I’ll start with a very simple question. One that we have all considered at some point: What makes some behaviors more and less easy to modify or even eliminate?
Readers will think of examples of acquaintances, or even themselves, in which they have been able to modify behaviors that seem impossible for others to change, such as stopping biting their nails, quitting tobacco, or resisting compulsive shopping.
Here one of the proposals comes into play to respond to our concern: the Behavioral Moment Theory by John Anthony Nevin (1988) but first, we will explain some basic concepts of Learning Psychology to get your mind ready.
With these terms clear, we can begin to describe Nevin’s Behavioral Moment Theory, or BMT from now on.
Explaining resistance to change
Nevin proposed the Behavioral Moment Theory to explain the resistance to change in behaviors that, in many people, become automatic either through training or massive practice of them. Therefore, he proposed a concept: The behavioral momentdefined as the susceptibility of a behavior to being interrupted.
But what creates that susceptibility? What makes one behavior more resistant than another when it comes to eliminating it? The answer is found (among others) in the forms of reinforcement with which the behavior was acquired
Research that supports this theory
Let’s think about two mice that we have trained to press a lever. Each time they did so, they would receive a food pellet. The behavior is to press the lever, and the reinforcer is the food pellet.
Mouse 1 has always been reinforced after pressing the lever, while mouse 2 has been partially reinforced (sometimes yes, sometimes no and without a fixed pattern). At this point, when the behavior is fixed, we want to eliminate it in our small rodents. Therefore, we stop dispensing food pellets each time the lever is pressed (behavior extinction).
I ask you, dear readers: which mouse will take longer to extinguish its behavior, that is, to stop pressing the lever: number 1 or number 2?
Reinforcement
Mouse number 1, which learned through continuous reinforcement, will go extinct very quickly the behavior because he will notice that food no longer falls into his feeder regardless of how many times he presses the lever. That is to say: if he was always given food and suddenly it is not given, he will make a few attempts that, after being unsuccessful, will give up definitively.
Extinction
And mouse number 2? You will suffer a paradoxical effect explained by the Theory of Frustration (Amsel, 1962) by which their behavior not only will not begin to extinguish immediately, but will increase.
Why is this happening? Mouse number 2 was reinforced sometimes yes, sometimes no. He doesn’t know when a pellet will fall into his feeder again, but he knows there have to be a few lever presses where he won’t fall and a few where he will. Therefore, he will press the lever 20, 100, 200 times until he finally understands that there will be no more balls in the feeder if he emits the behavior and it ends up being extinguished.
Or what is the same: mouse number 1 had a lower behavioral moment than number 2.
How does this phenomenon affect us in our lives?
If we look away from the mice to ourselves, this explains a multitude of everyday actions:
Disorders that it influences
But it can not only be applicable in such everyday behaviors, but also in disorders such as gambling, addictions, eating disorders… in which apparently a continuous “reinforcement” is generated, but in reality this is not the case. A gambler does not always manage to get money from the machine, a cigarette produces instant pleasure, but it stimulates areas of the brain that increasingly ask for more, and more of the stimulus to be satiated, a person with binge eating disorder can fill up on food and feel assaulted due to great discomfort due to their lack of control that makes that “small pleasure” dissipate…
We all know the difficulty involved in abandoning an addiction or overcoming an eating disorder, and in this lies the resistance to extinction of the behaviors that are emitted, in relation to how they were acquired.
Even so, it is necessary to make a cautious note. Behavioral Moment Theory has provided an excellent framework for studying resistance to change. and the extinction of behavior, but logically, the complexity that characterizes us, specifically, human beings, makes it unlikely that only the behavioral moment explains extinction by itself. In any case, it is a very interesting theory to take into account for our knowledge.
