How to stop a behavior? Behavioral Extinction

In what is called ‘operant extinction’, a response becomes less and less frequent when reinforcement no longer takes place. 🇧🇷SKINNER, 1953, p.69).

Hello friends!

It is very common to realize how it is not so simple to create a new habit and, at the same time, how difficult it can be to end an old habit. In behavioral psychology, we understand operant behavior as that which operates in the environment and transforms it, that is, it brings a given consequence to the organism, to the person. Reason why a behavior remains – or is extinguished, ceases to exist – when the consequences change.

An example from social networks. A couple of years ago, when we created a page on facebook, we managed to interact with 15% of the fans, on average, with each publication. Thus, on a page with 10,000 fans, it was possible to share a photo or a link and 1,500 people would view that content. If it was a page with 1,000,000 fans, 150,000 would view it.

In order to profit more from paid advertisements, with facebook ads, the boost, facebook has reduced this reach and now the average is 1%. With that, thousands of pages were abandoned because the previous answer, to get 15% of interaction, was drastically reduced. However, due to “habit”, many page owners still continued to post, even though they saw the drop in results.

This is a simple example to show that if the consequences change, the behavior also changes. A great professor of behavioral psychology I had in college gave us the following example of extinction:

The courtship ends. She finished, he wanted to continue. He takes a break, but calls back to try to reconcile. However, she really doesn’t want to go back… what should she do?

– answer all calls

– answer some calls

– do not answer any calls

Obviously, if she answers all the calls, he’s likely to think she still wants to keep in touch, even regardless of the content of the conversations. If she does not answer any calls, it is extremely likely that, over time, the number of calls per day will decrease, until it ceases and reaches zero.

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The curious thing is that if she answers a few times and doesn’t answer others, he tends to call even more than he would if she answered all of them. In other words, intermittent positive reinforcement tends to maintain the behavior (and even increase it) longer than fixed-ratio positive reinforcement. These are technical terms, but it’s pretty simple to understand.

If she picks up a few, he’ll never know when she’ll pick up and when she won’t pick up. So it will take much longer for him to stop calling.

So my behavioral psychology professor’s response was that if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to come back, the best answer she could give would be to not answer any calls. Thus, his behavior would die out in a few days or weeks.

If we take this logic to Facebook, we will see that they used the intermittent reinforcement scheme so that page owners would not stop posting at all. As we still have a page and we keep posting a day, I still see that Facebook sometimes raises the result from 1% of fans to more, depending on other factors, such as the number of shares or comments. The idea is to maintain the behavior, even if the result is lower, so that, in other circumstances, the page owner pays for the ad to reach a larger fan base.

How to stop a behavior?

Therefore, we begin to have a simple indication of how to stop a behavior: modifying the consequences that it provokes. An example we’ve seen a lot is of parents who discover that their children are smoking: they take the pack of cigarettes and make their son or daughter smoke the whole pack. The goal? Creating such an unpleasant physical sensation that the response associated with smoking is one of discomfort.

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The idea is to make the smoking response change from a positive consequence (perhaps due to the influence of the group that reinforces the smoking behavior) to an aversive response. Consequently, by changing the consequence, you change the behavior.

This would be no different than someone who loves to play a certain kind of sport and at some point gets injured. Although the injury or injury is healed, if the person associates the sport with the distressing event, there will be a tendency to stop the behavior of practicing it.

In technical terms, Skinner stated the following:

In what is called ‘operant extinction’, a response becomes less and less frequent when reinforcement no longer takes place. 🇧🇷SKINNER, 1953, p.69).

For example, you used to go to a party for the music. The music is what reinforces your behavior to go to that party. The organizers change the DJ and soon the music changes. The tendency is that, as reinforcement disappears, the behavior also disappears.

In that sense, it doesn’t matter what the reinforcement is. If you went to a party because of your friends and your friends stop going to that party, the scheme is the same: you stop going to that party because of the absence of the reinforcer (in this other example, the friends. In that other, the music ).

What is incredible is that we can change both our behavior and our relationships with other people by knowing more about what maintains and what diminishes X behavior.

I can learn that if I don’t answer any telemarketing calls to get a credit card, they will soon stop calling. If an annoying neighbor rings the company almost every day, I can make him stop by simply not answering once. No matter how insistent the telemarketer is or how persevering my neighbor is, in the absence of the expected response, the behavior will die out.

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Of course, many times we will need specialized help to understand these behavioral processes, ours and others. Even trained psychologists often go to therapy to understand what is going on and how to change their behavior.

But, in a synthetic summary and for simpler situations, to end the behavior just understand:

– what holds it (what is reinforcement, what is “gained”)

Knowing what the reinforcement is and what the good or positive consequence is, we will be able to replace the consequence and achieve it in another way. For example, a person who loves the sensation of a manufactured candy discovers that it is not the candy itself, but the sensation.

Knowing that the industry puts levels of fat and sugar so that the brain doesn’t know when to stop, you can replace the industrialized candy with a homemade one. The positive consequence will be obtained, however, we will not fall into the induced “addiction” cycle.

The guy who wanted to continue dating will realize, over time, that he can get the same kind of reinforcement with someone else. The owner of the Facebook page will look for other ways of publicizing his business and, thus, the change happens.

So whatever behavior we want to change, we can find out what we gain from the behavior and look for another way to gain the same, through healthier or adaptive behavior.

Questions, suggestions, comments, please write below!

Bibliographic reference

SKINNER, BF (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Mc Millan.