PROFESSOR: So today's lecture is
about the claim that we've been exploring in the context
of Aristotle's ethics, that the way to cultivate virtue is
by cultivating in ourselves certain sorts of habits. And I want to start by showing
you a picture of a T-shirt which was popular at MIT in the
mid-'90s when my husband was a graduate student there. And what it said on the T-shirt
was, "Gravity: It's not just a good idea,
it's the law." Now, if you guys were MIT
students, you would be rolling on the floor. [laughter] As it is, social beings that you
are, you're rolling on the floor at the thought that other
beings are rolling on the floor at the thought
of this. [laughter] But what's interesting about
this T-shirt is that it brings out a distinction between
two kinds of laws. Because gravity isn't a law that
tells you how you ought to behave. It's a law that
tells you how things do behave. And philosophers make a
distinction between two kinds of laws. There are, on the one hand,
normative laws, oughts, things that tell you how you how you
should do things, things that express, as the name indicates,
norms. Those are things like, "look both ways
before crossing the street." That's something you
ought to do. It wouldn't be funny have a
T-shirt that said, "Look both ways before crossing the street:
It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Right? It could be the law, and the
T-shirt, for lots of reasons, wouldn't be funny. It wouldn't be funny to have a
T-shirt that said, "Don't eat in the library: It's not just
a good idea, it's the law." Because it could be a law in the
library that you not eat. And it wouldn't be funny to have
a T-shirt that says, "65 miles per hour: It's not just
a good idea, it's the law," because in fact, it is
a normative law. So normative laws express
summative judgments about the way things ought to be. They are laws in the sense that
you find over at the Yale Law School. But in addition, there are laws
of a very different kind, spread around the
rest of campus. Spread around, in fact,
everything that you ever do. And those are descriptive
laws. They tell you the way
things actually are. So it would be sort of funny to
have a T-shirt, "If a car hits you, you will die. It's not just a bad thing, it's
the law." Because "If a car hits you, you will die"
is a description of the way the world is. It's a fact about the world
that is a law in the sense that it is in a position to
allow you to make predictions about the future on the basis
of the past. It tells you about law-like relations between
things in the past and things in the future. Likewise, it's a law of biology
plus chemistry plus physics, roughly, that crumbs
cause book decay. That's a description of a fact
about the world to which the normative law, don't eat in the
library, might correspond. But they are nonetheless
very different claims. And finally, whereas it's a
speed limit on your car that you drive 65 miles an hour,
it's a speed limit on everything than it not
go faster than 186,000 miles per second. The speed of light expresses a
descriptive law about how fast you can go, whereas the speed
limit "65 miles an hour" expresses a normative law about
how fast you may go. Now, why did I start out this
lecture on Aristotle and habit with a bunch of remarks about
the difference between normative and descriptive
laws? The reason is this. Habits are tools for turning
oughts into ises. Habits are ways of taking
normative commitments that we have about the way we want
things to be, and making use of the fact that we are
psychological, biological, chemical, physical beings in
whom patterns of descriptive law-like relations can be
created by repeating the same activities over and over. So when Aristotle says, "We
learn a craft by producing the same product that we must
produce when we've learned it. We become builders by building,
harpists by playing the harp, in the same way we
become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing
temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions," he is
explaining to us the utility of recognizing the connection
between normative laws on the one hand--ways we think we want
to be--and descriptive laws on the other--ways
that we find ourselves naturally becoming. Remember, when he describes
for us how it is that we cultivate virtues, he contrasts
that to two cases where merely descriptive
laws apply. He said, it's not like trying to
train a rock to stay in the air, because that's
a case where a descriptive law applies. Nor is it like a case of
watching a plant unfold when given water and light, because
that, again, is a case where merely descriptive laws apply. What's interesting about the
middle realm on which almost the entirety of the Nicomachean
Ethics focuses is that it's the domain where the
principle that I've just articulated holds. It's the domain where it's
possible for us to think about the ways we want things to be,
to act as if things were already that way, and in a
self-fulfilling manner, to have things become that way. So Aristotle's basic insight is
that if you want to become something, act as if that is
what you already were. If you want to become
instinctively brave, act as the brave one does. And then it will become
natural to you. If you want to become a piano
player, train your fingers to act as the piano player's
fingers do. You learn the craft of piano
playing by producing the product that you must produce
when you have learned to piano play. That is, you learn to become
a piano player by practicing the piano. So patterns of behavior that are
initially under conscious control can, through a process
of repeated practice, become automatized. So initially, when you learned
how to drive a car, you had to think very carefully about what
to do with each of your feet and each of your hands. Any of you who went to dancing
school in junior high know that when you learn how to
dance, you start off by counting: "One and Two and..."
I won't dance on stage, because this is going forever
on the Internet. [laughter] But those of you who learned how
to dance in middle school know that behavior that was
initially under conscious control became automatized,
such that those of you who were trained to do waltz and
tango will now, upon hearing the music of waltz and tango,
have a kind of motor routine activated in your feet. The fact that this happens
inevitably to biological beings like ourselves gives us
a tool for turning normative commitments into descriptive
laws. So it has because the case for
me that though it begin as a norm, "look both ways before
crossing the street," it's now a description of me: that I look
both ways before crossing the street. And any of you who has ever
been to England or Australia--countries in which
people drive on the left, rather than the right--know how
incredibly difficult it is to overcome that ingrained
habit. In fact, when I'm in England,
I look both directions about thirty times, because I'm so
disoriented by the fact that my routine doesn't fit
the situation in which I find myself. If you grew up driving a
standard shift car or an automatic car and switch to
the other, it's incredibly difficult to make the changes. When we become habituated to a
certain pattern of behavior, something that was initially a
normative rule for us becomes a descriptive one. And in fact, one of the main
goals of parenting is to instill in one's children
instinctive responses that accord with one's reflective
commitments. I want it to be the case that
when handed an item, without reflection, automatically, my
children say, "Thank you." Now, the same capacity that
allows us to turn normative commitments that we reflectively
endorse into habitual practices can, of
course, be deployed in the reinforcement of habits which
we wish to get rid of. So for many of us, it is the
case that upon opening one's computer, there is an immediate
compulsion to open one's Internet browser, and an
immediate compulsion to check one's Facebook page. Now, we talked already in the
very first class about one of the ways of dealing with this,
which is to eliminate the connection that takes you
from the computer to the Facebook page. If you turn off your Internet
browser, then no matter how instinctive the reaction is, you
won't be able to respond to the compulsion. If you have an instinctive
tendency to go down to your refrigerator at midnight and
drink the full fat chocolate milk that's there in the fridge,
if you take the milk away, then you don't have
to change the habit. So one of the strategies for
self-regulation involves limiting access to the
response that you wish to get rid of. But sometimes either the
response that we want to get rid of isn't something that we
want to eliminate entirely. Right? I don't want to get rid of all
the food in my kitchen. Some of you don't want to get
rid of Internet access simpliciter on your computer. So the question that we're going
to consider in lecture today, is what additional
strategies are available for breaking the link between
unwanted habits, or the link between cues and the
unwanted habits to which they give rise. So let me ask you to take
out your clickers. These are the only times we're
going to use the clickers today, but I promise in later
lectures we'll use them in less contrived ways. So I want to ask you. Which is true of you? That you have no habitual
behaviors that you would like to change? Everything about
you is perfect? You're like the figure in Alan
Kazdin's opening chapter who wants to change everybody in
the world, but who needs to change nothing in
him- or herself? Or are you somebody who has at
least one habitual behavior that you would like to change? And we'll keep polling open for
another six, five, four, three, two, we've got 110
responses, and let's see how it comes out. OK. So 8% of you are perfect. I'm thrilled. I've always wanted to have a
class full of perfect people. At least I have, I guess it's
that back left-hand corner. [laughter] But 92% of you have at least
one habit that you would like to change. For the 92% of you who have that
habit that you'd like to change, a second question. So for any of you who has ever
gotten rid of a habit and thought to do so, which
is true of you? Were you able to change that
habitual behavior just by saying to yourself,
"You know what? I'm not going to check Internet
in class anymore." "You know what? I'm actually going to practice
my violin every morning at ten." "You know what? I'm not going to leave my bed
unmade in the morning." So how many were able to change your
habitual behavior just by talking yourself out of it, and
how many of you were not able to change that habitual
behavior by talking yourself out of it? And again, we'll cover
this for another ten. OK. And let's see how the
numbers come out. Four, three, two, one. OK. Oh my goodness! 35% of you can talk yourself
out of habitual behaviors. But the other 65% of you are
embodied human beings of the sort whom I took myself to be
lecturing in this class. OK. It is very often the case,
though obviously not always the case, that simply trying
to talk yourself out of an unwanted behavior is
extraordinarily difficult. And the chapter that we read
from Jonathan Haidt, and in fact, the readings that we've
been doing all semester long, explain why this is so. Part of the reason that at least
65% of you fall into the category of people who are
unable to talk yourself out of an unwanted behavior
is that we aren't just composed of reason. Plato gave us the metaphor of
reason, spirit, and appetite. Haidt gives us the metaphor of
the rider and the elephant. Every single one of the authors
that we've read so far has talked about the ways in
which we are fundamentally processing information at a
rational level that may or may not reach down to the other
aspects of what Plato calls our soul. So Aristotle, in those
incredible closing five pages of the Nicomachean Ethics that
I had you read for today, the very last bits of the last
book, writes as follows. He says, "If arguments were
sufficient in themselves to make people decent, the rewards
they would command would justifiably have
been many and large. But," he points out, "in
a large majority of circumstances," simply
saying to people, "Hey, you know what? You probably ought to pay your
taxes by sometime mid-spring," doesn't cause them to act in
keeping with what it is that they want, or you want,
them to do. Arguments alone, appeals to
rationality alone, work in exceptional cases. But they don't work
all the time. Now, because I've been glossing
over it in most of the material that we've been
reading from the ancient authors, I want to point out
that the intervening texts, the texts that I'm skipping over
in the rest of 1179, is actually an expression of
something that runs through every single one of the ancient
Greek texts that we've been reading, which is an
expression of a certain kind of cultural elitism about the
difference between the well-born and the many. But I want to, right now, set
aside what is, I think a legitimate ground for
challenging some of what Aristotle's saying, and focus
instead on what I think is true about what he goes on to
remark, which is, that it is impossible to alter by argument
what has long been absorbed as a result
of one's habits. And Aristotle goes on then to
discuss something that we'll talk about in about
five weeks. Namely, given this fact about
human beings, that early experience shapes subsequent
behavior, and that pointing regulations in place can shape
behavior in ways that is pro-social, it appears that
there are implications for how societies ought to
be structured. And when we got to the unit on
political philosophy, we'll look yet again at these
closing pages of the Nicomachean Ethics. What I want to point out to you
now is that there it is an extraordinary connection between
what Aristotle is saying in this ancient text-- here's a beautiful fifteenth
century edition of the Ethics in Latin, here's the translation
that we're using-- and it seems to me, and this
is the point that I want to make in the remainder of today's
lecture, that the fundamental insight of
Aristotle's ethics is what lies behind the literature
in a certain kind of therapeutic practice-- in particular, cognitive
behavioral therapy-- and I want to show you how this
plays out in a particular kind of self-help book. In particular, a parenting
guide. The claim I want to make is
roughly that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
is the greatest parenting guide ever written. So those of you looking for a
baby present for your newborn niece or nephew, look
no further! [laughter] So what I want to do is to
contextualize cognitive behavioral therapy by starting
off with a discussion of the animal literature of
which it is a part. Behavioral therapy exploits the
fact that we are evolved beings, continuous with
non-human animals, in the kinds of control over behavior
which are available to us. So with apologies to those of
you who have taken already Psych 110, a brief introduction
to Pavlovian conditioning. Oh! Sorry. With no apologies
to anybody, some more quotes from Aristotle. Just as Aristotle says, "We
learn a craft by producing the same product that we must
produce when we've learned it. We become builders by building,
harpists by playing the harp," when Aristotle says
that, what he is pointing out is the importance of structuring
your experience in such a way that you have the
opportunity to perform the behavior that you wish
to cultivate. Give yourself the opportunity to
do the things that you want have become habitual, and those things will become habitual. All right. Here's the dog. So I assume most of you know,
but it's worth reviewing, there is a technique of
regulating animal behavior, which has of course been known
for thousands of years. You hear report of the training
of domestic animals in the ancient Greek tradition,
and in fact, Descartes has a long discussion
of how you can train dogs. (Descartes had idiosyncratic
views about animals. He thought that they
were machines. But with regard to this
hypothesis, that mistaken assumption doesn't make
a difference.) So the way classical
conditioning works, is that before the conditioning takes
place, you identify an item-- say, food-- that produces in the being that
you wish to condition a response of salivation, in
this case, or excitement. So the dog sees the food,
and goes, "wow!" So the food, in this case, is
what psychologists call an unconditioned stimulus. It's something that, without
intervention on our part, produces is in the being whom
you're trying to condition, an unconditioned response. You show the food, and without
any intervention on our part, the dog salivates. By contract, there are lots of
things in the world-- bells, for example-- which produce in the dog
no reaction at all. You ring a bell. Dog goes, "Big whoop. Who cares? It's a bell." So in that case,
you present what called a neutral stimulus, and what you
get from the dog is what is called, no response. Now here comes the
conditioning. You take your dog, and
you present him with, simultaneously, the
bell and the food. And the presence of the food
is sufficient to produce in the dog the Oh, wow. Right? The dog says, "Food! Salivate! Excellent! Yum! Something to eat." And so what you've done, is
you've taken paired stimuli, the bell and the food, and
produced, as a result of the introduction of the paired
stimuli, an unconditioned response that is, at
this point still, a response to the food. But animals are associative
beings. And eventually, this
unconditioned response, the oh, wow that results as a matter
of hard-wiring from the introduction of the food, comes
to be paired with the neutral stimulus. And when that happens, when the
bell is in a position to produce in the dog the response
of salvation, one has thereby conditioned the stimulus
to produce in the animal a conditioned response. Now, it's not just with animals
that this sort of thing is possible. In the opening pages of the Alan
Kazdin textbook that you read, we heard the story of poor
Baby Albert who used to think white rabbits were no big
deal, until the neutral stimulus of a white rabbit got
paired with the unconditioned stimulus of a loud noise that
produced terror in him. And when that happened, Albert
came to associate what had previously been neutral,
the white rabbit, with a feeling of fear. Human beings are capable of
coming to have associations that have valence, either
positive or negative, associations that produce in
them positive or negative emotional responses. And they are capable of coming
to have those associations with entities that previously
had no value to them. So with that fact in mind,
psychologists began thinking more generally about the
relation between objects and behaviors, on the one hand,
and outcomes that those objects or behaviors are
associated with, on the other. So whereas classical
conditioning is concerned with the passive consumption of
some item in the world-- food is presented to you, a
rabbit is presented to you, and a certain association
arises-- operant conditioning is
concerned with the relation between behaviors that you
yourself perform and the outcomes to which those
behaviors typically give rise. So we have, in our behavioral
repertoire, a bunch of things we do that are desired
behaviors. It's a desired behavior that you
do your reading, that you go to the gym, that you're
polite to your roommates, that you call your parents at
least once a week. And we also have undesired
behaviors. Things that we wish
we didn't do. The bad habits that 92% of those
of us in this room have. And what psychologists noticed
is that we have resources available to us using the
mechanisms that conditioning provides for increasing
differentially various types of behavior. In particular, if we are
attentive to the consequences that behaviors typically give
rise to, and if we intervene to control those consequences,
we can increase the incidence of certain kinds of behavior,
and decrease the incidence of other kinds of behavior. So if there's a desired behavior
that you wish to have more of, you can pair with that
behavior as a consequence some sort of reinforcer. You can pair with it a
positive reinforcer. I can reinforce your efforts
on writing a paper by providing you with the positive
reinforcer of a letter on your transcript
that has signaling value to future employers. So I can provide you with
positive reinforcement for desired behavior. Or one can reinforce a desired
behavior through what is technically known as negative
reinforcement. The removal of an aversive
stimulus. If there's noise in the room,
you are negatively reinforced in your tendency to put in
earplugs if the putting-in of the earplugs reduces the
aversive consequence of being in a noisy room. So we can increase behaviors
that we want to increase bye associating with them
consequences that serve to increase the value,
subjectively, that that behavior has to the individual,
as the result of pairing something that the
individual likes already with the behavior. We can, in addition, decrease
the likelihood of an undesired, or in fact of
a desired, behavior by associating that behavior with
some consequence that is a negative consequence. So we can take away something
that you like if you act in a way that we don't want. And we will, in the final two
lectures before, or just after March break, talk about
punishment and how it works. So behaviors can be associated
with positive consequences, or they can be associated with
negative consequences. And sometimes, that
happens naturally. So when I eat chocolate cake,
that is associated with the positive consequence of the
flavor that it provides me. It is positively reinforced,
because the behavior, eating the cake, gives rise to a
natural consequence, the taste of the cake. But it may not be so salient to
me that the behavior also gives rise to a consequence
which I don't evaluate so positively. It increases the amount of
arterial blockage on the way to my heart. Making salient to people what
the natural negative consequences of their behaviors
are is one of the ways one can make use
of this paradigm. So we can take behaviors that
occur, that we want to have more of and associate them with
positive consequences. We can take behaviors that occur
that we want to have more of, and associate them with
negative consequences. We can help make people aware
of the positive or negative consequences that these
behaviors already have. And finally, we may discover that
unbeknownst to ourselves, a certain kind of reinforcer is,
in fact, preserving a behavior for us that we wish
to get rid of. So a parent may discover that
the reason a child is continuing to whine is because
whining, an undesired behavior, is in fact associated
with a reinforcer, parental attention. And one might come to recognize
that the removal of that reinforcer will reduce
the behavior. So in this regard, operant
conditioning takes our capacity for association and
uses it in familiar ways to increase desired behaviors and
decrease undesired behaviors. But, of course, behaviors don't
arise out of nowhere. And the third thing that operant
conditioning attends to are the antecedents that
gave rise to behaviors. So whether a behavior is likely
to occur depends first of all on the setting event. On whether the reinforcer is
likely to increase the probability of the behavior
occurring. You will be more likely to drink
chocolate milk late at night from your refrigerator
if you are hungry. So if you drink a glass of water
an hour beforehand, then that reinforcement that drinking
the chocolate milk had won't be so great for you. You can set circumstances so
as to make the reinforcers more or less effective. You can also provide yourself
or others with prompts. I want to help you do the
reading, so I provide you with reading guides in which I direct
you to the parts of the texts which I think are most
important, and I thereby reduce the barriers
to entry that the readings might provide. I help prompt the behavior
by making the task more manageable. And finally, we can give rise to
behavior differentially by the presence or absence of what
are called discriminative stimuli, that indicate, in
technical terminology, the availability of a reinforcer. So in the pages of Kazdin that
we read today, Alan Kazdin points out that if the behavior
that we're interested in is the answering of one's
telephone, that the ringing of the phone is an antecedent that
makes the behavior more likely to give rise
to the reinforcer. The reinforcer is, being able
to talk to somebody at the other end. So you're standing in front
of your telephone. If the phone rings, there's
reason to pick it up. If the phone doesn't,
there isn't.. So what the framework of operant
conditioning provides is a way of cashing out the
Aristotelian suggestion that what we want to do is to
structure our lives in such a way that the behaviors we want
to have become part of our repertoire, become habitual. And one of the most effective
ways to do that is to structure experience so that the
thing we don't want to do is incompatible with an
alternative behavior that we put in its place. So in the context of, for
example, parenting, Alan Kazdin says, "instead of
thinking as your child's behavior in terms of what
you don't want"-- right? I don't want to have him
whine; I don't want the siblings to be fighting; I don't
want my children to be staying up past midnight-- "Start thinking in terms of the
behavior that you do want, and reward that opposite." So instead of saying to
yourself, "I don't want to spend the evening talking to
my roommate and ended up having to stay up all night,"
say to yourself, "what is the behavior that I wish to
cultivate and reinforce? What is the alternative that
will preclude my acting in the ways that I don't want, and
encourage me to act in the ways that I do?" In so doing, you open up for
yourself the most profound and lasting form of human
self-control. The form of human self-control
that leverages the difference between what reason commits
you to and what spirit and appetite may be pulling
you towards. You come to associate a behavior
that was previously unreinforced for you with
positive consequences. "When you get rid of a behavior
by rewarding its opposite," says Kazdin, the
effects are stronger, "and last longer than if you punish
the undesired behavior. The best way to build the
behavior you want is through reinforced practice." Now, "the best way to build
the behavior you want is through reinforced practice" is
something that presumably you've heard before. In fact, you've heard
it before three times in today's lecture. "We learn a craft by producing
the same product that we must produce when we have
learned it. We become builders by building,
we become harpists by playing the harp." So what we try to do in
Aristotle's challenge, and in the contemporary analogue of it,
is to structure our lives in such a way that we can take
normative commitments-- things that are good ideas-- and turn them into descriptions
of behaviors that come naturally to us. We take them from being good
ideas into being laws. And this provides, I think,
new insight on the passage with which I closed the previous
lecture, as well. Aristotle writes that
"Abstaining from pleasure makes us become temperate, and
that once we've become temperate, we are most capable
of abstaining from pleasures. It is similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm
in frightening situations makes us become brave, and once
we have become brave, we are more capable of
standing firm." So this, I think,
is an undeniable aspect of human nature. But it isn't the full story. And the two essays that we're
reading for next class bring out a complication to the story
that I told today, and they ask us stop to think about
whether this entirely describes what it is that's
required for bringing about the kind of change which
we hope to achieve. And I look forward to
talking to you about those texts on Thursday. We have a couple of minutes for
questions, if somebody-- by my watch, we have
three more minutes. I'll give you positive
reinforcement if you raise your hand, then a query that
you have will be answered! All right.
