Negative Reinforcement and Biden, Trump and Russia

Negative reinforcement is not what you think

The term “negative reinforcement” dates to Behaviorism, the view that psychologists can only measure what they observe (e.g., behavior), hence that’s all they should study. Behaviorism was a powerful antidote to depth psychiatry, especially anything to do with Sigmund Freud, most of which largely was based on narratives, fables and imagined internal conflicts. While some of Freud’s teachings remain current (the latency period for child sexuality, for example), the science has moved on.

But the core concept of “negative reinforcement” is very much alive yet little understood, thanks in large measure to general assignment reporters and on-air TV journalists who routinely misuse the term. It does not mean threatening or punishing or harming someone to get them to change their behavior. It means removing a negative such as an existing punishment, perhaps alleviating some hardship, to get them to change their behavior. A child is in sit out for misbehaving? You promise to let him back in to your good graces if he or she changes their behavior for the better. A convict is in solitary confinement, perhaps for attacking another prisoner? You offer to return him to the general population on the condition he conform to the rules. That’s negative reinforcement.

So, what has this to do with Joe Biden’s recent decisions to allow Ukraine to deploy American long-range ballistic missiles and land mines? Plenty, I say. What Biden has done is give incoming president Donald Trump, no friend of mine, the bargainiong chips by which he can offer substantial negative reinforcement to Vladimir Putin, also no friend of mine. Vlad wants peace? Trump now can say, ‘Okay, Vlad, you want Ukraine to stop using these weapons of war? You want us to ban them from using them? You stop advancing on Ukrainian territory, maybe even withdraw to your real borders, and we will stop the Ukrainians from using these weapons.’ Right now, I don’t see that we have much leverage with Russia at all, except this history of slow-motion escalation on our side (but which has now become rapid and substantial) that has not worked well in the past.

Biden and Trump recently met in the White House, and the media was either surprised or agog at how cordial the meeting was. Some wondered what they talked about. It wasn’t the weather. I’m hypothesizing that they talked about just this – give the incoming president some tools, some bargaining chips, that might finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. If a promise of peace or better relations didn’t work as “positive reinforcement,” then negative reinforcement just might. Certainly, the timing for a change in our behavior is right.

The speculation in the media as to why Biden is only now allowing these particular weapons of war to be used seems quite weak and uninformed. It’s just the media mavens quoting each other like cackling people in a street market. They just seem incapable of thinking it through, or thinking on their own, and they don’t seem to understand that Biden, for all his faults, is patriotic, and is anti-war, and does want to see the bloodshed in Ukraine end. Everybody writes about his fear of nuclear war, but that does not mean he doesn‘t know how the grand game is really played. I don’t know that such negative reinforcement will work, but the timing is right.