Into the Box
by Wentworth Sutton,assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto.
A popular television show has described Canadian culture as a combination of beer, bingo, and doughnut shops. Certainly these three institutions occupy central cultural positions in Canada. However, they also share an important and fundamental characteristic which explains not only much of Canadian life but much of the culture of the industrialized world as well.
This characteristic has been acquired most recently by the doughnut shop, as a result of the takeover of the retail doughnut industry by giant corporations. One of the chief modifications made to doughnut shops by the corporations has been the elimination of counter service. In fact, counter service is now the hallmark of the increasingly rare independent doughnut shop.
Corporations don't like counter service because the customers at the counter have a distressing habit of talking to the staff. This, to the corporations' mind, distracts staff from their important task of maximizing net return per doughnut, and customers from finishing their food as quickly as possible and clearing out to leave a space for another customer.
The corporations have reduced the life of the doughnut shop to ordering, buying, consuming, and splitting (at Tim Horton's they even confiscate stray newspapers so you won't waste time learning about current events). In short, the corporations have remodelled the doughnut shop to resemble a Skinner box.
As you probably know, the Skinner box is a device for investigating learning. In the classic version a rat or pigeon presses or pecks a key, and food is delivered as a result of the key being depressed. Delivery of food contingent on a response is reinforcing – it increases the likelihood the response will occur again. In the new improved doughnut shop of the Third Millennium, customers hand over money and then receive their food. Giving money to the corporation is reinforced by food.
In the old restaurant model, food was ordered, then delivered, then consumed, and only then paid for. Corporations realize that this order of events is inconsistent with effective learning principles. Paying is not reinforced. How much more efficient is the new improved doughnut shop! Pay, get doughnut, increase response strength.
The model reaches its purest form at the doughnut drive-through. The drive-through reduces the doughnut transaction to its simplest form – put money through window, get food back, get moving. Judging from the lines at Tim Horton's every morning, Canadians' driving-through responses have acquired enormous strength.
The reinforcement model is new to doughnut shops, but it is not new to Canada. If we turn to the first of the three components of Canadian culture, beer, we find that Ontario beer stores have perfected this approach. When you order beer in Ontario you pay your money and the beer comes flying out of a hatch along rollers. That's the entire transaction. The similarity to a rat pressing a bar and finding a food pellet dropped in its food tray is obvious.
The second component of Canadian culture, bingo, demonstrates an important learning phenomenon discovered with the Skinner box. This is the effect of the partial reinforcement schedule.
Partial reinforcement schedules are, naturally enough, schedules of reinforcement in which reinforcers are provided after only some of the responses. Once a response has been fully acquired, reducing the frequency of reinforcement makes the response deeply ingrained and difficult to eradicate.
And who likes partial reinforcement more than Canadians or bingo players? A game of bingo consists of sitting at a table dabbing at pieces of paper until bingo is called and a handful of people collect money. The resemblance of a bingo hall to a workshop is quite striking. The activity is not in itself enjoyable, but partial reinforcement keeps people addicted to it.
The reinforcement model is a sign of a world in which commerce has been elevated to iconic status. We must not go to a restaurant to enjoy good food among pleasant company in pleasant surroundings, but instead to give money to a corporation. We must not go out for a night of entertainment but instead to pay money for the opportunity to dab relentlessly at numbers on pieces of paper – real entertainment would cost the owners too much.
In Canada, though, the reinforcement model also appeals to the deep puritan strain in Canadian culture. Simply put, Canadians hate to enjoy themselves. It makes them feel guilty. Worse, it makes them feel American. Better to consume a doughnut in haste and discomfort than to enjoy one unhurriedly and at ease. Let those vulgar Americans luxuriate in their Krispy Kremes; such delights of the flesh are not for us. We prefer to give of ourselves for the greater good of transnational capitalism.
We can expect to see reinforcement principles extended to other areas, and in fact they are being extended in some now. Pay-per-view television is an obvious example. Plans to introduce user fees for government services are another. The future is one in which society will more and more come to resemble the Skinner box. Human interaction which distracts from the exchange of money for products or services will be discouraged.
Considering that human interaction produced such things as karaoke and all five major Canadian political parties, perhaps that's not a bad thing. Perhaps sitting in one of those back-breaking chairs at Tim Horton's gulping the liquefied waste they call coffee and vainly trying to snaffle a free newspaper before the staff confiscate it is truly a glorious act of self-sacrifice which we carry out for the greater good of society.
Into the Box © Coolth, 2001
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