Why We Settle for Less While Wanting More

Consider before answering. Think about all you do. On the job, at home, in your relationships. Now then: Are you receiving enough pay? Sufficient help with house chores? Enough nurturing sustenance from those in your life? In short, are you getting as good as you give?

Probably not. Or at least, probably not in all areas.

And yet, for most of us, it has likely been some time since we last asked the boss for a raise, the spouse or kids for extra assistance keeping up the homestead, or a cherished friend for a bit more needed support.

In daily life, we call the phenomenon that conspires to keep us from fulfillment mental habit. Behavioral psychologists call it habituation. Given enough experience with circumstances through repeated exposures over time, all organisms – including humans – become accustomed to things as they are.

As Barry Schwartz and Steven J. Robbins point out in Psychology of Learning and Behavior, when you poke a snail with a stick, it reacts immediately and withdraws into its protective shell. Poke it again when it reemerges, and it will react more slowly. Try the experiment several times in succession and the snail won’t react at all.

As long as the stick-poking doesn’t threaten life or limb (an admittedly difficult thing to find on a snail), the creature adapts and goes about its business. Habituation, in this case, has survival advantages since the snail won’t be kept from foraging and grazing by the simple inconvenience of mere pesky circumstance.

Problem is, habituation can work against us as well.

When the kids are in dire need of those new shoes you simply can’t afford at the moment, it may become painfully clear just how overdue that pay raise actually is. Funny thing, though, is that a salary increase hasn’t crossed your mind at all – even at a time when scrimping and saving seems a constant obsession just to get by.

We settle for less for a reason. None of us arrive at a state of habituation (the lessening or disappearance of our response) without desensitization, the repeated exposure to a stimulus.

Volumes have been written about social and behavioral responses to cultures (at the family, community, or national levels) that “produce” an abundance of poverty (of either the emotional or monetary sort). All sorts of problems arise. Abuse, criminality, and – importantly for our discussion – apathy.

As a former dolphin trainer for the U.S. Navy, I once inherited a dolphin whose despair upon emerging from a culture of lack was so profound that it nearly killed him. His learned helplessness, really a form of profound apathy, had reached a point where all he did was float listlessly at the surface of the waterline without moving for hours on end. The dolphin was in dire need of rehabilitation, and even required retraining to become willing to eat. Few sights are as heartrending.

We humans become vulnerable to the same sort of phenomenon when, for example, unscrupulous employers seek to maximize profits at our expense. After becoming desensitized to a culture of poverty, not only do we sometimes fail to seek the pay raises we’ve earned, but we can also fall prey to what behavioral psychologists call fading, a procedure allowing for the gradual removal even of the conditioned reinforcers we’ve come to expect, such as paychecks and benefits. Work furloughs are an extreme example of fading, one in which even the opportunity to engage in behavior that once brought reward, is removed.

Unfortunately, our places of work are all too often ripe with examples of how the psychology of habituation – which evolved as an adaptive survival ability to protect us, like snails, from the vicissitudes of stick-poking – can be upended to work against us. But the harms of habituation apply equally to other scenarios in our lives. Whether on the job, on the home front, or in our relationships, none of us wants to become a listless dolphin in need of rescuing. But we can’t fulfill our desires without the willingness to ask for what we want. And sometimes, we need to do it loudly.

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Copyright © Seth Slater, 2016