The law, the brain, operant psychology, and the intersection
By Nicolle Kouw UA’24 and Jim Stellar
This conversation began in NK’s spring senior year class (How the Brain Decides). The idea in that class was that the cognitive system (neocortex) has plans and the emotional system (limbic) has the value reaction to those plans. That contrasts with the “laws” of operant behavior that BF Skinner made famous. Namely, that the reward experience shapes those operant plans in reinforcing a particular voluntary behavior that leads to that reward. In Skinner’s case the operant behavior was often pressing a lever to get a food pellet when the rat was hungry. But how does that cognitive-emotional integration happen? Even more interesting, what is the overlap between a system of laws in society and “how the brain decides” to generate behavior.
Two points: We start with two key points that came out of NK’s class work: 1) How does the brain generate movement (behavior) and then how does it get evaluated for its impact, and 2) What is the overlap between the rules-based order that is the law and the reinforced operant behavior that are the “laws” of operant behavior?
Point #1: In one of the clearest stories in neuroscience, motor behavior is generated by a loop running from the neocortex to the caudate nucleus to the globus pallidus to the thalamus and back to the cortex. The key neurotransmitter of dopamine comes from the brainstem to keep that loop running and if it is not there the rat or the human cannot move. This is Parkinson’s disease and both humans and the laboratory rats have the same key symptom – akinesia or a lack of movement.
In another good story, a nearby brainstem area supplies the same dopamine neurotransmitter but to a structure that is close to the caudate nucleus, called the accumbens. Here both laboratory rats and humans both seem to experience reward from dopamine release. This is evident as they both become addicted to cocaine which promotes dopamine in the accumbens synapses. As Skinner said long ago, reward (or reinforcement) shapes behavior toward goals. In some sense, dopamine directs and selects the behavior to make it line up with what are the implicit rules of the environment. That could be a food pellet for the hungry rat by pushing the lever in a operant box or it could be the pleasure of a child from the praise of a parent.
Point #2: The rules-based order or government’s laws that control human behavior is clearly found in parallel in operant psychology. One can see them coming into the points above through operant psychology paradigms of risk and reward, hyperbolic discounting, the matching law, etc. Viewing these laws that affect our behaviors through not just a psychological lens but also through my (NK’s) interest in the law gave these rules a new meaning. Most aspiring law students don’t major in psychology, however, through doing so I found deeper ways to think critically and logically in subjects beyond law. And yet in studying for my LSAT that is required for entrance into law school, I find myself learning how to think differently and critically, how to study efficiently, and what the LSAT is designed to test for; I find myself going back to my psychology roots. I see the behavior patterns from operant psychology in the way I study and the methods of the law I’m learning to use now and that I hope to use when I am a lawyer.
Integration: This is the hard part because we want to go beyond what is a superficial parallel and see if there is anything deeper. First, another blog in this series is relevant as it saw the caudate nucleus (really including the accumbens) as an integrator between emotion and action. A compelling phrase to us here is “cognitive-emotional convergence, the “mixture of ways” referring to the blending of conscious explicit ways of thinking and implicit emotional ways of assigning value to behavioral outcomes for learning and possibly making behavioral tendencies or habits. We can refer you here to another blog on how the frontal cortex re-represents the limbic (emotional/value) analysis, perhaps so it can enter into cognitive planning. Of course, we recognise that some forms of emotional processing underlie implicit thinking that may not be something of which the person is aware.
Consider this operant psychology theory that NK explored in why drug addicts may be able to give up their addiction more successfully later in life rather than earlier. Based on an article titled Addiction and choice: theory and new data byGene Heyman, we can explore the idea of why some addicts can quit their addictions simply because the lifestyle no longer aligns with their reality, without any rehabilitation efforts. Heyman supports this new idea through quantitative principles such as the matching law and hyperbolic discounting. The matching law is when behavior occurs in direct proportion to the level of the reinforcement available. In other words, preference is shown to the behavior which receives the highest amount of reinforcement. If the ratio of reinforcement between two operant behaviors is 2-to-1 the ratio of the display of those behaviors is 2-to-1. Hyperbolic discounting is where people choose smaller, immediate rewards over larger, later rewards. The immediate presence of the reward increases the reward’s value although the later reward is actually more valuable or “better”, so to speak. Both of these phenomena are quantitative and predictable.
These principles play a role in creating the addiction in the first place. The drug is very rewarding. However, Heyman argues these principles also play a role in the person’s beating of the addiction. For example, when the addict starts a career or a family, or their friends do, suddenly, the benefits in their lives begin to outweigh the benefits of drug usage. Obviously, this is circumstantial and applies to those who began using drugs in a particular setting and usually in a transitional period of one’s life, such as their 20s or in college. Once the next chapter of life begins and environments, values, and lives change as one gets older, the consequences or cost of drug usage become greater parallel to said values. As Heyman says,
“A common feature of addictive drugs is that they provide immediate benefits but delayed costs. Thus, it is possible that the drug is the best choice when the frame of reference is restricted to the current values of the immediately available options but the worst choice when the frame of reference expands to include future costs and other people’s needs.”
So what does this mean? The brain dopamine mechanisms shape individual behavior to generally fit with these laws of reinforcement. As a society, people also generally shape their behavior to fit with the laws of the State. Is this individual action in our brains (really a society of nerve cells), working like the shaping of society’s behavior? That is an interesting question that we might ponder in another blog.
