Fanfare

Operant conditioning is a psychological concept that involves, essentially, teaching a behavior by a system of rewards and punishments. It is this concept that has brought the often-misused terms of positive and negative reinforcement into everyday conversation. I understand this concept, and I use it from time to time--deliberately on my son and unintentionally on others such as co-workers. Everyone uses it to some extent, and everyone is affected by it, but we usually don't notice it acting on us.

Today, I noticed it.

I was required to watch a series of safety training videos for work, and each video was followed by a short quiz. The quizzes were on a computer, and they were all multiple-choice or true-or-false questions. I answered the first question correctly and was rewarded with a peppy musical fanfare sound effect. I rolled my eyes, thinking that such a thing was silly. It continued, playing that fanfare after every question I answered correctly (which, for the first series of videos, was all of them).

When a series of videos completed, I was presented with a cumulative quiz that repeated some of the questions I'd previously answered. It looked exactly like the short quizzes from before. I answered the first question correctly and fully expected to hear the fanfare. But the computer did not play it! I was initially perplexed. After a few more questions, I determined that the format of the cumulative quiz was slightly different from the short quizzes, and I inferred that it did not have sound effects. I was disappointed.

And I was surprised by disappointment!

As I completed that quiz, I found myself thinking about what I was experiencing (an activity called metacognition, or thinking about thought). I had become accustomed to the fanfare, as silly as I might have thought it to be. I had subconsciously enjoyed it and had come to expect it. When it didn't come, I missed it. When I realized that the cumulative quiz was not going to reward me at every turn with the happy sound effect, my motivation faded.

During the second and third sets of training videos, I was again rewarded during the short quizzes, but the sound effect had lost all the absurd excitement it had previously carried with it. I didn't care about it anymore because I knew it was just going to disappear again. Thus, I did not care at all when I answered a question wrong and got what amounted to the descending "Sorry!" scale so often heard on game shows. It would go away, too, and would therefore be meaningless to me.