Are We Humans, or Are We Dancing Pigeons?
The Power of Lucky Underwear
Pigeon’s Ponder the Conundrum (photo credit)
In a famous psychology study, Skinner’s Pigeon Experiment, a researcher would drop food into a pigeon’s cage at random intervals. Wanting to get more food, the bird would attempt to recreate their actions when the food dropped, from pecking walls to standing on one foot to dancing around. Unsure why the food arrived, the pigeons attempted to understand and recreate the patterns they noticed to get the same result.
It’s easy to laugh at the pigeon. Until we examine our own rituals, that is.
How many people do not wash their jerseys during the playoff season? How many of us have or have ever had “lucky underwear” or any “good luck charm?” Our wish to see our team win, have a presentation go well, or just have a good day is powerful. Combine this fervent desire with the fact that our brains are hardwired to find patterns, and it’s no wonder we start to believe in the juju of a particular pair of briefs.
While it is a pattern, however, correlation is not causation. The correlation between a pigeon lifting its left foot and the appearance of food, for instance, does not mean lifting a foot will cause food to drop from the sky, much to the chagrin of many flailing pigeons.
In our chaotic world of random events (from winning the lottery to getting a rare form of cancer), we crave patterns to make sense of it all. After all, patterns help us survive - we plant crops and harvests based on seasonal cycles, we can play the stock market with the right patterns, we can avoid dangers if we see the steps that led to it last time, etc. Any rigid belief that a pattern is inescapably true, however, inevitably causes problems.
The Power of Context
Why is it funny that the pigeon is dancing for food? Because we understand the context. The pigeon does not need to dance; food will just arrive at random intervals.
What about times in our lives where we are the pigeon missing the context?
We may feel nervous when our boss calls a late Friday meeting with us, having seen other coworkers laid off in similar meetings. We may find that our team does not respond to the same motivation they did last year. We may feel burnt out, unsure why we have not achieved the success we wanted when in reality, we have changed nothing about our approach.
In the comedy world, saying people are “just too sensitive” is a common refrain for why a joke does not land, especially if it used to. But maybe the real change is in the social context. For example, jokes playing on the differences between men and women were a staple of comedy throughout the nineties - movies, TV, stand-up comedy, you name it. Now, however, gender is largely understood to be more fluid and less binary.
As the saying goes, “it’s funny because it’s true.” But what was “true” then may not be considered “true” now, so the humor fades. In this scenario, complaints about people being “too sensitive” begins to feel like a cop-out.
How can truth change? The reality is that it was never “truth,” it was simply the context at the time. Our assumption that our understanding was Truth with a capital-T is now creating a violated expectation and cognitive dissonance in our heads. Our understanding of the context (in essence, our mental model of reality) was off, and now we must choose to adjust or risk further disappointment.
Dancing by Choice
How can we spare ourselves these sometimes embarrassing, sometimes frustrating assumptions that correlation is causation?
The most potent tool we have is to remain curious. If we have a streak of bad luck where every decision we make backfires, we can either lament our misfortune or get curious. Investigate what might be going wrong, investigate what might fix it, poke at our assumptions to see which of them hold weight, etc.
It is vital to truly reflect on the patterns in life to discover which seem to be working and which do not. For instance, if we are often frustrated on Wednesday mornings because we forget to take out the trash, can we set a Tuesday reminder?
If work is feeling stagnant, can we figure out what we are missing? Is it a change in responsibilities? Has the company changed? What about us? How are we different than when we started?
Is our underwear actually lucky? Or did we just happen to deliver two great presentations while wearing the same pair?
If we can acknowledge the context, we can make different choices in the moment.
In the case of lucky underwear, if we know the underwear is not causing good fortune, then when something bad happens we will not be shocked and lose time wondering how they could have lost their touch. On the flip side, being able to laugh and enjoy the notion of lucky underwear might just give us enough of an edge to brush off unlucky circumstances that would otherwise ruin our day. Our beliefs can be helpful, even when not true - it’s when we hold them as fact that we stand to be disappointed. Repeatedly.
There’s an ocean of difference between a frustrated pigeon that is furious when the can-can is no longer producing food and the pigeon who knows the can-can is a pretty fun way to wait for our next random meal.