Posted: Aug 11, 2010 6:36 am
inkaStepa wrote:Wow I really appreciate the comments made here!! Your guys never dissapoint
Yea I found out one of the girls was actually left by her bf, he contacted her once in a blue moon, confessed his undying love, and then would disapear for another couples months saying "things are crazy but once I settle down I'll come see you." She hasn't heard from him in a year (except a few days every like 5 months) and still says she only wants him. I think it's got everything to do with the pathways in the brain- she thinks of him and gets the rush- sees him and the messages are filling her brain with the feel-good properties. A year is pretty extensive though. She's not ugly either (we're friends now lol) and I've been trying to figure her out. My theory is that when she realizes he's obviously using her for $ she'll forget about him (I'm trying to reverse the signal).
That situation could probably be explained by the "partial reinforcement effect". In a nut shell, generally people assume that if you want to maintain a specific behavior, in a person or animal, then the best way to do this is to reward (reinforce) them every time they perform a particular behavior. However, this isn't actually true - instead, if you want to maintain a certain behavior for a while and make it almost impossible to get rid of even in the absence of reward, then you provide rewards for the behavior at random intervals. As a real world example, take gambling on a pokies machine/one-armed bandit - these games are very addicting because they produce a reward periodically after you've played it a number of times.
We can easily see why this is the case as if we imagine one of these machines that gave a reward on every turn, then people would only play until the rewards stopped coming. After playing a few times without winning, then most people will assume that the machine is empty and move on. However, since the real machines can go for long periods of time without giving out rewards, it becomes impossible for the player to distinguish between a long gap between rewards and the complete absence of rewards. Some research also indicates that in situations like these, people actually start associating long gaps without rewards as rewards in themselves because the long gap essentially says, "The reward must be coming soon!".
(More info here, if you wanted it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcem ... nforcement)
Incidentally, your explanation above is consistent with the theory I've just described above. Your analysis would be what happens in the brain, whereas mine looks at the behavioral effects.
