Intermittent Reinforcement Quotes

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I saw a post online where someone said, “An abuser doesn’t abuse every day.” That, my friend, is intermittent reinforcement in a nutshell.
Shannon Thomas (Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse)
how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.
Michael Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time)
Random intermittent positive reinforcement can be found in gambling... and bad relationships.
José N. Harris (MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love)
Love is intermittent reinforcement with spouses and children alike. The child is love-bombed when the narcissist feels the child reflects their false self. The moment the child fails to do so, the narcissistic parent blithely discards them.
M. Wakefield (Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays)
As with other relationships with CNs, there are a lot of mixed messages and intermittent reinforcement. They will make grand gestures; they might defend you in front of others. They will look out for you at times, as well as demean and devalue you. All the nice acts make you question negative thoughts you have about them.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.” I call them “the reason we date jerks.
Catherine Price (How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life)
Intermittent reinforcement in the context of a relationship is when kindness and loving acts are not given consistently, but rather intermittently. In 30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics, author Adelyn Birch writes, “This is an extremely powerful and effective manipulation tactic. In fact, psychology experts consider it the most powerful motivator in existence.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
The problem is a survivor never knows when the next warm and fuzzy experience will happen, or when the next episode of abuse is coming through the door. Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful emotional string abusers like to pull. Never knowing what will happen next can be intoxicating for a survivor who is not fully aware of the game being played. Intermittent reinforcement causes adrenaline rushes in the body and stress hormones to be produced. It creates a biochemical shift in the survivor that becomes addicting and from which is hard to break free.
Shannon Thomas (Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse)
The take-home message: Even if you achieve only intermittent reinforcement—that is, you experience success only sometimes—having some successes will make your behavior much more resilient, and you’ll be less likely to give up. Therefore, whenever you start something, focus on getting your first few successes.
Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
If you’re a victim of this tactic, you will sense the manipulator is withdrawing. He or she is not giving you the attention and affection that they used to, and you will fear that something is wrong and that you are losing them. If you ask them if something is wrong, they will deny it or blame you. At some point the manipulator will act once again like the attentive, romantic, interested and loving person they once were. Your anxiety and doubt are relieved, and you are on top of the world. But then they withdraw again, and you are consumed with anxiety once more. By using intermittent reinforcement the manipulator will have you riding an emotional roller coaster, your moods and emotional well-being dependent upon whether he or she is withholding from you or rewarding you.
Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)
Many people say that when things are good, they’re really good. The flattery, attention, and obsessiveness are exhilarating to the ego. To feel so important to someone can be exciting and empowering. The exhilaration can be recognized immediately, especially if you have not been in this position of being an “idol” before. You may also begin to look for the exhilaration—to anticipate the flattery and attention. And, after a while, when the flattery begins to gradually fade, you will miss it and may even make attempts to get your loved one with BPD to idolize you again. The law of intermittent reinforcement applies here again, since your loved one may intermittently engage in obsessiveness and flattery throughout the relationship. This in turn reinforces your commitment to the relationship. Jim
Paul T. Mason (Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder)
Intermittent Positive Reinforcement caused an unpredictability that prompted a subconscious craving for positive attention: Cassie had begun chasing her for a positive reaction.
Angela Marsons (Blood Lines (D.I. Kim Stone, #5))
The addictive nature of smartphones is further enhanced by a form of behavioral conditioning called intermittent reinforcement and the power of this conditioning was revealed by the research of the 20th century psychologist B.F Skinner. Skinner discovered that if a behavior is rewarded on a variable and unpredictable schedule, the reward is felt as more pleasurable and the conditioned behavior is more resistant to extinction in comparison with a behavior that is rewarded all the time. Mobile app developers use this behavioural conditioning to promote the use of their applications. Rather than exposing their users to stimulating novel content each time they open the app, users are rewarded only some of the time. This type of behavioral conditioning heightens the feelings of pleasure associated with using these apps and renders users prone to addiction.
Academy of Ideas
Intermittent reinforcement is a conditioning behavior where CNs set the rules. Their love is inconsistent and on their terms. This leaves you feeling unstable and longing for their love and attention. The relationship becomes a mixture of subtle cruelty and periodic affection. They will woo you and withhold from you. This conditions you to keep trying to please them in order to get the reward of love. It brings you to a place where you lower your standards so much that you become grateful for mediocre treatment that you never would have tolerated when you first met them. You end up believing you don’t deserve any better and that you are not worthy of love and affection.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
An amicable divorce is not possible when you are dealing with a covert narcissist. The breakup is sudden. It is a fire hose of so many different traits. You will experience intermittent reinforcement, smear campaigns, flying monkeys, lies, manipulation, crazy-making conversations, triangulation, absolute absence of empathy, devaluing and demeaning insults, emotional immaturity, profound selfishness, entitled superiority, and so much more during this discard phase. You will feel a betrayal like you’ve never known.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
Rats get tripped up by uncertainty in a way that should appear very familiar to us. Classical stimulus-response experiments have shown that the introduction of uncertainty drastically slows learning. When rats are trained on a fixed reward schedule (for example, a pellet for every tenth press of a lever), they learn pretty fast to press that lever for food. If you withdraw the reward, the lever-pressing behavior is quickly extinguished. The rats figure out that no more food is on its way. But when you reward the rats on a variable or intermittent reinforcement schedule (a pellet that comes on average every tenth lever press), that introduces uncertainty. The average number of lever presses for the reward is the same, but the rat could get a reward on the next press or not for thirty presses. In other words, the rats are rewarded the way humans usually are: having no way to know with certainty what will happen on the next try. When you withdraw the reward from those rats, the lever-pressing behavior extinguishes only after a very long time of fruitless lever pushing, sometimes thousands of tries.
Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
an intermittent reward, or success, is more powerfully reinforcing than a constant one.
Nirmala (Living from the Heart)
intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
Intermittent reinforcement creates a climate of doubt, fear and anxiety that compels the victim to persistently seek acts of positive reinforcement from the manipulator that will alleviate their angst. When the reward of positive reinforcement is given, it is very powerful. It floods the brain with dopamine and other feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones. It creates addiction.
Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)
By using intermittent reinforcement the manipulator will have you riding an emotional roller coaster, your moods and emotional well-being dependent upon whether he or she is withholding from you or rewarding you. The manipulator does this on purpose to increase his or her power and control over you and to make you ever more desperate for their love, attention or approval. You will have become the proverbial lab rat living for a randomly dispensed morsel. The rat thinks of nothing else, and either will you. Your bond with the manipulator will become stronger in response to intermittent reinforcement, along with your desire to please them and your fear of losing them.
Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)