One of the most challenging “engineering challenges” we have to confront as human beings in relationships is what often get called “negative cycles,” “bad patterns,” or “downward spirals.” Basically there’s this weird thing that happens, where – even if we really like each other and genuinely want the best for one another – as we continue to interact over time, we find ourselves behaving in ways that have significant disadvantages for both of us. Often we really want to do things differently, but we find ourselves confusingly “stuck,” acting against our collective best interest, even when we both “know better.”
I previously discussed the “Functional Lens” in this post. Today, I want to talk about a few of the core mechanisms within that framework that are particularly important for relating in the wild.
Reinforcement
First, to review a bit, the functional lens rests on the concept of “reinforcement learning” where behavior which is “reinforced” by some positive outcome becomes more likely in the future. My behavior in our relationship is reinforced when it prompts behavior from you that’s desirable to me, or else serves some productive function for me. Though “positive outcome” is a convenient shorthand, it’s important to keep in mind that when we’re talking about people – with all of our complex psychology – the “reinforcement value” of a given outcome is dependent on the individual’s lived experience—what they have “learned” to be reinforced by, or less technically, what that outcome “means” to them.
So while we intuitively think of material “reward” (like food, or money) as sources of reinforcement, psychological rewards are often even more relevant. In relationship, we “reinforce” each other with things like approval or cooperation, or more generally, you “reinforce” my behavior any time you respond to it by doing something I “like,” and vice versa. To the extent that our relationship proceeds this way – desirable behavior reinforcing desirable behavior – togetherness is likely feeling pretty good. If only it were that simple.
One major complication is that there are all kinds of ways my behavior might be reinforced even when the “reinforcing outcome” comes with serious downsides. There’s an idea from cognitive psychology called “confirmation bias” which basically refers to the human tendency to give greater weight to evidence that confirms our existing beliefs about the world than evidence which challenges those beliefs. In terms of reinforcement learning, a similar idea is that we may be reinforced simply by experiencing something that confirms our beliefs, which makes intuitive sense if you think about it… we all know how good it feels to be proven right. The tricky part is that I may be reinforced when my existing understanding of the world is “proven right” even if I don’t otherwise enjoy the evidence that confirms this understanding. To put that in a relational context, the confirmation of a belief that I’m the better partner in our relationship might be reinforced when you behave badly, which would then incentivize me to behave in ways that promote your bad behavior.
For example, you might actually really enjoy it if I did my fair share of the household chores, but your behavior of cleaning things while silently resenting me might be reinforced by continual confirmation that I am just as lazy as you always thought, even though it might be true that I would be more than happy to do the dishes if you asked me directly.
Punishment and Avoidance
We’ve been talking a lot about how behavior is shaped by things that “feel good,” but what about outcomes that feel bad? If pleasurable outcomes make behavior happen more often, do painful ones make it go away? Yes and no… it’s complicated.
It’s common to assume that punishment is simply the opposite of reinforcement, as when “reward and punishment” are spoken of as a matched pair. But, while punishment does technically reduce the frequency of the punished behavior, it does so not by “un-reinforcing” the punished behavior, but instead by reinforcing a competing sort of behavior—namely, the behavior of avoiding the punishment. That little distinction turns out to make a huge difference, particularly when it comes to interpersonal behavior.
So when someone is punished for doing something, the punishment does not directly decrease the tendency to do the punished thing, but the person do become more likely to avoid the punishment. Sometimes, there’s little difference between avoiding punishment and not doing the punished behavior, like when you are punished with a burning sensation for putting a part of your body in an open flame. Often, though, a given behavior is only punished under certain circumstances, for example, getting a speeding ticket doesn’t tend to do much about one’s tendency to drive fast (at least for very long), but does strengthen the behavior of checking for cops when doing so. So while punishment may make the punished behavior disappear in the present context, the behavior tends to “go underground” and reappear elsewhere. The phenomenon of “passive aggression” can be understood, for example, as behavior which “avoids” punishment for overt aggression, while still getting the “aggressive” point across.
Punishment, and its resultant avoidance behavior, also characteristically has a number of additional (and often problematic) consequences. For one thing, it tends to produce emotional byproducts—often some combination of fear, anxiety, frustration and anger. These emotional experiences may be problematic in and of themselves, as when fear of an anticipated punishment becomes so overwhelming that you can’t do much productive behavior in the first place. Anxiety can also become attached to both the punished behavior and behaviors associated with it, like simply imagining behaving in the punished way, or being in the same circumstance where you were previously punished. After I said something cutting in response to you doing something I found annoying, I might find you avoiding interacting with me at all, not only of doing the annoying thing. When your boss punishes you for working too slowly, or making a mistake while working, you may begin to feel anxious simply while working, and there’s a good chance the quality of your work will suffer, especially over the long term. Being punished also tends to make one angry at the punisher, which I doubt I have to explain is typically not conducive to effective collaboration.
Avoidance also has the potential to take the place of otherwise productive behavior, in that avoiding punishment is often a functionally different and mutually exclusive task from seeking reinforcement in the form of pleasure, meaning, or connection. To take an extreme example, punishing someone for not loving you will be much more likely to cause them to avoid you than to cause them to love you. This also has a lot to do with the now culturally ubiquitous idea of “emotional vulnerability,” in that what you do to avoid rejection and judgment also typically avoids things like connection and intimacy.
One of the big reasons avoidance is such a problem is that it is easy to reinforce even when it’s no longer serving a productive function. When your partner reacts badly to something you say, maybe just because they had a bad day at work, you might avoid that topic in the future despite the fact that on a different day it might be totally “safe” to do so. If you’ve been cheated on, you might “avoid” future infidelity by checking in with your partner frequently whenever they are out of the house. As long as you don’t get cheated on again, you may conclude that the check-ins are working, even if your partner wasn’t going to cheat anyway, and might even be more likely to, given their resentment about you monitoring their whereabouts.
To make matters worse, partly because of our (often overrated) human rationality and sense of justice, we have a tendency to punish “good behavior” in a range of situations, typically with undesirable consequences. When you tell a relative you wish you were in more contact with “you never call,” when they finally do, or you tell your partner “I told you so,” when they admit they were wrong, you are likely punishing the exact behavior you wanted them to exhibit. This is not to say that these responses aren’t morally justified, or emotionally understandable, just that they will tend to cause your partners to avoid calling you, or admitting you were right. If I’m angry at you, but you’ve been keeping your distance, I may be tempted to “let loose” when you finally come back close enough for me to feel safe doing so, and insodoing teach you to avoid approaching me in the first place.
Behavioral Control in Relationships
As humans, if we want to remain alive and in working order, we’re all inevitably stuck with the ongoing task of “getting our needs met,” which inevitably depends on the cooperation of other people. Viewed functionally, everything you do in interaction with others as you go through your day – all of the moment-to-moment, conscious and unconscious decisions you make about who to interact with and how to behave with them – functions to influence other people to behave – very broadly speaking – the way you want them to. So in a sense, this is all about getting your needs met, if you include needs for things like “emotional connection based in deep mutual understanding,” or “a sense of belonging within an altruistically-interdependent community.”
That’s all to say that we’re all in the business of controlling other people, in the sense of influencing them to cooperate in meeting our needs. The big question is how we go about that attempt at influence, or in other words, our “control strategy.” So, we each have our unique collection of needs, and we need to have them met, and we have an infinite range of potential strategies to choose from, with a range of different consequences. To put it simply, especially if you’re looking at relationships toward the intimate-partner end of the spectrum, punishment is best minimized, which leaves us with the simple question of what it looks like in practice to employ reinforcement rather than punishment in controlling your partner’s behavior.
The central issue is what to do when I want my partner to behave differently—differently here meaning anything from “picking up some groceries” to “showing more interest in me as a person.” A convenient way to think of the “reinforcement” approach would be making it in your partner’s interest to do the thing you want—typically by reacting in such a way that it ends up feeling good to them to do the thing. This could mean anything from verbal appreciation, to ongoing participation in a mutually enjoyed activity, or anything that works for your unique partner, as a person.
But even if my intention is reinforcement, punishment has a funny way of sneaking into almost every interaction in some form, made almost totally unavoidable by the fact that it’s your partner’s perception of a punishing outcome that actually “does the damage.” One reason this is so tough is that it’s naturally much easier to notice the things you don’t like than the things you do. When you want something to be different about how your partner is behaving, it’s probably because something about their current behavior is causing you noticeable discomfort, and that discomfort and sense of indignation about having been made to feel bad by someone who’s supposed to be making you feel the exact opposite of that makes it easy to go about the attempt to modify there behavior in counterproductive ways. It tends to feel more vulnerable to admit you’re having an impact on me, and humbly request your mercy than to complain about what you’re doing wrong, or explain why you owe me that thing after all, or just hint at what I want, or silently, resentfully, ruminate about how any reasonable person would know to do that thing automatically.
One of the reasons that punishment is so hard to avoid is that it tends to feel good to administer, especially when your relationship is not feeling particularly good at the moment. When you’re annoyed about something annoying your partner just did, it feels good to make a sharp comment or a grunt of exasperation… even if it doesn’t feel good to see their pouty face or hear their sharp rejoinder afterward.
Another common method of relational punishment – at least when you’re dishing it out – just feels like “telling the truth.” That is, when I do something you don’t like, you might find your first impulse being to “point out” what I’m doing, using a descriptive label for my behavior, like “you’re being clingy,” or explain to me why what what I’m doing is misguided, irrational, unfair, or otherwise “wrong,” or why an alternative behavior is in fact what I should do. Alternatively, it’s common to respond to unwelcome behavior with an ostensibly curious: “Why are you doing that?” or “Why are you doing that that way?” which tends to prompt a “justification” of the behavior from the source of the unwanted behavior, and an ensuing argument about the validity of that justification.
Love and Punishment
On that point, one of the main ways punishment contributes to repetitive destructive cycles is that especially when it comes to relationships with people we love, the effects of our punishment on loved ones tend to be punishing to us. One often-cited characteristic of the state of loving someone is that we tend to be reinforced by their happiness and wellbeing, and punished by their suffering. It feels good to see your loved one happy, and it feels bad to see them in pain. Especially when it’s our own unintentional punishment that caused the suffereing, one can quickly accumulate all of the “emotional byproducts” of anxiety, resentment, frustration, and helplessness simply in response to my partner’s response to my punishment, leading to another meta layer of punishment avoidance, where one becomes pathologically avoidant of doing something that their partner might experience as punishing.
More generally, the state of love, at least the way we’re functionally defining it here, opens up the whole issue of punishing my partner with my pain, as a control strategy. This might be best exemplified in the idea of “guilt tripping,” but a more technical label might be “coercive masochism.” Those labels frame it as a conscious process, though, which it often isn’t… I may find I can “punish my partner into” doing something simply by being persistently unhappy as long as they’re not doing it. The problem is that when this “cooperation” is accomplished by punishing non-cooperation with unhappiness-by-proxy, especially if it’s something your partner really doesn’t want to do, they may end up being worn down into avoiding the ongoing punishment with resentful submission to the implicit request, or while otherwise holding their nose.
Before, I used the example of the typically dumb idea of trying to get someone to fall in love with me by complaining about them not being in love with me. Similarly, if your feelings are hurt that I didn’t offer to make you a sandwich when I was making one for myself, you’re likely to get better results, by simply asking for a sandwich or asking me to check with you if I think of it in the future; rather than pointing out that you always offer when you’re making yourself something, or by reminding me how often I fail to think of these kinds of basic gestures of human caring. In anecdotal experience, direct, warm requests tend to avoid a lot of the unintentional punishments that can accompany the various ingenious ways we find to ask without asking—which of course relies on being aware of what you want in the first place, which is a topic for a future post.
The primary use of punishment as a means of managing others behavior is, as a whole, generally referred to as coercive control. In social psychology, there’s a well-worn research finding summarized as “coercion elicits resistance” and this is perhaps more relevant in intimate relationships than anywhere else. Even if this resistance is not expressed in overt conflict, the private resistance of “resentment” nearly always appears in reaction to the experience of coercive control of interpersonal behavior.
But just as patterns of punishment and avoidance can be self-reinforcing, so too can ones of mutual benefit. If punishment underlies destructive cycles, then constructive cycles rely on mutual positive reinforcement.
Extinction and Exposure
If not with punishment, then, how else are you supposed to get your partner’s bad behavior to go away? In the functional view, this other mechanism is known as “extinction,” fittingly mirroring the process by the same name in natural selection. When a behavior goes unreinforced, like a species whose members die at a higher rate than they reproduce, it gradually becomes less likely over time. But what does it mean, functionally, to stop reinforcing your partner’s unwanted behavior? This is kind of a tall order, given that we’re generally not aware of how we are reinforcing our partner’s bad behavior (or else we probably wouldn’t be reinforcing it) made more complicated by the fact that most things that intuitively come to mind when I imagine “withholding reinforcement” would be very likely to fall right into the “punishment” camp, at least in terms of how I imagine a partner experiencing them.
This is another place where the idea of “reinforcement by function” is useful in the sense that any behavior which is persisting over time is meeting some need for one of you or for the relationship as a whole. The related idea of “replacing the function” can be a useful way to look at it, in that if an unwanted behavior can be out-competed by a different behavior which is more enjoyable to the person doing it, the unwanted behavior can be effectively rendered obsolete. In practice, this is messy, though, as it can be quite difficult to figure out exactly what function a given behavior is serving, especially given that most behavior in interpersonal contexts serves multiple functions at once.
All that said, you’re much more likely to get your partner to stop doing something you don’t like if you can offer them substantially improved reactions from you “in exchange” (we don’t say this part out loud) for their willingness to substitute an alternative activity that – ideally at least – scratches all the same itches for them.
Given all of the negative consequences of avoidance behavior I’ve been ranting about, it’s probably not surprising that avoidance itself is often something we’re interested in trying to reduce. As I alluded to earlier, avoidance behavior is a particularly difficult behavior to try to subject to extinction precisely because it can so easily be reinforced even in the absence of any punishment. If something terrible happens to you outside your home, as long as nothing terrible happens at home, the behavior of staying in your house may be continually reinforced by your feeling of safety, while you grow ever more sure that the world outside is brimming with potential catastrophes.
In the mental health world, the primary protocol for confronting this sort of self-reinforcing avoidance behavior is commonly called “exposure therapy,” which involves intententional “practicing” of a previously-punished behavior (like going outside) in a situation designed specifically to not be punishing. The intentional part is important because you can’t learn that it’s safe to “let go” of your avoidance behavrior unless you choose to risk punishment by again doing something that has been punished in the past.
As that applies to relational behavior, if you’re interested in reducing the prevalence of your partner’s avoidance, you’re going to have to convince them to “try out” things they’ve gotten burned for in the past, before you have any chance to show them it’s actually safe now. Skinner hypothesized that a main mechanism behind the beneficial effects of psychotherapy generally was that a therapist typically strives to be a “non-punishing environment” for their clients, prompting a gradual reduction in avoidance behavior as the client takes risks to “be themselves” as they feel safe to do so. Likewise, your effectiveness in reducing your partner’s avoidance will inevitably depend on the combination of your ability to be “non-punishing” and their willingness to risk getting hurt again.
On the other hand, though, it’s important to note that it’s the experience of punishment that creates avoidance, rather than the nature of the punishing behavior itself, such that the perceptive behavior of the recipient of potential punishment has substantial power to shape its ultimate outcome. To put that less technically (and flirting with the line between blaming and empowering the “victim”) just because you say something that could be interpreted as punishing, doesn’t mean I have to be punished by it or avoid that behavior in the future. Elenor Rosevelt’s famous “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” speaks to this, as does the variously attributed “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
In any case, many of the most painful things we can experience in life tend to happen in the context of intimate relationships, and yet as humans, we depend on these relationships for our basic wellbeing. Whether we like it or not, we inevitably influence and control our relational partners with our behavior in relation to them, and the way we go about exercising that control has a huge impact on the quality of the connection. We often don’t realize how much punishment has crept into our relationships until cycles of reciprocal hurt and avoidance have already become firmly established. Centrally, the felt necessity of avoiding punishment functions to gradually “close down” behavioral possibilities, effectively redirecting energy from other potentially-productive action, creating an internal list of no-no’s that it can be exhausting to try to navigate around. So though some punishment is unavoidable, its overuse leads to insidious and destructive effects on the integrity of any relationship that depends on emotional intimacy and voluntary cooperation. But, the more we understand about the places we’re likely to “punish” without meaning to, the more likely we are to be able to find ways to substitute constructive cycles for destructive ones.
Sources
Mecca Chiesa (1994) Radical Behaviorism: The philosophy and the science
B. F. Skinner (1953) Science and Human Behavior
B. F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior
B. F. Skinner (1974) About Behaviorism
