An Idea: Political Action and Behaviorist Experiment on a Grand Scale
How do you train a dog to do what you want when you ask it? This does not seem like a political question, but bear with me.
There are a great many techniques for training dogs, and historically they often involved punishing "bad" behavior: shouting, threats, violent leash jerks, swatting with newspapers, and so forth. These techniques work, but perhaps mostly because dogs are incredibly biddable animals. They don't tend to work well with "difficult" dogs (or, indeed, with "difficult" children). The range of approaches for training animals who are, unlike dogs, too large and powerful to readily correct by force is much narrower. When you are training, say, a dolphin or an orca, applying violent correction is impractical, and potentially lethal for the trainer. So some highly effective, positive reinforcement training methods emerged in part out of human beings learning to train cetaceans to do tricks, and these methods work well when applied to dogs, too. The neat thing about that is that along the way, we learned that positive reinforcement works better than negative, not just for whales and dogs, but for pretty much anything with a central nervous system, including planaria, and human beings.
The key to these methods lies in "shaping" the behavior you want by reinforcing things the trainee does spontaneously, using immediate application of a positive reward when the trainee does something, anything really, in the direction of the desired behavior. At first you reward whenever the trainee does something close to what you want. Then only if the behavior is closer to what you want. Then only when it's exactly what you want. And then only occasionally even when it's exactly what you want. This produces reliable execution of exactly what you want from your trainee. The main art lies in finding what reward the trainee is most responsive to.
There are stories of classes of students training their professors using positive reinforcement. One class of colluding students trained their instructor to lecture with his hands on his head by using active listening (nodding, smiling, acting attentive and engaged, leaning forward in their seats, etc.) whenever his hands moved higher, and acting bored and inattentive whenever they moved lower. Karen Pryor has taught behavioral shaping to all sorts of groups, and when she taught a class of teens, some of them apparently took the techniques home and retrained their own parents. And I know from direct family experience that my aunt turned my hyperactive monster of a cousin into the most polite, interested, engaged and respectful teenager I ever met when she switched to only ever using praise with him. So yeah, this stuff, it works on human beings.
Okay, so that's background I had in my head, owing much to Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training, which I commend to you if you are ever in a position to teach, train, or lead other creatures with a central nervous system.
Then I read a couple of unconnected (well, unconnected, except insofar as they are both responses to the current US political circumstance) posts in my Facebook feed.
First, Avedon Carol wonders out loud whether it mightn't be a good idea to tweet sensible suggestions to Donald Trump in hopes of his taking up some. At the very least, it couldn't hurt. To the response that Trump is not that interested in what people tweet of or to him, she says, "Oh, yes he is, that's why he is constantly retweeting anything positive someone says about him and also constantly attacking people for negative tweets." Note that it's positive and negative tweets he specifically responds to. I'll get back to that.
The second post was a reblogging of Charles M. Blow's op ed piece in the New York Times, "No, Trump, We Can't Just Get Along," in which Blow says, among other things, "You don't get a pat on the back for ratcheting down from rabid..."
And my first thought was, "No, but he should." Not because that's what he deserves, but because that's what he needs. And because if he gets what he needs when he takes steps in the right direction, he might just take more such steps. I may well be wrong, but it seems to me you don't get to be Donald Trump without needing just an assload of positive reinforcement. Certainly he seems to respond to attention. And creatures that respond to attention can be trained.
It seems to me that we are living in a potentially pivotal moment. The ability of many, many people to impact anyone who pays attention to their Twitter stream is demonstrably great. Huge, in fact. Admittedly, most of the examples we've seen have been negative. But that doesn't mean the same aggregation of individual action could't be used for good, if there were a collective will to do so. And we have a President Elect who appears to be particularly susceptible to the power of public attention, even childishly so.
What I'm hinting at here is a simple action that we can all take: tweet directed, training praise at Trump. The downside is that unlike attending a protest (which it's perfectly compatible with, by the way), it will not be a big collective feel-good moment. It isn't cathartic. It doesn't provide the galvanic thrill of vindictive bile. It's work. It's incremental. It's a process. It's something that would require attention and going back to, day in and day out. It's more like a chore. Like doing dishes, or training a puppy. It takes a grown up to swallow their feelings and pick up the poop, clean the floor, and skip the punishment in favor of waiting to praise the puppy the next time she does her business outside. Or at least on the designated pad. Or closer to the pad or the door. And then to iterate that process until your dog always poops outdoors. But that is how you train a puppy. And when the puppy in question is far too large and powerful to be trainable by punitive methods, training it with positive feedback is probably your best bet anyhow. And a lot of grownups willing to swallow their feelings long enough to send a positive tweet whenever anything remotely positive comes out of the White House is just possibly one way to do it.
So yeah. I have to start paying attention to Twitter. Because I mean to praise the hell out of Mr. Trump whenever he does something that moves him closer to where I want him to be. When he backs down on terrible campaign promises, I will praise him for his maturity and vision. When he reflects that the general who told him torture doesn't really work, and a pack of smokes and a sixpack will get better information, is a great guy and probably right, I will praise the living crap out of him. And I hope you will join me. Because it will take a lot of us working together to retrain a President. But with enough of us on task, it could make a crucial difference. At the very least, it couldn't hurt to try.