Reinforced Behaviour

In class today, a colleague/friend of mine, Gary Shelton, spoke to the students/customers who regularly show up for Saturday class. Gary spoke to them about his career, including his humble beginnings, demonstrating to the students/customers that it doesn't matter where you start out - it only matters where you end up. His audience appreciated his presentation and I'm glad I invited Gary to speak to them, since it's their first official class at the institute, because they can now see that their humble start is just the beginning to a successful and prosperous career.

While Gary spoke, I was pulled aside and informed by a member of the faculty that I needed to encourage the students/customers to complete an assignment given to them earlier in the quarter.

I thought about this assignment, which will have to remain nameless, and wondered what motivation is involved in completing any one assignment. I recalled my psychology classes from high school and college and was pleased that the scientific behaviourism studies of B. F. Skinner still reside in my head. Also the classic oft-quoted phrase, "Pavlov's dog."

As a manager in the corporate world, I have discussed with others in management the concern we have about the type of behaviour we want to reinforce. Most humans will respond readily to easy-to-follow instructions if they believe their results align with their personal beliefs and the goals of a high-quality organization. Of course, many humans will follow directions, clear or chaotic, regardless of their beliefs or ethics/integrity/quality of the group they're following. Therefore, it behooves us who are leading to make sure we have a clear idea of the behaviours we're seeking from our followers before we tell them what to do.

As a classroom instructor, I fill the role of a factory supervisor or quality-control inspector, making sure that the widgets (my students/customers) match up with the widget specifications given to me. Most widgets are non-human and have well-defined material properties with which we can gauge their resistance to reshaping or modification. In many ways, humans are similar to non-human widgets because we can, in general, derive expectations of the types of resistance we will get when reshaping humans with known personality traits, physical capabilities, level of intelligence, etc.

Oddly enough, the assignment that the students were supposed to complete was designed without taking humans' personality traits into consideration. I know for a fact that a certain number of my students have personalities that are in direct conflict with the requirements of the assignment and will not complete the assignment, no matter what.

I, as the instructor, have my own set of personality traits, many of which have been documented in this blog. I laugh to think that one of these traits is a resistance to pushing my students/customers to do busy work, or work that is not directly tied to their course performance (by the way, the assignment in question here is a voluntary extracurricular one, I can say).

Incentives have been put in place to "encourage" me to push the students/customers to complete the assignment. I know that other instructors have strong needs to get these incentives but I am somewhat immune to incentives of this kind. My needs fall outside the goals and objectives of most humans who participate in the exchange of goods and services.

Three weeks before teaching my first class, I found out during instructor orientation class that this assignment would have a due-date as well as knew the incentives I would receive should a sufficient number of students/customers complete the assignment in a certain way. However, the person(s) who told me about the assignment did not ask me if the incentives would motivate me to get the students/customers to complete the assignment.

That's the problem with a blanket set of incentives - it doesn't cover everyone and thus fails to get the desired behaviour from all potential recipients of the incentives.

My needs are simple. I like to make people's faces light up and to get that they usually give me their life stories in return. I have given my students/customers more than I hoped. They have given me more than I needed. There is no money in the whole wide world, no riches, no fancy cars, no dream vacations, nothing of any material value that can replace the past ten weeks. What do I need of material incentives that are tied to an unnecessary extracurricular assignment, especially whose outcome I can't guarantee other than manipulating students/customers in ways I don't desire?

An old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for - you might get it." I say be careful how you ask for something because there's no guarantee you'll get it.