The effect of non-contingent negative and positive reinforcement operations on the acquisition of superstitious behaviors

Is superstitious responding a matter of detectability? A replication of Killeen (1978)

Organisms may sometimes behave as if a contingency exists between behavior and consequences, even if this is not actually the case. Killeen (1978) suggested that such superstition occurs because of factors that bias subjects to behave "superstitiously" rather than because of failures of discrimination. We systematically replicated Killeen's experiment and compared contingency discrimination between different consequences. Six pigeons responded in a matching-to-sample procedure in which a response-independent or response-dependent stimulus change, food delivery, or blackout occurred. The pigeons reported whether the consequence was response dependent or response independent by choosing between two side keys. Discrimination was strongest after stimulus changes, weaker after blackouts, and weakest after food deliveries. These differences persisted even after additional training, suggesting asymmetries that may reflect differences in the disruptive effects of different consequences on remembering and/or behavioral mnemonics. Importantly, the pigeons were not biased to report response-dependent consequences unless that response was consistent with locational biases; that is, they behaved "superstitiously" when there was a reason to be biased to do so. These findings corroborate Killeen's and demonstrate that behavior may deviate from contingencies not necessarily because subjects cannot discriminate those contingencies but because they are biased to behave otherwise.

Bridging the gap between laboratory and applied research on response-independent schedules

In 1948, Skinner described the behavior of pigeons under response-independent schedules as "superstitious," and proposed that the responses were reinforced by contiguous, adventitious food deliveries. Subsequently, response-independent schedules have been of interest to both basic and applied researchers, first to understand the mechanisms involved, and later, as "noncontingent reinforcement" (NCR) to reduce undesirable behavior. However, the potential superstitious effects produced by these schedules have been challenged, with some researchers arguing that antecedent variables play a significant role. This paper examines the evidence for adventitious reinforcement from both laboratory and applied research, the results of which suggest that antecedent, nonoperant functions may be important in fully understanding the effects of NCR. We propose an applied-basic research synthesis, in which attention to potential nonoperant functions could provide a more complete understanding of response-independent schedules. We conclude with a summary of the applied implications of the nonoperant functions of NCR schedules.

Uncovering Underlying Processes Before Illusion of Control Begins in Gambling Disorder: A Pilot Study

Gambling Disorder (GD) is characterized by persistent betting even in face of accruing debts and psychosocial hardship. Gambling Disorder behavior has been linked to conditioning, cognitive distortions and superstitious behavior. Previous studies have demonstrated that during response-outcome analytical tests (ROAT), non-gambling individuals are precluded from response extinction when failure feedback is suppressed, and develop superstitious behaviors and illusion of control instead. Gambling can be regarded as a ROAT paradigm in which disordered gamblers (DGs) fail to compute failure feedback; hence they do not perceive the independence between response and outcome. In order to investigate early phenomena on response and outcome processing in DGs, we developed two short ROAT versions, one with a controllable outcome and one with an uncontrollable outcome, both with explicit failure feedback. Twenty DGs and twenty healthy controls were assessed using this novel paradigm. Compared to controls, DGs reported higher distress during the controllable ROAT, less self-confidence in the uncontrollable ROAT, and more random responses and less use of analytical strategies in both tests, evidencing potential deficits in cognitive control. In contrast to previous findings, DGs did not demonstrate more superstitious beliefs, or illusion of control, and were generally more skeptical than controls regarding the controllability of both ROAT versions. Taken together, our findings provide some support for deficits in cognitive control in GD that precede illusion of control and superstitious behaviors.

Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment

The notion of superstitious behavior can provide a basic background for understanding such notions as illusions and beliefs. The present study investigated the social mechanism of the transmission of superstitious behavior in an experiment that utilized participant replacement. The sample was composed of a total of 38 participants. Participants performed a task on a computer: they could click a colored rectangle using the mouse. When the rectangle was in a particular color, the participants received points independently of their behavior (variable time schedule). When the color of the rectangle was changed, no points were presented (extinction). Under an Individual Exposure condition, ten participants worked alone on the task. Other participants were exposed to the same experimental task under a Social Exposure condition, in which each participant first learned by observation and then worked on the task in a participant replacement (chain) procedure. The first participant in each chain in the Social Exposure condition was a confederate who worked on the task "superstitiously," clicking the rectangle when points were presented. Superstitious responding was transmitted because of the behavior of the confederate. This also influenced estimates of personal control. These findings suggest that social learning can facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of superstitious behavior and the illusion of control. Our data also suggest that superstitious behavior and the illusion of control may involve similar learning principles.

Causal Illusions in the Service of Political Attitudes in Spain and the United Kingdom

The causal illusion is a cognitive bias that results in the perception of causality where there is no supporting evidence. We show that people selectively exhibit the bias, especially in those situations where it favors their current worldview as revealed by their political orientation. In our two experiments (one conducted in Spain and one conducted in the United Kingdom), participants who self-positioned themselves on the ideological left formed the illusion that a left-wing ruling party was more successful in improving city indicators than a right-wing party, while participants on the ideological right tended to show the opposite pattern. In sum, despite the fact that the same information was presented to all participants, people developed the causal illusion bias selectively, providing very different interpretations that aligned with their previous attitudes. This result occurs in situations where participants inspect the relationship between the government's actions and positive outcomes (improving city indicators) but not when the outcomes are negative (worsening city indicators).

Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions. Scientific thinking is the best possible safeguard against them, but it does not come intuitively and needs to be taught. Teaching how to think scientifically should benefit from better understanding of the illusion of causality. In this article, we review experiments that our group has conducted on the illusion of causality during the last 20 years. We discuss how research on the illusion of causality can contribute to the teaching of scientific thinking and how scientific thinking can reduce illusion.

Exploring the factors that encourage the illusions of control: the case of preventive illusions

Most previous research on illusions of control focused on generative scenarios, in which participants’ actions aim to produce a desired outcome. By contrast, the illusions that may appear in preventive scenarios, in which actions aim to prevent an undesired outcome before it occurs, are less known. In this experiment, we studied two variables that modulate generative illusions of control, the probability with which the action takes place, P(A), and the probability of the outcome, P(O), in two different scenarios: generative and preventive. We found that P(O) affects the illusion in symmetrical, opposite directions in each scenario, while P(A) is positively related to the magnitude of the illusion. Our conclusion is that, in what concerns the illusions of control, the occurrence of a desired outcome is equivalent to the nonoccurrence of an undesired outcome, which explains why the P(O) effect is reversed depending on the scenario.

Reducing the illusion of control when an action is followed by an undesired outcome

The illusion of control is the belief that our behavior produces an effect that is actually independent from it. This illusion is often at the core of superstitious and pseudoscientific thinking. Although recent research has proposed several evidence-based strategies that can be used to reduce the illusion, the majority of these experiments have involved positive illusions-that is, those in which the potential outcomes are desired (e.g., recovery from illness or earning points). By contrast, many real-life superstitions and pseudosciences are tied to negative illusions-that is, those in which the potential consequences are undesired. Examples are walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror, or sitting in row 13, all of which are supposed to generate bad luck. Thus, the question is whether the available evidence on how to reduce positive illusions would also apply to situations in which the outcomes are undesired. We conducted an experiment in which participants were exposed to undesired outcomes that occurred independently of their behavior. One strategy that has been shown to reduce positive illusions consists of warning people that the outcomes might have alternative causes, other than the participants' actions, and telling them that the best they can do to find out whether an alternative cause is at work is to act on only about 50% of the trials. When we gave our participants this information in an experiment in which the outcomes were undesired, their illusion was enhanced rather than reduced, contrary to what happens when the outcome is desired. This suggests that the strategies that reduce positive illusions may work in just the opposite way when the outcome is undesired.

[Is superstitious behavior more easily acquired by negative reinforcement schedules than positive reinforcement schedules? Examinations of the polarity and the duration of a consequence]

This study investigated the effects of positive and negative reinforcement on superstitious behaviors. Participants were instructed to produce the word "GOOD" on a computer display (positive reinforcement condition) or to remove the word "BAD" (negative reinforcement condition) by pressing any of six keys. The words GOOD or BAD were presented at fixed-time intervals regardless of the participant's responses. In Experiment 1, only participants exposed to the negative reinforcement condition acquired superstitious behaviors. However, the observed asymmetry may not have been due to the polarity of consequences (positive vs. negative) but instead to the amount of time of goal states, because the period of the absence of BAD was longer than the period of the presence of GOOD. Experiment 2 varied the duration of word presentations to match the period of goal state between the positive and negative reinforcement conditions, and found that participants acquired superstitious behaviors equally under the two conditions. These results indicate that the duration of a consequence rather than its polarity is a critical factor controlling superstitious behaviors. The theoretical relationship between superstitious behavior and the illusion of control is discussed.

Pathological gamblers are more vulnerable to the illusion of control in a standard associative learning task

An illusion of control is said to occur when a person believes that he or she controls an outcome that is uncontrollable. Pathological gambling has often been related to an illusion of control, but the assessment of the illusion has generally used introspective methods in domain-specific (i.e., gambling) situations. The illusion of control of pathological gamblers, however, could be a more general problem, affecting other aspects of their daily life. Thus, we tested them using a standard associative learning task which is known to produce illusions of control in most people under certain conditions. The results showed that the illusion was significantly stronger in pathological gamblers than in a control undiagnosed sample. This suggests (1) that the experimental tasks used in basic associative learning research could be used to detect illusions of control in gamblers in a more indirect way, as compared to introspective and domain-specific questionnaires; and (2), that in addition to gambling-specific problems, pathological gamblers may have a higher-than-normal illusion of control in their daily life.

Mediating role of activity level in the depressive realism effect

Several classic studies have concluded that the accuracy of identifying uncontrollable situations depends heavily on depressive mood. Nondepressed participants tend to exhibit an optimistic illusion of control, whereas depressed participants tend to better detect a lack of control. Recently, we suggested that the different activity levels (measured as the probability of responding during a contingency learning task) exhibited by depressed and nondepressed individuals is partly responsible for this effect. The two studies presented in this paper provide further support for this mediational hypothesis, in which mood is the distal cause of the illusion of control operating through activity level, the proximal cause. In Study 1, the probability of responding, P(R), was found to be a mediator variable between the depressive symptoms and the judgments of control. In Study 2, we intervened directly on the mediator variable: The P(R) for both depressed and nondepressed participants was manipulated through instructions. Our results confirm that P(R) manipulation produced differences in the participants’ perceptions of uncontrollability. Importantly, the intervention on the mediator variable cancelled the effect of the distal cause; the participants’ judgments of control were no longer mood dependent when the P(R) was manipulated. This result supports the hypothesis that the so-called depressive realism effect is actually mediated by the probability of responding.

Measuring preschoolers' superstitious tendencies

Superstitious behaviors have been studied extensively in adults and non-human species, but have not been systematically assessed in children. The purpose of the study is to develop and validate a method of measuring superstitious tendencies in young children based on an established learning paradigm. In two studies, 3-5-year-olds tapped a computer to make a target image appear. On half the trials, a sensory stimulus appeared at a random time before the target. Superstitious tendencies were measured by change in tapping during the presence of the sensory stimulus. Children's proportion of tapping increased during the presence of the sensory stimulus, indicating that children associated the sensory stimulus with the appearance of the target image, even though the two stimuli were not causally related. Implications for the development of superstitious tendencies and children's causal knowledge are discussed.

Superstitious conditioning as a model of delusion formation following chronic but not acute ketamine in humans

BACKGROUND

Ketamine has previously been shown to induce delusion-like or referential beliefs, both acutely in healthy volunteers and naturalistically among nonintoxicated users of the drug. Delusions are theoretically underpinned by increased superstitious conditioning or the erroneous reinforcement of random events.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Using a novel and objectively measured superstitious conditioning task, experiment 1 assessed healthy volunteers before and during placebo (n = 16), low-dose (n = 15), and high-dose ketamine (n = 16) under randomized and double-blind conditions. Experiment 2 used the same task to compare ketamine users (n = 18), polydrug controls (n = 19), and nondrug-using controls (n = 17).

RESULTS

In experiment 1, ketamine produced dose-dependent psychotomimetic effects but did not cause changes in superstitious conditioning. Experiment 2 found increased levels of superstitious conditioning among ketamine users compared to polydrug and nondrug-using controls, respectively, as evidenced by both objective task responses and subjective beliefs following the task.

CONCLUSIONS

Results indicate that chronic but not acute exposure to ketamine may increase the propensity to adopt superstitious conditioning. These findings are discussed in terms of acute and chronic ketamine models of delusion-like belief formation in schizophrenia.

Illusion of control in Internet users and college students

When people try to obtain a desired event and this outcome occurs independently of their behavior, they often think that they are controlling its occurrence. This is known as the illusion of control, and it is the basis for most superstitions and pseudosciences. However, most experiments demonstrating this effect had been conducted many years ago and almost always in the controlled environment of the psychology laboratory and with psychology students as subjects. Here, we explore the generality of this effect and show that it is still today a robust phenomenon that can be observed even in the context of a very simple computer program that users try to control (and believe that they are controlling) over the Internet. Understanding how robust and general this effect is, is a first step towards eradicating irrational and pseudoscientific thinking.

Non-contingent positive and negative reinforcement schedules of superstitious behaviors

The role of schedules of reinforcement on the development of superstitious conditioning was investigated in a college age population. Participants were randomly assigned to one of eight operant schedules and instructed to remove (escape), prevent and/or remove (avoidance and escape) or produce (positive) the appearance of a computer generated stimulus using a response pad. Results from the experiment indicate that concomitant (escape and avoidance) schedules of reinforcement are most effective in facilitating acquisition of superstitious behavior as measured by self-reports of participants.

Cue-induced reinstatement of ethanol seeking in Sardinian alcohol-preferring rats

The purpose of the present study was to characterize cue-induced reinstatement of ethanol seeking in selectively bred Sardinian alcohol-preferring (sP) rats trained to lever press for ethanol in 30-min self-administration sessions. Four responses on an "active" lever led to presentation of 0.1 ml of 15% (vol/vol) ethanol by a liquid dipper and concurrent activation of a set of discrete light and auditory cues. In a 70-min extinction/reinstatement session, responding was first extinguished for 60 min. Subsequently, different stimuli were delivered in a noncontingent manner and reinstatement of nonreinforced responding was assessed. Fifteen presentations of the ethanol-predictive stimulus complex, including the dipper cup containing 5 or 15% ethanol, potently reinstated responding on the previously active lever. The magnitude of reinstatement increased with the number of stimulus presentations and concentration of ethanol presented by the dipper cup. Fifteen presentations of the ethanol-predictive stimulus complex, including the dipper cup filled with water (0% ethanol), did not produce any reinstatement. These results indicate that (1) noncontingent presentations of the ethanol-predictive stimulus complex may reinstate ethanol seeking in sP rats and (2) the orosensory properties of ethanol may play an important role in reinstatement of ethanol seeking in sP rats. The latter finding concurs with clinical observations that odor and taste of alcoholic beverages elicit immediate craving responses in abstinent alcoholics.

Anxiety disorders and control related beliefs: the exemplar of Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Beliefs about control have been postulated to be important to anxiety and mood disorders. In particular, the phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suggests that it may be an exemplar of an anxiety disorder where control issues related to the self (behavior and thoughts) and world (the external environment) are particularly important. However, only beliefs concerning the need to control thoughts have been incorporated into contemporary theories of OCD. This article summarizes the theoretical and empirical research relevant to control-related beliefs in OCD. It is suggested that discrepancies between an individual's desired level of control and their perceived level of control could contribute to OCD symptoms, and exacerbate the tendency for individuals with OCD to engage in magical ideation and superstitious rituals. Overall, this review demonstrates how consideration of control cognitions could enhance our understanding of OCD and further improve its treatment.