Accommodated people – how does psychology explain it?

Hello friends!

I’m laughing right now because of a slightly odd situation. My internet connection is not working at the moment (I write this text in LibreOffice Writer). The problem is that, according to the company responsible, failures are happening in the city that sends the signal to São Lourenço, in this case, Três Corações.

But what makes me laugh is that since I don’t know when the signal will come back on, from time to time I try to open a page again, to see if it opens. I laugh because when we study behavioral psychology we learn that depending on the type of reinforcement, the extinction of the behavior takes longer to occur.

For example, if I knew when the internet would come back, I wouldn’t be clicking several times, from time to time, to know if it came back. But since I don’t know when it will come back, I try because a few times (yesterday and today) I was successful when trying to click – the internet was back.

This example demonstrates – like so many others – an important principle of our behavior. In cases where reinforcement is not for a fixed reason, the probability is that the extinction of the behavior takes longer.

Another example may make this relationship between reinforcement and extinction clearer.

Imagine someone who works for a fixed salary. Every 30th, after a month of salary, the employee receives his paycheck. That is, its reinforcement – ​​the consequence of the behavior will increase the behavior, so reinforcement – ​​is positive. He earns something, in this case, money.

Imagine someone who only receives commission for sales. The reinforcement at the end of the month may be greater than that of the salaried employee. However, the value is not fixed. It varies from month to month. One month it’s higher and the next month it’s lower.

Now let’s imagine a situation in which the two workers lose their reinforcement. Let’s assume that the first receives the proposal to only remain in the position if he starts to receive commission. While the second goes through a phase where he simply cannot sell anything.

Both lost their reinforcement. The first may soon give up on the new work structure. After all, he will no longer be paid for the time he spends at the establishment, but for the results. The other, however, will probably take a while to want to leave because he will start to imagine that it’s just a bad week, that this phase will pass, that it’s not a crisis.

In short, when we don’t know when we’re going to get reinforcement, we end up taking much longer to give up than when we do know or when reinforcement is more standardized or fixed.

Taking the same dichotomy to love relationships, we realize the following: there are relationships in which everything is always good (constant positive reinforcement) and there are others in which, from the beginning, there is an oscillation between reinforcements and punishments. One hour everything is fine, the next everything is wrong, fights, anger, discontent give way to gifts, parties and affection and vice versa.

In cases where the relationship is only good, often a single punishment is enough for the relationship to end. It could be a delay, a foul, a failure, a lie. That’s it… what was 100% pleasant becomes 100% unpleasant. Termination is quick, although it can also be painful.

In cases where there is a large oscillation between reinforcements and punishments, the tendency is for the termination to last for months, perhaps years or decades. The couple gets used to having bad moments and, as neither one knows when it will get better, they end up hoping that it will get better, as it happened before.

Accommodated people – a definition

From these situations we managed to derive a concept of accommodation. A person who is accommodated, with a terrible internet connection, with a work situation that worsens but the person continues, or with a relationship more or less is a person who has become accustomed to having a certain type of consequences for his behavior and does not expect any more.

I think many of you are aware of the famous bestseller Who Moved My Cheese. Basically, what the story tells is that from the change of external circumstances, there are two types of responses:

– the answer of the one who is accommodated, sometimes sad and sometimes angry, and remains in the same place, doing the same thing;

– the response of those who quickly understand that the situation has changed, or that there are better possibilities, and go in search of change.

The book was so successful because it describes all this through the story of some mice. Reinforcement is represented by cheese. Hence the title Who Moved My Cheese? “Who was it – what was it – that I can blame for not having whatever it was that was pleasant to me anymore?” This is the question.

But each one will give a response, in practice, in behavior that will either be the response of an accommodating person or the response of someone who expects and goes through changing his behavior and his environment.

I, for example, am going to change my internet provider, lol.

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