Random reward conditioning

If slot machines delivered $1 every time you inserted 50 la6icents, you might use them, but you’d never get addicted.

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An urban myth popular in US universities concerns a group of psychology students who decide to play a trick on their lecturer. They conspire among themselves to nod, smile and express passionate interest whenever he’s standing at one side of the podium, or whenever he raises his arms to gesture; the rest of the time, they look distracted and bored. By the end of term, he’s spending every lecture teetering precariously at the podium’s edge, his arms floating foolishly far above his head. He has fallen victim to good, old-fashioned “operant conditioning” – the rewards-based system of behaviour change pioneered in rats by BF Skinner.