Like most of you, we've been ordering stuff online for many years. It's a rare week when one of us doesn't order something from a store online, whether it's clothes, tools, hobby stuff, products for home maintenance, and, well, just "stuff".
At the moment and for the last week or so we haven't ordered anything. Nothing is on back order. So for the first time in quite a while, we aren't expecting any packages to land on the front porch.
And yet, every time I walk past the narrow windows on the side of the front door, I find myself involuntarily looking at the porch to see if a package has landed, and realized that I've been conditioned, just like Pavlov's dogs, to look for an expected package even though I know doggone well (sorry, couldn't help it) that no package is arriving.
Just in case there's someone who has never heard of Ivan Pavlov and his psychology experiment, here's a link to an article describing it: https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html. I had to take a number of psychology classes in college so I'm well familiar with it.
Anyone else find themselves doing something similar in catching themselves behaving in a certain manner just because, on intermittent occasions, the behavior is rewarded even when you know it won't be this time?
At the moment and for the last week or so we haven't ordered anything. Nothing is on back order. So for the first time in quite a while, we aren't expecting any packages to land on the front porch.
And yet, every time I walk past the narrow windows on the side of the front door, I find myself involuntarily looking at the porch to see if a package has landed, and realized that I've been conditioned, just like Pavlov's dogs, to look for an expected package even though I know doggone well (sorry, couldn't help it) that no package is arriving.
Just in case there's someone who has never heard of Ivan Pavlov and his psychology experiment, here's a link to an article describing it: https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html. I had to take a number of psychology classes in college so I'm well familiar with it.
Anyone else find themselves doing something similar in catching themselves behaving in a certain manner just because, on intermittent occasions, the behavior is rewarded even when you know it won't be this time?
Someday's there is plenty of good stuff, others, not so much.
