Behaviorism is the idea that the environment shapes all behavior.

To control yourself, take steps to exercise control over your environment.

B.F. Skinner, a forerunner of the behaviorist school of psychology, theorized that human beings behave the way they do because they have been conditioned by their environment to do so.

According to this view, all behaviors are therefore learned responses shaped by external factors.

Skinner pioneered the concept of operant conditioning, a process in which behavior is shaped by reinforcement and punishment.

Reinforcement pertains to those consequences of a behavior that make that behavior more likely to occur again in the future.

Positive reinforcement involves the provision of a pleasant or rewarding consequence, while negative reinforcement consists of removing an unpleasant circumstance after a certain behavior.

Both types of reinforcement condition a person to repeat the behavior in the time to come.

Punishment, in contrast with reinforcement, is anything that makes a behavior less likely to occur again in the future.

When a behavior is punished, the person learns to avoid doing the same behavior again.

You can use principles of conditioning to set up your life in such a way that your environment supports your self-discipline instead of undermining it.

Make an honest assessment of your environment and try to identify the external factors that influence and shape your behavior.

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B.F. Skinner believed that our behavior is heavily influenced by the consequences of that behavior, which come from our interactions with our environment.

If we seek to alter our behavior, we need to look at making changes to our environment and how we engage with it.

Psychologist B.F Skinner is primarily associated with the behaviorist school in psychology.

From the behaviorist’s perspective, what human beings did was largely down to one thing: the environment.

The idea was that the likelihood of a behavior occurring came down to the perceived consequences of that behavior— if you were punished every time you did X, for example, you would soon stop doing X.

In a nutshell, this is what Skinner called operant conditioning, and if you know anything about training dogs or getting toddlers to keep quiet, you’re probably already very familiar with its principles.

“Conditioning” is a process of interaction with the environment, which leads to learned behavior.

Another way of putting it is to say that all behaviors are learned responses to the environment.

If I consistently praise a small child for eating all their vegetables, I am providing an environmental stimulus that reinforces a certain behavior—i.e.

them eating their vegetables (that’s the theory, anyway).

We make associations between our behavior and its consequences, and according to behaviorist thought, this is how we learn to continue some behaviors and stop others.

Those behaviors that are reinforced persist and become stronger, while those that aren’t rewarded or are even actively discouraged will die away with time.

Behavior can be shaped by either positive or negative reinforcement.

A positive reinforcement is a reward that makes the preceding behavior more likely to occur again.

For example, receiving a bonus for working overtime will make people want to work overtime in the future.

Negative reinforcement is any consequence that involves the removal of an unpleasant experience, i.e.

the “reward” is to have something unpleasant removed.

If someone nags and annoys you to do something, you might do it just to have them stop nagging and annoying you.

Negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment, which doesn’t reinforce (i.e.

strengthen) anything but only weakens a behavior.

Punishment involves delivering an unpleasant stimulus during or directly after a behavior, and this soon leads to that behavior diminishing or disappearing over time.

To illustrate the difference between the two, consider a boy who finds the barking of their pet dog annoying.

When he rubs the dog’s tummy, he finds that the barking stops.

He is thus more likely to continue rubbing the dog’s tummy, as it gives him the benefit of not having to hear the barks.

That is negative reinforcement.

If the boy, however, ended up being bitten when he rubbed the dog’s tummy, he is unlikely to continue that action.

That is punishment.

A crucial difference between behaviorism and much other psychology is that it’s only interested in what can actually be observed and measured, making it easy to quantify and test.

Its goal is to have a science of behavior that can be used to predict behavior as well as shape and modify it.

To behaviorists, speculating about the inner workings of the mind along with its intangible impulses and supposedly unconscious drives was useless and would only lead to unfounded conclusions.

Behaviorism endeavors to stick to only observable behavior as the basis of its principles.

Therefore, the realms of emotion and motivation as they’re normally defined are acknowledged to exist but are absent from this theory.

Behaviorism holds that innate factors like personality or inherited characteristics are largely irrelevant; rather, when we are born, our mind is a “tabula rasa”—a blank slate.

What is written on that slate is everything we learn throughout our interaction with the environment.

This theory is essentially a theory of learning.

Skinner was influenced by Pavlov and his experiments with dogs.

Pavlov observed that dogs would salivate not only upon receiving food, but even prior to it—for instance, they would salivate at the sound of a bell that immediately preceded or accompanied the giving of the food.

Furthermore, he found that with enough repetitions of such pairing (i.e.

the bell and the food), the dogs would even salivate upon just hearing the sound of the bell, even when food was absent in the situation.

In other words, the dogs learned to associate the bell with the food, such that they involuntary reacted in the same way to the bell as they would to the food.

Pavlov was thus able to demonstrate that dogs’ behavior could be conditioned to develop a response (i.e.

salivating) to what used to be a neutral stimulus (i.e.

the bell)—a process that came to be known as classical conditioning.

This differs from Skinner’s operant conditioning, in that classical conditioning shapes behavior by pairing a certain stimulus with another, while operant conditioning influences behavior through consequences given after that behavior.

To further study operant conditioning, Skinner performed experiments in what is now known as a Skinner box.

For example, a rat or pigeon would be placed in a box and allowed to roam freely.

Whenever the animal turned its head to one side, a pellet of food was released.

The animal soon learnt that every time it turned its head, it was rewarded.

The behavior depended solely on the environment, and had nothing to do with the inner mental world of the pigeon or rat.

Skinner claimed that human beings behave in qualitatively the same way.

For example, a boss can expect more hardworking employees if he rewards hard work, and a naughty child will stop being naughty if they associate their behavior with a negative consequence like being grounded.

But is there really no difference between the way a pigeon learns to turn its head to get food and the way a person learns to do something a lot more complex? For Skinner, the answer was no—animals and humans learn the same way.

All behavior, no matter how complex, can be reduced to a stimulus- response association.

Now you may be wondering, in light of such a straightforward view on human nature, what to make of concepts such as unconscious drives, intrinsic motivation, will to power, and other innate qualities discussed in the previous chapters.

While different views in behaviorism assign different importance to such internal mental events, as well as the extent to which the environment really controls behavior, it is worth noting that the teachings of behaviorist thought need not totally restrict you from considering the influence of intrinsic factors in shaping your own behavior.

Even recent developments in genetics now mean we have to consider the role that innate characteristics play.

Take advantage of the practical techniques that behaviorism puts forward when it comes to structuring your environment effectively, and use it to fortify your efforts toward your goals.

What does Skinner’s Behaviorism have to do with Self-Discipline? Without delving too deeply into the different ways a man in a white lab coat can shape and manipulate the behavior of a rat in a box, how can we use the underlying principles of behaviorism to strengthen our self-discipline? Fundamentally, this perspective is one that centers the environment as the prime driver of behavior.

What we are exposed to is what will shape and mold us, for better or for worse.

You could imagine that your life is a very large and very complex Skinner box that you live inside of—what things does your environment “teach” you? What behaviors are consistently being rewarded or punished? In the Skinner box, the rat doesn’t make the “rules.” It isn’t in charge of the stimuli it receives, and doesn’t shape its own behavior—the scientist does.

But in a way, we human beings have the privilege of being able to use these principles of operant conditioning to shape our own behavior.

We can be both the rat and the scientist, one part of us understanding how we are motivated and how we learn, and another part setting up precisely those conditions that will best lead to the kind of learning we desire.

1 Crucially, the way behavior is described in Skinner’s world is one where self-discipline is irrelevant—animals don’t behave in certain ways because they choose to, but because they are conditioned to.

There is no free will or choice.

But self-discipline comes into the picture when we consider that even though the environment has a degree of control over us, we in turn can consciously control the environment.

This is a subtle but important distinction— when we behave unconsciously and without exercising our own free will, we will behave much as animals do, simply responding to stimuli in predictable ways.

Our behavior will be mindless, reactive, perhaps even addictive.

But, if we actively engage our self-discipline, we can take control of both the environment and ourselves.

We can give ourselves the opportunity to reflect critically on our behavior, and choose to set up the conditions we want.

1 An example will make this clearer.

Imagine you’re trying to learn a new language.

You know that it’s going to take consistent hard work, every day.

But you also notice that you’re frequently distracted every time you sit down to go through some new vocabulary or a grammar lesson.

You know you need to do something to strengthen your self-discipline.

So, you look at the study setup you have through the eyes of a behaviorist.

You notice something kind of simple: that you always study at the same time each day, around a half hour before bed.

You also notice that it’s at this time of day that you’re most tired and, on bad days, may even be feeling exhausted and grumpy.

You open your books, and you can’t force yourself through the lesson.

Your mind keeps wandering to when you can get to sleep, or, being exhausted, you ruminate on all the things that have happened in the day.

You realize you’ve actually paired a neutral stimulus (studying the language) with a negative one (feeling tired) and so have come to associate studying with being lethargic.

In fact, when you really stop to notice it, it’s almost as though merely opening the books is an act that signals to your brain that it’s nearly time for bed.

Inadvertently, you’ve trained yourself to feel tired whenever you start studying.

The solution is simple: study in the morning when you’re refreshed, comfortable, and have nothing distracting you.

Of course, this is an oversimplified example, but it does go to show that sometimes, these things are that simple.

While you may have tied yourself in knots trying to understand why you can’t push forward with a mere half hour of easy study, what your unconscious hang-ups could be, the details of your process and goals, etc., you may have missed the simple fact: your environment was hindering your ability to learn.

On the one hand, human beings are very much animals who follow basic laws of cause and effect, action and consequence.

But on the other hand, we can become aware of our more primal and behavioral drivers, ensuring that we’re doing what we can to support our learning.

Self-discipline is about having the willpower to push through the ways we’ve been conditioned, as well as the ability to actively try to recondition ourselves where possible.

We can use the same idea to ask if our broader environment is supporting the goals we set for ourselves.