The Power of Attention

Act I  

I’m in the Safeway parking lot and notice a woman standing outside of her car while she looks into the driver’s side with an annoyed expression. Instantly, I know exactly what’s going on. I’ve been there. I say to myself, “I bet there is a kid in the car who thought it would be entertaining to lock his mom out of the car.” Sure enough, as I walk by the woman’s car, I see a school-aged child sitting in the front passenger seat and laughing.

Act II

I’m visiting my daughter at her college apartment. She shares that Beans, her beloved kitty, has developed a habit of sticking his claws in the light socket, and that it’s been making her really worried.

Annoying Psychologist Mom:  What do you do when Beans goes for the light socket?

Daughter: I completely freak out!  I yell, “BEANS!!!!”

Our attention, whether positive or negative, has the power to shape the behavior of others in ways that we don’t intend.

You would think that our negative emotional responses would have the effect of stopping unwanted behavior in others.  Why would anyone want us to be mad at them? Or annoyed? Or stressed out?

The finding that negative attention can positively reinforce behavior has been documented since the 1960’s.

In other words, responding to a behavior with negative attention can make it more likely that the person (or cat) will repeat the behavior in the future. It’s been assumed that negative attention is better than no attention in cases where someone is attention-starved. I don’t think people have to be neglected in order for them to enjoy negative attention. While it might be true that negative attention is preferred to no attention, I have wondered whether the power to get a reaction out of someone can simply reflect an experiment of social power, agency, or just sheer entertainment. 

So what do we do?

It depends on the situation, of course. In the case of the kid-locking-mom-out-of-the-car, I discovered that if I simply shrugged and turned my back after discovering that the car door was locked by a snickering child, my child immediately unlocked the door.

In the case of Beans, I believe it would have worked for my daughter to simply ignore the behavior.  She would have had to endure and ignore the “extinction burst,” which is a dramatic (but temporary) uptick in the problem behavior as a last ditch effort to get the desired response. She let me know that this would be impossible. We instead ordered a set of socket covers.  Problem solved.  

This week, be an observer of your reactions to your kids and pets when they act annoying.  What do you do in response?  Is it possible that you’re feeding the behavior with attention (or food)?  For example, one of my dogs used to emit a horrible high pitched bark in anticipation of her kibble dinner. I couldn’t stand it, so I always rushed to get the kibble in her dish just to make the barking stop as soon as possible. It then occurred to me that I was reinforcing the annoying behavior. 

My intervention? Every time she uttered the annoying bark, I turned and walked away. As soon as she was quiet, I moved towards her food dish. If she barked again, I turned around again.  I had to repeat this many times, but within a few days, the behavior ceased.

What happens when you try to ignore annoying behavior in your pet (or child)? Does the behavior escalate? If so, this is a sign that you may be reinforcing the behavior. 

For an entertaining book that will wake you up to the many ways that we’re stuck in patterns of reinforcing unwanted behavior, I recommend “Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training,” by Karen Pryor.  The title makes it sound like it’s just about animal training, but it’s much more far reaching.