12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

few months. He’s still wobbly and unreliable. So, you start his training by
handing him a plate and having him hand it back. A pat on the head could
follow. You might turn it into a game. Pass with your left. Switch to your
right. Circle around your back. Then you might give him a plate and take a
few steps backward so that he has to traverse a few steps before giving it
back. Train him to become a plate-handling virtuoso. Don’t leave him
trapped in his klutz-dom.
You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First,
figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk.
Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in
(hawk, remember) and deliver a reward. Your daughter has been very
reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she would talk more. That’s
the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over breakfast, she
shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention.
That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell
you anything ever again.
Parental interventions that make children happy clearly can and should be
used to shape behaviour. The same goes for husbands, wives, co-workers and
parents. Skinner, however, was a realist. He noted that use of reward was
very difficult: the observer had to attend patiently until the target
spontaneously manifested the desired behaviour, and then reinforce. This
required a lot of time, and a lot of waiting, and that’s a problem. He also had
to starve his animals down to three-quarters of their normal body weight
before they would become interested enough in food reward to truly pay
attention. But these are not the only shortcomings of the purely positive
approach.
Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need
to learn, because we’re stupid and easily damaged. We can die. That’s not
good, and we don’t feel good about it. If we did, we would seek death, and
then we would die. We don’t even feel good about dying if it only might
happen. And that’s all the time. In that manner, negative emotions, for all
their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed and
disgusted so we can avoid damage. And we’re susceptible to feeling such
things a lot. In fact, we feel more negative about a loss of a given size than
we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure,
and anxiety more than hope.