I heard about “ intermittent reinforcement” or “push and pull” technique but i can’t wrap my head around it.
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If you want to train someone or something to act in a particular way, the best thing to do is reward them, right?
The classic example (called an “[operant conditioning chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber)” or a Skinner box after the famous behaviorist) is a mouse in a box that has a lever hooked up to a treat dispenser; when the mouse pushes the lever, it’s rewarded with a treat. Sometimes the lever is presented with a pair of lights to signal when the mouse should push the lever, and sometimes it’s dressed up in other ways, but the result is the same: push lever, receive treat.
This is *positive reinforcement* — the desired behavior is trained by providing a reward linked to it.
But we’re missing out on something — if a reward is consistently provided when the desired action is taken, the subject knows it can always be obtained, and so they’ll perform the action exactly and only when they want the reward.
If we instead rig the lever to a little computer chip that only provides the reward, say, 40% of the time — that is, *intermittently* — we cement the behavior way more reliably than we do with *constant* reinforcement, driving the subject to hammer at the lever a lot more, because they don’t know when they’ll get it.
This is the essence of *intermittent reinforcement,* and it’s so powerful a conditioning mechanism that it’s what drives gambling in all its forms, along with all manner of other behaviors.
Sometimes you’ll get no Reddit upvotes, sometimes no replies, sometimes a ton of funny and interesting replies and upvotes and you’ll feel good – and keep coming back to try again. Intermittent reward is addictive. (hi! 👋)
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– If something never works, we get bored.
– If something always works the same, we understand it, and move on.
– If something works sometimes, but not always, we find it interesting, addictive, puzzling, exciting. It keeps us hooked.
Examples:
Playing a game with a lootbox, if it’s always empty that’s boring. If it’s always 5 credits, that’s boring. If it’s mostly 5 credits but *sometimes* the ultra gun, or level up, or 500 credits, that’s addictive and moreish and exciting.
Getting a kid to do chores, if the parents never reward it, it’s a chore. If they always pay $1 it’s no fun. If they normally do nothing but sometimes allow staying up late or seconds of dessert as a reward for doing a good job on the washing up, that just works better.
If you refresh Instagram and there’s never anything new, you close it. If you refresh and it’s always 3 new things which look the same, you get bored. If you refresh and sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes theres normal things, and intermittently there’s something really good – you get hooked and spend hours scrolling and refreshing.
Companies know that people behave like this, and they exploit it to keep you hooked so they can show ads. TV stations, social media apps, gambling apps, one-armed bandits, they design intermittent reinforcement into the game to make as many people hooked as possible.
It’s why people continue gambling even when they understand that the odds are against them: losing doesn’t stop them from playing because they’ve come to treat losing a round as “that thing that happens right before you win big.” By only rewarding them intermittently you’ve encouraged gamblers to keep trying *even when the reward is absent*, which is more profitable for the people running the game.
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