting up before dawn or do you make sure that you get lots of sleep? Do you stay in close touch with your students or subordinates to keep them moving along or do you let them struggle more independently while you think up the next projects?

Lots of things work a bit, for a while. Some things do seem to help consistently, but they're never enough. You can't just conclude that it's random, and then settle on the approach that comes out as least ineffective on average, because you're never trying exactly the same set of conditions for long enough to distinguish signal from noise with confidence. External factors outside your control don't stay constant for long enough over any short term, and you can't afford to keep trying exactly the same thing for ten years, to get enough data on how well it works, because you don't want to waste that much of your life on something that didn't work well.

So you keep tinkering and retinkering, occasionally you try something radical, chasing the will-o-wisp. You chase it madly, because it flickers and wanders. If it steadily shone, you'd walk up to it.

Everyone chases wisps like that. I may be after that breakthrough paper, or that bumper year of multiple good papers; I'm after other things, too. I want things for my children. I wouldn't mind some serenity. I'd take enlightenment if it turned up. Lots of people are looking for a romantic relationship, or a better job, or a brilliant investment. We all tend to pursue intermittent rewards, trying and trying again with small tweaks or bold changes.

I get the impression that Mormonism promises material and tangible "blessings", even if they're not spelled out in detail, and that Mormons might often be trying to reach their personal or material goals with priesthood powers and covenants. So Mormonism might be somewhat more about chasing intermittent rewards than other faiths or pursuits. It's a universal pattern, though, and it might even be smart. The world is complex, with many different things you can try, but there really are tricks that work well if you find them, rocks you can bang to make sparks and start fire. There's no straight path to finding them, sadly.

This is deeply enlgihtening and profound. I see this in my life constantly! Thanks for sharing this PG.