Presidential Election, 2020, a Behavioral Perspective
Before starting, I'd like to pay tribute to the life of Michael Palmer, Ed.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist, who died of cancer last year. He was 69 years old. I have been fortunate to have many excellent mentors over the years, mostly psychologists, but Dr. Palmer was the longest and most influential. He and I met for 2-3 hours a week for 8 years, and I knew him from staff meetings for 6 years prior to that. A behaviorist, Dr. Palmer had a concise way of looking at things. He also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Psychology. Perhaps most of all, he prided himself for his carpentry and construction skills, which he passed on to his sons. In a parallel way, he looked at Psychology as akin to carpentry or Engineering. Although he was a somewhat religious and very spiritual man, he was especially enamored with the material behaviorists, Joseph Wolpe and B.F. Skinner. He looked at human problems the way an engineer might think about diagnosing and fixing a piece of machinery. He scoffed at many of the post-modern developments in counseling as "a bunch of hooey." He was also about 70% skeptical of Psychiatry. For me, he was a reliable source of fresh perspectives. For example, he once remarked that the sole purpose of staff meetings was "to reinforce the pecking order." Initially, I found his comments to be humorous, original, and surprising. Over time, though, I came to realize that he was not just trying to be plucky or rebellious. He analysed situations and problems, and then provided unblinking commentary and guidance. He gave me his dusty books from the 60s and 70s, which I have slowly read and tried to absorb. Often, he talked about things I struggled to understand. For example, he often talked about "extinction loops." From my own education, I knew about "extinction," the gradual fading away of a conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus, i.e. Pavlov's dogs slowly losing the salivation response to the bell. Or, from an operant-conditioning perspective, "extinction" would be the gradual fading away of the influence of a reward or punishment. But I had never heard of an "extinction loop," and I struggled to understand what he meant. Lately, I have been thinking about the developing presidential election, and I realized this is an example of an "extinction loop."
My limited understanding of behaviorism assumed that all repeated behaviors are either rewarded or punished. I did not understand that there was a third alternative, "the extinction loop." For example, from my limited understanding, a behavior that ostensibly did not seem to have a reward or punishment meant that I simply was not looking hard enough. Or, I needed to broaden my perspective on what was a reward or punishment. Thus, the acting out child who seems to work against his own self-interest would be responding to negative attention. Normally, children respond to positive attention. However, if no positive attention is available, they may instead seek negative attention. In other words, what we normally think of as punishment--spanking, for example--might be reinforcing for some children. The children thrive on the negative attention. In Dr. Palmer's words, some children are "addicted to negative parental attention." The same could be said for the children who enjoy the notoriety of regularly going to the Principal's office. But that's not the whole story.
Often, when a person experiences the removal of the reinforcing response, the person responds with even more pronounced behaviors. The obvious example would the the Heroin addict who strives in vain to recreate that first high. She uses more and more of the drug, but never achieves anything like the initial dopamine rush. Over time, the addictive behavior becomes more and more extreme and, if it weren't for tolerance the difficulty in obtaining the drug, would almost inevitably result in death. Another example, perhaps less obvious, might relate to hair styles. For a young person, some long or short haircuts can illicit a lot of positive reinforcement. With age, however, the frequency of positive reinforcement for the long or short hair decreases. For us older folks, a long or short haircut is no longer quite as cute. One would think that the normative response would be to regress toward the mean, having either less long or less short hair. But that is not what happens. In a futile effort to regain that positive reinforcement, the hair becomes either progressively longer or shorter. Perhaps in a similar way, the extreme hair styles of punk rockers or hippies might not be best accounted for by reinforcement, but as an "extinction loop." They make incrementally more extreme attempts to gain reinforcement for a hairstyle that once garnered positive attention. Also, in some cases, punk rockers or hippies may have a strong aversion for mainstream culture, which even further fuels their extreme appearance.
For ethical and simplicity reasons, behavioral research tends to use animal subjects. Many of the studies on extinction loops used pigeons. For example, Gerry (1971) measured a phenomenon called "pitch shift differential" in pigeons who learned to distinguish between two pitches, one lower and one higher, in response to the reward of a food pellet. The study involved two very hungry pigeons that researchers trained over an extended period (36, 3 hour sessions) to respond to the higher pitch but not the lower one, from a range of pitches provided by an occilator. The researches rewarded the pigeons responding to a narrow range of pitches around the target frequency; in 3 sessions, the researchers also aversively trained one of the pigeons with a mild electric shock in response to the lower pitch. The result was that both pigeons responded in a rough bell curve to the pitches around the target frequency. Then, the researches removed the rewarding food pellets from both subjects; they also removed the electric shock condition from the second pigeon. The result was a marked change in both pigeon's responses, and the pitch shift differential was even more pronounced in the pigeon that had received the aversive conditioning. In fact, especially with the added aversive conditioning, the bell curves of their response rates no longer overlapped with the bell curve from before. The pigeons came to respond to pitches in a range that no longer corresponded with the target pitch that would have resulted in a reward. In other words, if after a period of extinction response, the reinforcing food pellet were reintroduced at the target frequency, the pigeons would no longer respond at that range. They would have to be re-trained to respond to the target frequency. The pitch shift differential was even more pronounced when the aversive condition of the electric shock was part of the conditioning.
What does this have to do with the current election? Well, much to the dismay of Democrats, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. In other words, the Democrats were not rewarded by having their candidate win. As a result, they are experiencing an extinction response. Despite their best efforts, they were not rewarded by a victory. What happened next was interesting. Rather than take a hard look at why they might have lost (not appealing to middle-class voters, ignoring the rust-belt, and pushing for a globalist agenda), they sought to blame the other side.
This approach is not all bad (save that topic for another blog), but the overarching approach of the Democrats and most of the news media since November 2016 is to aversively condition the American people into hating the President. Metaphorically, the news media and Democrats are repeatedly attempting to show you a picture of Donald Trump coupled with a electric shock. In short, CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and NPR are in the process of aversively conditioning the American people to hate the president. But here's what is interesting.
For the most part, the Democrats are preaching to a choir of Democrats. The people who have become the most aversively conditioned to the President are fellow Democrats. Further, even though they gained some seats in the mid-term election, they have not completely changed their circumstances as the Senate is still under Republican control. Here's where pitch shift differential enters the scenario. Two things are happening simultaneously. First, the Democrats are not in a position of power as they sorely lost the 2016 Presidential election. Second, they are creating an aversive training condition regarding the opposing party's candidate. This is creating a pitch shift differential. The net result is that the Democrats are moving further and further away from the center and toward extreme left-wing positions--late term abortions, medical coverage for undocumented aliens, open borders, and socialism. These are all losing issues, alienating to most mainstream Americans. And the more they push to demonize the president, via impeachment inquiries and the Muller report, the more left-wing their platform becomes. The Democrats are not acting in their own best interests, and the result is an alienation of the voting public. Sure, they may bring out their base, but the majority of Americans will either vote for Trump or stay at home.
Of course, behaviorism in itself has no political agenda. One could say that the whole Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh phenomenon of the 90s was aversive conditioning against Bill Clinton. And not coincidentally, the Republicans moved markedly further to the right in that time, resulting in the Tea Party movement. So this phenomenon can cut either way. It makes sense that the see-saw effect of most Presidential elections changing parties every 4 to 8 years could relate to an extinction loop. En mass, people seldom act as rational determinants of their own destinies.
Prediction for 2020: As a rule, in Presidential elections, the more centrist candidate wins. I don't think any of the front-runners, even Joe Biden, understand this. The only candidate from the Democrats who could win is Tim Ryan from Ohio, but I don't think he has the name recognition yet. He would make a good VP candidate, though. (Personally, I don't like him, but I think he could win under the right circumstances.) Considering the Democrats mass migration to the left, Trump is more centrist than almost all of the Democrat field, with the possible exception of Ryan. I even think Trump is arguably more centrist than most of the Republicans from 2016. This is a tremendous strength for him. Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling off the left side of the map. Trump will win in 2020. Tim Ryan has the potential to re-emerge in 2024.
