Recognizing
And
Avoiding

ADDICTIVE TRAPS

Recognizing Addictive Traps. [There are a lot of different ways to present this material. Which way to choose depends on what part of the message you want to emphasize. This is based on B.F. Skinner�s experiments with pigeons. He was uniformly able to convert pigeons into compulsive gamblers-- addicts -- using a �Skinner Box.� It was our goal to help the kids recognize when they were walking into a Skinner box themselves, or accidentally constructing a Skinner box around another person. To do this we presented the data in the form that they were most likely to experience it! We sacrificed a bit in the area of connecting it to the red hot map on the square tile floor used for most of the other decision trap illustrations. Maybe there are ways to do both! What you see here is our choice in May 2001.] Sweep all the tea bags and red hots to the side of the board where the big pile of red hots is - the steep gradient side where the Roach Motel was. Introduce two new foam core poster board characters:

�What is this?� �What kind of bird do you think this is?� .... [Various answers] ..... �Yes, it kind of looks like all the birds I heard you all mention in some way or another.� �But, actually, it is a pigeon. Not just any pigeon. It is a SKINNY pigeon.� �There are two reasons it is drawn so skinny. One reason is that we are going to look at a bit of work that a man named B.F. Skinner did. His last name sounds like skinny.�

�The other reason it is drawn so skinny is because Skinner did much of his work with skinny pigeons.� �What do I mean: skinny pigeons?� As a first step to his experiments, he would starve (or put on a diet) the pigeons until they weighed only 80% of their normal body weight. That means that if you normally weighed 100 pounds, he would do the experiment when you weighed only 80 pounds. That is pretty starved. That must be pretty hungry feeling! Let�s talk about Mr. Skinner for a while. Back in the 1950�s, before you were born, before I was born, he was doing one of those rat maze experiments. �Who here has worked a maze? Like maybe at a restaurant on a paper placemat?� .... [Various answers] ..... �Sometimes they are hard to figure out. So they use mazes to test mice, or lab rats, for all sorts of experiments.�

Way back then, they did not have dry pellet mice or gerbil food like they do now. He had to make it himself. Mix all these ingredients together, and turn them into pellets � or rat treats! �This was tedious, slow, and boring.� �SO to keep from running out of food pellets, Mr. Skinner decided to put food pellets in the center of the maze ONLY every other time, instead of every time like everyone else in the lab did.� What he discovered was that the mice would run the maze just as fast getting food only every other time as they would run it if they got food every time! �This was interesting. Less work for him.� But the mice still took a while to run the maze. So he switched to studying pigeons in a special box. They can peck a lot faster than a rat can run a maze. We are going to show you what the most important parts of that �Skinner� box looked like and show you some of the stuff he discovered.

[Get people to animate the foam core: An expressive face on the pigeon animator; and, an impish fetal position like person behind the target. The idea is to make this target person NOT someone the kids would want to become. More weak and despicable than strong and admirable.] The skinny hungry pigeon can peck anywhere on the inside of the box he wants to and receive no food. [Show this] But the first time he pecks on the target, food comes out. [The target animator throws over a tea bag].

Now the pigeon has discovered that he can get food by pecking the target. Pigeon #1: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately) Pigeon #1: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately) Pigeon #1: �What a relief! I thought I was going to starve to death. Now I know how to get food whenever I want just by pecking the target. Whew! I can relax now,� the pigeon says while wiping his forehead. �Let�s see if the pigeon is as smart as the rat, who would run the maze twice to get one piece of food. Rewind. Reset. Start again with a brand new skinny, hungry pigeon (#2) in a cage:� Pigeon #2: �Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon #2: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon #2: �Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon #2: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon #2: ...thinks....then... �Peck. Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon #2: �Peck. Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon #2: �Peck. Peck.� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon #2: �What a relief! I thought I was going to starve to death. Now I know how to get food whenever I want just by pecking the target. Whew! I can relax now,� the pigeon says while wiping his forehead.

�It looks like the pigeon is as smart as that rat!� �They have a name for the way the target is rewarding the pigeon each time, or pairs of times, he pecks. It is called Fixed Ratio Reinforcement. All that means is that the exchange rate is fixed. The first pigeon came to expect one treat for each peck. He could understand that. In the second pigeon�s world, the expectation is two pecks per treat. Everything makes sense to him, too.� �Let�s see what a few other patterns produce in your everyday average hungry pigeon.� [Illustrate that with no reward ever, the pigeon loses interest] �That�s kind of obvious!� �Now lets try a different pattern... Let�s see if YOU can figure it out.� Pigeon: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats immediately). Pigeon: �Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck?� I am hungry!� Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats, rubbing tummy). Pigeon: �I know there is food here. I just have to figure out how to make this thing work.�

[Pigeon Pecking� continued�] Pigeon: �Peck?� Target: toss tea bag (pigeon eats frantically). Pigeon: �That�s more like it! Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck?� �Peck?� �Peck?� �Peck?� �Peck?� Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck? Peck? Peck? Peck? Peck?� (faster now) Target: nothing. Pigeon: �Peck, Peck, Peck, [target interrupts sequence with teabag!] Peck, Peck. Oh!� (Pigeon eats)� [This continues, as the pigeon gets frustrated, pecking faster and faster: up to 150 pecks per minute for five minutes until its beak breaks. (This is what the real experiments showed time and again!) Illustrate as much of this as you think you have to. We pounded the lower corner of the foam core on the ground simultaneous with each peck on the target, so the damage to that part of the pigeon was obvious and severe.] �WOW! That is sad. When a pigeon breaks its beak, it can�t open seeds any more, or dig for worms. Without help, that pigeon will die.� �This pigeon fell into an addictive trap. The pattern that did this is called: Variable Ratio Declining Positive Feedback.� �He was not seeing something he could understand like the 1st and 2nd pigeons did.�

That unlucky pigeon never really knew what to expect, but he knew he was hungry and the only food in his cage seemed to come from that dang target. �What are some things that present this kind of pattern to people?� �Slot machines in casinos. Yes, some casinos specifically program them to present this kind of pattern. The way they do that is by recognizing that newcomers are not so comfortable in casinos, and will tend to pay the machines by the door. These machines pay more frequently than the machines further inside, but it is still sort of random.� �Drugs? Cigarettes?� �Yes, your body tends to get used to chemicals, so it takes more of them to get the same effect once you are hooked. Drug pushers act just like the casinos: Easy until you are addicted � then TRAPPED! Some of the people who make cigarettes and coffee are said to have varied how strong they are in a random way to make the pattern more addictive � like the pattern that last pigeon saw.� If we wanted to draw a graph of this dangerous pattern, where each peck is shown as a big square, and the pigeon pecks through life as if stepping on one square after another, the dangerous pattern would look like this:

The addictive pattern is NOT a simple ramp like all those other graphs � boiling frogs and Aesop�s Fables. �It is hard to figure out what is going on! And the dangerous pattern does NOT always look exactly like that. It is random, but good, at first, to get you interested.� �Has anyone else ever seen another pattern that looks like this?� �Just like that pigeon was physically starved, at just 80% of his normal body weight, people can be emotionally starved.� �Have you ever seen unpopular people get this kind of response from popular, but mean people? Sometimes they are friendly. Maybe when no one else is around. Other times not friendly.� You can see this in romantic relationships when one person decides they don�t like the other person any more, or maybe they do, � or do not. �What can YOU do to avoid this trap?� Three things you can do: Maintain your emotional body weight. Pay attention to people you care about � and that should be everybody because like we saw with the people lost in the mountains and the cancer researchers: everybody influences everybody else. Don�t act like the target in beak breaking part of the experiment! If you remember when the pigeon was pecking until its beak broke � was that a good situation for the target?