The Adventure of the Behaviourist

During my first years as a Psychology student at the University of Waterloo, I was a dedicated behaviourist. There was something comforting about its endless chains of predictable cause and effect. Next to the more "subconscious" disciplines it was downright simple: you reward or punish a person for doing something, and eventually you can "condition" them to do what you want.

Behaviourists got results...and they could QUANTIFY them! They used a mixture of hard-nosed determination, patience, and metrics to -- say -- turn a kleptomaniac into an upstanding citizen. And I quickly discovered how useful the behaviourist approach was when dealing with pets; thanks to B.F. Skinner and his operant conditioning I had the family cat rolling over for chicken in a pretty much consistent way.

But courses in child development threw me for a loop, with their revelations of hard-wired mechanisms for things like language and knowledge of "self." Suddenly there were parts of human behaviour UNRELATED to conditioning. The REAL blow was the study of Symbolic Interactionism, which shows that we humans relate to our environment in a symbolic way, and therefore a "stimulus" is what we believe and perceive it to be, not something pure that always means the same thing, all the time, to all people.

So I've been forced to let go of much of my love of "billiard ball determinism" and hard-nosed behaviourism, partly because so many other forces seem to be at work, but mainly because all the factors involved -- people, problems, stimuli, responses -- get tangled up with other forces in the real world, making the "laboratory" approach to therapy just as difficult as any other.

So while I skip most of the New Yorker profile pieces, it was interesting to read Kenneth MacGowan's profile of Dr. John B. Watson in the October 6, 1928 issue. Despite the weird synchronicity moment in the first paragraph (Watson was annoyed by the character of "Dr. Watson" in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and here I am reading those stories right now), it's interesting to read a relatively muck-raking article about his academic problems.

By the time of the article Watson had long left academic life. The article claims that this was due to his intransigence and controversial studies, and it inexplicably ignores the entire scandal that surrounded his leaving: his adulterous affair with graduate student Rosalie Rayner. This is my first indication that the New Yorker profiles may have been a BIT of a whitewash.

(Incidentally, for fans of Thomas Pynchon, Watson and Rayner have the dubious honour of conducting the infamous "Little Albert" experiment which gets pride of place in Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow.")

Anyway, Watson was hard at work in the advertising business during 1928, helping with campaigns such as -- more synchronicity here -- Odorono. He made a lot of money perfecting the advertising agency's ability to frighten and titillate us. Maybe that's the way we should remember him; behaviourism was always best at curing phobias, and now we know it was good for causing them as well.

Busybody or Samaritan?

There is only one thing about winter that I enjoy: the opportunity to push cars out of snowbanks. As a pedestrian I am often in the position to help people get their vehicles unstuck, and this winter has been particularly fruitful.

Why do I enjoy doing this? Because I like the way social barriers fall down when the weather gets bad. Have you noticed? Strangers smile and say hello to you on the street, because everybody is united in a common struggle, and it makes us realize how much we depend on each other. Just the fact that we have a common difficulty is enough to make us worthwhile in other people's eyes.

So I'm thrilled when I see a few people trying to get their car out of a snowbank. It's a chance to have a quick, easy social interaction with strangers that I'll never see again. It makes me happy to help and it seems to make them happy in return.

But on Saturday I began to wonder if I've stopped being "helpful" and started being "a busybody."

On the way home from Conestoga Mall the bus broke down, because the middle door had gotten jammed with snow and it wouldn't close. The bus driver -- obviously not a very handy guy -- just kept coming back and kicking the snow around, basically packing it all in tighter until the door was permanently stuck.

Meanwhile, us passengers sat there and watched him. I felt I could do a better job of fixing the door, and I could see that a few others felt that way as well. But did any of us have a RIGHT to step up and offer assistance?

Well, I did. I dug around in the snow and slush and grease while people just sat and stared at me, and as I was doing this -- and as it became more apparent that the door was simply busted -- I saw myself through the eyes of those bored, anxious passengers: they thought I was a nosy busybody, somebody who gets involved just to feel important and to get into the public spotlight, hoping to be the hero who fixes the bus and gets everybody home on time.

I couldn't deny this entirely, and coupled with the fact that I was sticking my fingers into places where they could suddenly be chopped off, I gathered up my bags and decided to walk home instead. I began to wonder what my motivations are for pushing cars out of ditches, and rescuing animals at work, and helping out in the Club Abstract coatroom when I'm not really needed.

Like every motivation, I don't think my -- or anybody's -- samaritan impulses are cut-and-dried, but the subconscious stuff is unimportant anyway. By the time I reached my home on Saturday I'd realized that people will ascribe motivations for your actions according to their own prejudices, regardless of why you think you're doing it.

There used to be a guy in New Hamburg who may parents called "Ranger Rick." He was an elderly man who spent all day walking around town, watching everything that was going on and asking everybody about their lives. My family made fun of this because we were private people who didn't want attention from others, but now -- for the first time -- I realize that Rick might not have been simply nosy...maybe he cared about people? Maybe he loved the town and was interested in what was happening in it?

I think that Rick's behaviour was due to a mix of things, and some of them weren't noble (boredom, nosiness, social difficulties). But now I realize that I looked at him the same way the people on the bus were looking at me.

No dramatic conclusion, just a thought, and something I need to keep in mind...both when I'm thinking about helping others, and when others help me.

Card and Dice Hustlers

In my final year of University I took three courses that literally changed the way I look at the world. They were all taught by Robert C. Prus, torch-bearer for Symbolic Interactionism and a really entertaining guy. Unfortunately Prus couldn't (or wouldn't) seem to get a handle on the DIFFICULTY of his courses, and would heap us with huge amounts of diverse reading material and then give us really evil tests.

I've got my transcript in front of me. I achieved a C- in "Deviance: Perspectives and Processes," a D in "Social Psychology and Everyday Life," and I actually DROPPED OUT of "Sociology of Marketing and Sales" because I simply couldn't handle it.

Regardless, I look back on these courses as the most significant ones I ever took. After the somewhat rigid, dogmatic, and cocky field of Psychology -- my actual major -- this new discipline really spoke to me: a discipline of flexible patterns in individual behaviour as opposed to standard deviations and multiple-choice questionaires.

Prus wrote many of the books we had to read. One of them was "Road Hustler" (written with pseudononymous professional card sharp "C.R.D. Sharper"), a book about the profession of card and dice hustlers: people who discreetly infiltrate parties and stack the odds in their favour using various means. I didn't read the book when I was taking the course (I barely had time to BREATHE at the time), but I'm reading it now and it's plenty informative, especially if you want to understand why people gamble and how hustlers of all types "get along."

The book follows Prus' typical Symbolic Interaction script: interviewing professionals, sitting in when he can, then fitting the people's actions into a framework he developed. Basically he tries to figure out how people become involved with an activity, how and why they stay, and how they eventually become disinvolved. He seeks out the patterns involved with the activity and presents them in logical ways, liberally interspersed with long quotations from the people in the business. Prus is so methodical in his approach that you wind up seeing every situation from a dozen possible angles, and some of the revelations are striking (often even more striking because they're so mundane...you just never THOUGHT about it before).

It really is fascinating to read how these people ply their trade, and it would take far too long (and involve far too many digressions) to summarize it all here. But as usual I'm curious about how gender figures in this world of hustlers and grifters.

In short, it doesn't, really. Card sharps seem anxious to avoid women in professional situations except when they can be used as enticements. Speaking about hiring women to entice men into hotel suites during huge conventions:

Like these women, they're always looking to get laid, to make a little extra money. You tell them, "You don't have to do anything but be sociable," and you pay them a good buck, but they always seem to get some guy away from your game... once they see a guy with money, they try to grab him for themselves. If they get him out of the game, that's bad, because we want to beat him in the crap game. But, they come in handy, you have to have the chicks around. Imagine f you didn't, some guy comes up "What am I coming to this room for, there's no women here!"

This viewpoint isn't derogatory, it's the view that professional card sharps seem to have toward any person who isn't part of their "crew"...they can't be trusted, they don't have any regard for the well-being of the entire group, and they're quickly jettisoned when they're no longer necessary.

When it comes to women who aren't hired -- who are just there as part of the party, and aren't "wise" to the situation -- card sharps have different attitudes, depending on the marital status of the women:

Say you go to a convention where they have their wives with them. This is usually not as good, because the wives will hold the men back or the committees will be more concerned with appearances.

When it comes to single women, however

Okay, so you might get near the bar and set up a table and start rolling the dice, sort of joking about it, not getting too serious. Then, you try to involve some good-looking chick, "Come on over here, baby doll, and shoot for me!" And these women will roll the dice for the longest time, because they are the center of attention. They have all these men around and they love it... You don't mention any money at first, but later, as they see all this money changing hands, almost every one of them will say, "Well, what do I get?" So then you say, "Well, see this twenty, or fifty, if you make one more pass, I will give you this." Now, my partner is prepared, and when she rolls the dice towards him, boom, he makes sure she loses... the guys go for it, and once they get started, they get caught up in the betting. Sometimes a crew will pay a good-looking woman a hundred just to have her hang around that table for the evening.