This is not a real rat.
That was all I could think as I stared at my most recent homework assignment for my course on psychology of learning and behavior. In order to demonstrate that we understood the principles of operant conditioning, our erstwhile professor had set this task for us. Train a rat to press a bar that will provide food when pressed. This, the erstwhile professor claimed, would have far-reaching implications for our continued study of psychology, and allow us to condition our friends, relatives, and bosses to acquiesce to our every whim. That’s not creepy at all. I became a psychology major because I wanted to help people, and while my friend in the human services major worked on actually helping people in her internship in adaptive aquatics, I was here, in front of my computer, mechanically hitting the space bar to provide a virtual rat with virtual food. This is not a real rat, and this is not my real life.
The virtual rat’s name was Sniffy. Sniffy and I had been struggling a bit. Sniffy was wandering around his cage, stopping occasionally to sniff the virtual air or lick his virtual self, and I was hitting the space bar every time he came near the virtual food pellet dispenser. This was supposed to train him to rear up and press the bar, but unfortunately, I’d been a bit lax about rewarding him only when he was directly in front of the pellet dispenser, and now he was under the impression that rearing anywhere in the cage would convince the magical pellet dispenser to feed him. I was ready to scream. I had to keep going until my bar graph of sound-food and bar-sound associations was maxed out. I’d been at it for two hours and we weren’t even halfway there.
The prospect of operant conditioning works something like this: You do a thing. As a result of the thing you did, you are rewarded. Therefore, in the future, you’re more likely to do that thing in the hopes that you’ll be rewarded again. We use this principle to train dogs. We also use it to train children. And indirectly, we use it to train ourselves to do things we don’t really want to do. How was I training myself to do my psychology homework, even when it seemed ridiculous? The mere promise of a Netflix binge once I finally escaped pixelated rat hell. But how was I training myself to continue on psychology when the only thing I could do was play an invisible, omnipotent God to a virtual rodent?
Psychology, like any ‘helping people’ field, requires a lot of risk for an uncertain reward. It asks you to invest years of your life – four in undergrad, and anywhere from two to six in graduate work if you want to get anywhere near an actual person – on the slim hope that you’ll find yourself with the tools to help people in a career you find rewarding and fulfilling. In between the moment when you decide to major in psychology and that distant, happy day when you finally get to put your skills to work, there’s a lot of metaphorical clicking of the space bar. You get a good grade on a test. A professor tells you your analysis has real potential. You have the right answer in class for once. But it’s a schedule of variable reinforcement. You don’t get told you’re on the right path every time you take a step forward. Sometimes you have to take 10. Or 100. Or more.
More, it seemed, was going to be the watchword with Sniffy’s training for the bar-pressing Olympics. More practice pressing the bar. More reinforcement every time he got near it. More staring at the screen until I saw virtual rats dancing before my eyes even when I looked away. More response. My virtual rat and I were in the same boat. Both of us were on a long, difficult journey. And both of us were unsure we were ever going to get there.
Sniffy pressed the bar six times in rapid succession, earning a shower of food pellets. I cheered, and my roommate sent a strange look in my direction. “What’s going on?”
I grinned up at her. “I trained my rat.”
She frowned, looking around the room. "What rat?"
