Living in a Skinner box

In November of this year, I tried breaking up with my boyfriend after a year and a half of verbal, psychological, and eventually physical abuse. One time, as I was trying to pack up my belongings to leave, he grabbed all of my clothes off the closet hangers in a fit of anger and attempted to throw them out the window of the 8th floor apartment that we shared. In addition, he also threatened to throw my schoolbooks out of the window. Worst of all, he threatened to call Penn and get me kicked out. These are all examples of aversive stimuli. I reacted to these aversive stimuli by saying “sorry” and staying in the apartment and in the relationship (even though I later reflected that I did nothing wrong). If you examine abuse through behaviorist lenses, the above makes perfect sense. Behaviorism is the philosophy that all things that people and animals do (actions, thoughts and feelings) are all behaviors. Abusers “teach,” or rather condition, their victims to behave the way they want them to using positive and negative reinforcement.

In my case, my boyfriend would punish my “negative behaviors” - which included wanting to spend time alone with my friends or mother, saying hello to another male, not answering my phone, using up the hot water in the shower, questioning his drinking or drug use - by yelling, grabbing or restraining me, threats, giving me the “evil eye” and kicking me out. Getting worn out from the endless arguing and reasoning, I eventually surrendered and stopped going out. I would stay in the controlled environment of our Skinner box apartment to avoid the aversive stimuli. But as Boeree wrote about Skinner, “the environment doesn’t travel well!” When I would visit my mother on the weekends I returned to my normal [unafraid] behavior or left the controlled environment in a mental way – by reading books. We would have discussions of the books I read and he didn’t have any strong opinions on them usually. However, when I was enamored with Rita Golden Gelman’s book, he veiled his controlling behavior in “romanticism” by saying “please don’t ever do that [travel abroad alone], I would miss you terribly.”

Skinner and Thorndike claim that for behaviorism to work, we must start with someone’s core beliefs. My belief was that human beings are good by nature. Another reason why I believe I put up with the abuse for so long is because I was eager to please and driven by rewards and punishments. My rewards were kindness, love, attention, a soft tone of voice and material things such as ipods, clothes and getting taken out to eat.

Now that the relationship is over, I take away many important learning experiences from it. Just like Skinner learned in his rat experiment, I learned that you grow immune to constant negative reinforcements. When my boyfriend saw that I was no longer affected by aversive stimuli such as yelling, he needed to find stronger negative reinforcements and graduated to physical abuse.

This past week I finally dealt with it by giving him back a taste of his own medicine. I filed a report and put the responsibility of aversive stimuli (threat of jail) in the hands of the police.