Conditioning: Sneak preview of my next book Only Human

Luke works as a bricklayer. He’s always worked in the trades, ever since leaving high school early because the only topic he enjoyed was mechanical engineering. He does his 9 to 5, bantering with his like-minded workmates, sensing his career path forward in a vague yet certain way. He will be “on the tools” for 5-10 years, then he’ll be promoted to a supervisory role, and eventually he’ll start his own business. He’ll get a mortgage to buy a house, marry a woman he meets through his friends or on a dating app. They’ll have “a few” kids. He’ll retire in his mid-sixties, playing golf on the weekends, or going fishing with his grandkids.

All of this was decided on the day Luke was born. Luke walks a path that was laid out for him by the universe, from the moment of conception until the moment his soul leaves his body. Only a significantly unusual event could change this story. It’s not a “bad” life. But it is a conditioned life. Luke has had no choice but to play his role, like an actor following the instructions of an invisible director.

In the late 1800s, a researcher named Ivan Pavlov discovered that he could make dogs salivate as if food had been placed in front of them simply by ringing a bell. He conditioned the dogs to associate the sound of the bell with receiving food, until he could remove the food and just use the bell to get the same response.

In the early 1900s, Edward Thorndike showed us that humans respond to a basic reward process, where we’re more likely to repeat a behaviour if it consistently gets satisfactory outcomes, and how this could be used to influence people into learning things. We would later discover that we could apply this to people against their will, essentially using rewards to force them to act in certain ways (e.g. gambling machines).

A few decades later, behaviourists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner showed us that we could accurately control the behaviours of others through operant conditioning - using specific combinations of reward and punishment to make people behave in certain ways, regardless of the person’s original beliefs about such behaviour. We discovered that “voluntary” behaviour eventually can be moved into controlled behaviour, and if interviewed, the person would report that they “chose” to do it, even though it could be clearly demonstrated that they were programmed to do it.

There are famous experiments you can look up online to this day. One I saw recently had a waiting room full of actors. A bell would ring, and they would all stand up for a few seconds and then sit back down. Non-actors joined the waiting room, and they would at first be confused by the behaviour. Then within a few rounds they too would stand up for the bell. No one had told them to do this, or explained why it was happening. Eventually, all the actors would leave and be replaced, one by one, until only non-actors were in the room. All of them continued to stand for the bell. None knew why they were doing it. They were conditioned from rewards and punishments during their entire life to conform to the crowd, no matter how senseless the behaviour.

And if you think you wouldn’t stand for the bell, because you’re so special and different, you need to check your ego. Like any other animal (especially mammals), humans can be controlled. Easily. Through what we’ll refer to in this book as conditioning, our “choices” are shaped and determined by our perception - consciously and subconsciously - of the risk to reward ratio. When we think something often gets a “good” response, we’re far more likely to do it than when we believe something often gets a “bad” response.

Conditioning explains nearly every single action you see any person do. We go to war, get married, choose career paths, and eat at specific intervals throughout the day without ever really knowing why. We don’t see the cause-and-effect pathway leading back to early childhood. We don’t realise that we struggle with relationships because our parents made us cry ourselves to sleep. We don’t see that our patriotism comes from movies rather than a critical assessment of our country’s qualities. We believe our taste of music is based on sound rather than fitting in with our high school peers.

Just notice the “coincidences” you see every day.

Notice how a person’s religious beliefs always seem to match the dominant religion from where they were raised. Notice how a person’s fashion style seems to align with their local cultural norms, or reflect the country they enjoyed travelling to, or repeats what gets them the most sexual attention. Notice how you seem to be attracted to the same characteristics that others from your country are generally attracted to, and how different these preferences are compared to other countries with different cultures.

Notice how everyone is OK with alcohol but thinks heroin is taboo, even though alcohol is more lethal by far. Notice how everyone goes to work and comes home at the same time, even though this causes immense traffic problems. Notice how people tolerate mistreatment when it comes from “family”, even though setting strong boundaries would improve not only their own quality of life but also the health of those relationships.

And notice how we all tend to act in a way that gets a certain familiar response.

If you’re scared of getting “in trouble”, you’ll notice your behaviour is often the repeat of that which got positive responses from your parents and teachers growing up, like being reliable, performing to a near-perfect standard, and agreeing with authority figures.

If you like “belonging” to your peer group, you might notice the opposite behaviour - the kind that rebelled against authority to the delight of your friends in school. You’re resistant, defiant, unruly. You try to go against what is approved of. You like to show off. You enjoy shocking people with your anti-social antics. If something is popular you immediately scorn it, before even investigating deep enough to understand it. I remember refusing to watch South Park simply because everyone was raving about it. I didn’t even watch a single clip just to check if it really was that funny.

If being noticed led to bullying when you were a kid, you now probably avoid the limelight and tend to hide in the background as a wallflower. If being noticed got rewarded, you tend to perform, and you get anxious when you aren’t the center of attention. Maybe you fluctuate depending on who’s around, like the guy who shows off to his friends but goes quiet in the presence of family.

Notice the patterns. Notice the hidden rules you seem to follow. While it feels like you randomly make decisions based on the specific situation you’re in, someone watching you from a detached distance over a long period of time would be able to accurately predict your choices before you even made them.

I know if you’re anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and believe we should be hard on criminals, you will vote conservative. I know that if you’re pro-choice, enthusiastic about women’s rights, and think rich people should be taxed more, then you’ll vote liberal. Your decision has already been made. You can’t surprise me.

And the reasons you have these preferences in the first place can be explained by conditioning (and genetics to some extent). Your political views will have been shaped by your childhood experiences, your family’s belief system (you conform or rebel against - either way they control you), and even your age. I know you’re more likely to be liberal when you’re a teenager, and more likely to be conservative in your fifties.

You’re predictable because someone could easily guess your decisions based on the kind of reward and punishment conditioning you were exposed to. If you tell me that you associate blonde hair with a bully who tormented you in school, I’ll know that you probably find brunettes more attractive. If you tell me that your parents always made a big celebration out of you doing well in school, I’ll know that you probably went to university later. I know that if one visit to a restaurant goes well, you’re much more likely to revisit that restaurant than try a new one.

When you come to understand that everything you and everyone else does is a result of conditioning, not only will everyone’s behaviour make much more sense to you (and so relieve you of frustration, confusion and disappointment), you’ll be given the opportunity to break your conditioning and discover your freedom.

I remember sitting in a lecture in my first few weeks at university and just thinking, “Why am I here?” It was a rude moment of awareness, where I realised that I had signed up three years of my life to university and I didn’t really know why. It felt like I had been carried by some kind of invisible current, like a stick floating powerlessly down a stream. Even my choice of degree - Communications - had no sense of conscious desire to it. I knew there was some vague hope of meeting attractive women hoping to become news anchors, but besides that the only explanation was that I did well in English at high school and this was a natural progression of that skillset.

It was my first real moment where I became aware of what it meant to be conditioned, although I couldn’t have explained it at the time. It felt terrifyingly automatic. I felt enslaved by it. So strong was the feeling that I impulsively went to the Dean and within an hour had switched all my papers over to a Bachelors in Psychology. In all my education history, this was the first time I felt like I had made the choice about what I was going to learn. Everything before this had been based on long-standing pre-determined preferences: the likelihood of being with friends, how well I was likely to do in the topic, what seemed likely for securing a safe career path, and what tended to get approval from my parents.

Ironically, it was this change in degree that led to me being educated about conditioning and cognitive biases, the two most important topics I’ve ever been taught. Before this change, I had been walking the same path of Luke in the example above, following a secret collection of rules and laws that had pre-written my entire life’s path. But unlike Luke, I was lucky enough to experience an unusual variable; something, somehow, woke me up.

In this book, I hope to provide that variable to you, too, so that you might have a chance at living an unconditioned life. While I don’t believe in “free will”, which we will discuss soon, I do believe there’s a difference between being unconsciously conditioned and being self-aware, and that this difference can massively impact your quality of life.

And I hope to help relieve you of the rage and stress you often experience as a result of other people’s behaviour. You’re so often dismayed and annoyed by the stupid, selfish and harmful acts of others. I will show you that understanding why they do what they do is the path to acceptance, so that you can remain unaffected by the inevitable shortcomings of human beings. When you come to see that all behaviour is conditioned, you’ll realise no one is really to blame for what they do; like toddlers or brain damage victims, people simply cannot do better because they lack the ability to disobey their conditioning. And you can learn to respect a person (i.e. be at peace with the reality of human nature) without having to tolerate their harmful behaviour.

To move forward with this book you only need to accept one truth: we are all conditioned. Our decisions are heavily influenced by the visible and invisible reward/punishment systems we’ve been subjected to by society and varying degrees of luck throughout our lives, particularly during childhood while our brain was still forming. Most of our decisions can be predicted based on what we’ve learned are “good” and “bad” outcomes, and accepting this is the first humble step towards self-awareness, and ultimately, self-control.

And while Luke’s life isn’t so bad in the big scheme of things, the problem is that he may one day wake up - probably too late - and realise he has no idea why he has “chosen” this life. He might sit up suddenly in a cold sweat late one night, wondering if he actually loves his wife, or enjoys his job, or wants to live in his country. He might be overwhelmed with doubt and a vague but powerful sense of regret; a feeling that he is missing out on his real life.

We don’t need to live in any one specific way to have a “good life”. With the right perspective, almost any lifestyle pathway can be enjoyable. But for this to happen, we must have a sense that we know why we’ve made the choices we’ve made.

Otherwise, we’re no better than slaves.

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Conditioning: Sneak preview of my next book Only Human