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← The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 8. Learning to Be Mean—and Nice

Author: Judson Brewer Publisher: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2023-4-28 Status:📚

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There may be plenty of punishment in simply seeing the results of our actions: if they cause harm and we see that they do, we will be less excited to repeat them in the future. As I saw with getting caught up in anger while on retreat, we would become disenchanted with harmful actions. Why? Because they hurt.

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But it is critical that we actually and accurately see what is happening. Mindfulness can be extremely helpful in this regard. We must remove our glasses of subjective bias, which skew how we interpret what is happening (“hmm, that was fun”), so that we can clearly see everything that results from our behavior.

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Unless we get that immediate feedback—seeing the consequences of our actions—we may learn something else entirely.

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I discussed the possibility of reward-based learning extending into the realm of ethical behavior with my friend the philosopher Jake Davis.

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He agreed that it would be interesting to explore ethics as learned behavior. He started looking into it, and a few years later he was awarded his PhD after successfully defending his 165-page dissertation, entitled “Acting Wide Awake: Attention and the Ethics of Emotion.”3

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Jake’s paper moves away from moral relativism, a view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular standpoint (such as that of a culture or a historical period).

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For an example of this type of relativism, he uses the case of “honor killings” of young women who have been raped. Some may consider the practice immoral, while others might feel strongly that such traditional killings are necessary to save the honor of a family.

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Instead of relying on relativism, Jake takes into account individual emotional motivations as the focus of ethical evaluation. He phrased it thus, “Does how we feel about how we feel about things matter ethically?” (emphasis added). In other words, might reward-based learning converge with mindfulness (in this case, Buddhist ethics) to provide individual situational ethics? Can we derive ethical decisions from seeing the results of our actions?

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Through the rest of his thesis, Jake explores several ethical frameworks,

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He compares how all these views stack up from a philosophical viewpoint, pointing out potential limitations.

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Jake then discusses evidence from modern psychology. Why is it that in certain situations, we would rather lose money to punish someone else if we feel that he or she is being unfair to us? A game used in moral research studies called the Ultimatum Game is set up to specifically test this tendency. Participant A (usually a computer algorithm, but often portrayed as a real person) offers to share a certain amount of money with participant B (the true subject of the experiment). Participant B decides whether to accept or reject the proposed division of funds. If B rejects the offer, neither participant gets any money. After testing multiple scenarios and calculating which types of offers B will accept or reject, a set point for fairness can be determined. In such games, people report increases in emotions like anger and disgust when they feel that the other side is not “playing fair.”4

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But meditators behave more altruistically in these scenarios, willingly accepting more unfair offers than nonmeditators.5

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Ulrich Kirk and colleagues provided some insight into this phenomenon by measuring participants’ brain activity while they were playing the Ultimatum Game. They looked at the anterior insula, a brain region linked to awareness of body states, emotional reactions (for example, disgust) in particular. Activity in this region has been shown to predict whether an unfair offer will be rejected.6

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Kirk found that meditators showed decreased activity in the anterior insula compared to nonmeditators. The researchers suggested that this lower degree of activation “enabled them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behavior.” Perhaps they could more easily see their emotions arising and clouding their judgment (that is, leading them to fall into the “fairness” subjective bias), and by seeing the lack of inherent reward in punishing the other participant, they decided not to follow through on the behavior. They could step out of the “I’m going to stick it to you!” habit loop because it wasn’t as rewarding for them as other responses. As Jake puts it in his dissertation, “The costs of retributive response may indeed outweigh the benefits.” Fairness aside, it is more painful to be a jerk than to be nice to one.

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Jake concludes that we may indeed learn ethical values that are based on (and subjectively biased toward) cultural and situational norms.

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Grounding his arguments in behavioral psychology and neurobiology, he asserts that “by appealing to ethical judgments that all members of our human moral community would make if they were alert and unbiased, we can make sense of the idea that individuals and groups sometimes get the normative truth wrong, and that we sometimes get it right.” In other words, being able to see our subjective biases, which are born from our previous reactions, may be enough to help us learn a common human ethic.

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Stephen Batchelor seems to agree. In After Buddhism, he writes that the development of awareness “entails a fundamental realignment of one’s sensitivity to the feelings, needs, longings and fears of others.” He continues, “Mindfulness means empathizing with the condition and plight of others as revealed through an enhanced ‘reading’ of their bodies.” In other words, it helps to see clearly.

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He concludes that this clarity is important for disrupting “innate tendencies of egoism,” which in turn contributes to “letting go of self-interested reactivity.”7

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If we can take off our blur-inducing glasses of self-focus and subjective bias, which lead us to habitually react to the world through fear, anger, and so forth, we will be able to see the results of our actions more clearly (by getting a better read from others’ body language), and we may respond more skillfully to each moment’s unique circumstances.

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Bringing fuller awareness to our encounters may help us move beyond blanket codes of conduct derived from such questions as “Why do I have to?” and “How does this apply to me?”

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As children grow up learning the results of their behavior, they might broaden their application of the “don’t be mean” rule to cover a wide range of moral decisions rather than immediately searching for loopholes or ways to circumvent externally imposed restrictions

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If we follow our biology—how we have evolved to learn—and simply start paying attention to what our bodies are telling us, the rules might get simpler (though not necessarily easier). Get triggered. Be a jerk. See how much pain this causes both parties. Don’t repeat.

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without any accountability (negative reinforcement). In turn, since we cannot accurately assess the full results of our actions, we become subjectively biased to increasingly look for this type of reward and to look away from any damage that we might be causing.

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High schools can punish students for bullying, and social media apps can limit technology use, yet these types of rules may just spur rebellious teenagers on.

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Remember: immediacy of reward is important for reward-based learning. We get immediate rewards (Yakarma points) when our Yik Yak posts get upvoted. Punishment in the form of school suspension or something similar comes long after the reward has been reaped.

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And forbidding the use of apps falls into the category of cognitive (or other types of) control—even if we know that we shouldn’t have our phones on during lectures,

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In pointing to the principles of reward-based learning, Skinner may have been suggesting codes different from those now in place. He argued that for punishments to work—to be correctly associated with an action—they too had to be immediate.

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For example, how many of us have friends who, when their parents caught them smoking, immediately made them smoke ten cigarettes? Since nicotine is a toxin, the more we smoke cigarette after cigarette before our bodies have had a chance to build up a tolerance to them, the more they signal, “Toxic behavior! Abort! Abort!” We feel nauseated and vomit (often repeatedly) as our body strongly signals for us to stop doing whatever we are doing. Lucky for us and our parents! If the association with that punishment sticks, the next time we see a cigarette, we might feel nauseated—a warning as our body anticipates what will happen if we smoke it.

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At the time of my retreat, I had been dealing with some challenges at work. I had a colleague, “Jane,” with whom I was having some difficulty. Details aside (yes, gossip is juicy!), let’s just say I became angry whenever I thought of her.

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Each time a thought of her arose in my mind, I would cycle through endless mental simulations in which I would do this or that, all the while getting angrier and angrier. Of course, because these were my simulations, I was justified in being angry, because of the way Jane had treated me, and the things that she wanted from me, and so on.

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This predicament reminded me of one of the passages from the Pali Canon: “Whatever a [person] frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind.”2 As Skinner might have said, anger was now my habit. I was just spinning my wheels, and all the while sinking deeper and deeper in the sand.

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Soon thereafter, during a walking meditation period, I again got lost in an angry fantasy. This mind state had a very seductive quality to it; anger is described in the Dhammapada, a Buddhist scripture, as having a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”

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I asked myself, “What am I getting from this?” What reward had I been giving myself so often that I was constantly in this pit? The answer came in a blaze: nothing! Anger, with its poisoned root and honeyed tip indeed!

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This was perhaps the first time that I really saw that getting caught up in self-righteous, self-referential thinking served as its own reward. Like my smokers who realized that smoking really didn’t taste good, I finally saw that my contraction “buzz” from getting all high and mighty with anger was just perpetuating itself.

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Once I clearly saw that instead of getting anywhere near my goal of concentration meditation on this retreat, I was merely going around and around with anger, something lifted. Like my patients who started to become disenchanted with smoking, I started to become disenchanted with anger. Each time I saw it arise, it was less and less of a struggle to let go of it, because I could taste its poison, immediately.

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am not claiming that I never got angry again on the retreat or that I don’t get angry now. When I do, I just get less excited about it. Its rewarding properties are gone.

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On my “anger” meditation retreat, I noticed that my habit was not helping me concentrate.

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I started to become less excited about it (disenchanted) and noticed that, as a result, I freed up a lot more energy for other things.

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Why? As probably all of us can attest, anger is exhausting!

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On my retreat, this repurposed energy went toward the development of a less distracted and, yes, much more concentrated mind.

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As the distraction of anger died down, I was able to bring the proper conditions together to drop into a very concentrated state—one that stayed on point for up to an hour at a time.

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One of the factors that I mentioned in the last chapter that is needed for concentration is joy. Again, not agitated, restless excitement, but a joy that feels expansive and tranquil. Since anger and anticipatory excitement move us in the opposite direction, we need to find which types of activities foster joyful states.

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At some point in my meditation training, I learned a three-step “graduated” teaching that was part of Theravada Buddhism. It started with generosity, moved to virtuous conduct, and then, only after those had been practiced did one advance to mental development, as in meditation. The relevant insight from tradition and experience boils down to this: if you go around all day acting like a jerk, it will be hard to sit down and meditate. Why? Because as soon as we try to focus on an object, everything that was emotionally charged from the day will come marching into our heads, making it impossible to concentrate. If we come to the cushion not having lied, cheated, or stolen, there is “less garbage to take out” as Leigh Brasington, a meditation teacher specializing in concentration practices, likes to say.

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If this kind of virtuous conduct is the second step, what about the first, generosity?

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What does it feel like when we are generous? It feels good, an open, joyful state. Practicing generosity may help us learn what it feels like to let go. We are literally letting go when we give someone a gift.

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Yet not all generosity is equal. What happens when we give a gift and expect something in return? Does it feel joyful to donate a large sum of money with the expectation of receiving some type of recognition? What kind of satisfaction do we get when we hold the door for our boss or a date with the intention of impressing her or him?

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In an essay entitled “No Strings Attached: The Buddha’s Culture of Generosity,” Thanissaro Bhikkhu highlighted a passage in the Pali Canon listing three factors that exemplified the ideal gift: “The donor, before giving, is glad; while giving, his/her mind is inspired; and after giving, is gratified.”8

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That sequence sounds much like reward-based learning. The donor is glad (trigger); while giving, her mind is inspired (behavior); and after giving, she feels gratified (reward).

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In particular, this lack of recognition can explain the burnout experienced by those who constantly help others but return home exhausted, feeling unappreciated—like modern martyrs.

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On the other hand, if we selflessly hold the door, what would we expect? Absolutely nothing. Because we weren’t looking for a reward. It wouldn’t matter whether our date thanked us or not. Yet holding the door would still feel good, because the act provides an intrinsic reward. Giving feels good, especially when untainted by an expectation of recognition on the back end—no strings attached. That condition may be what the passage in the Pali Canon is pointing to. When we selflessly give, we don’t have to worry about buyer’s remorse because we aren’t buying anything. This intrinsic reward leaves us feeling gratified and lays down a memory that prompts us to do the same thing the next time.

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