Rogue Habits

more extensive summaries of each chapter:

Chapter One

Explains why it is helpful to interpret certain behavioral patterns as viral patterns. There are a lot of repetitive behaviors that we regard as unproductive, or bad, or perhaps even “sinful.” The question of why people do bad things is an old one. Re-framing some of these dark doings in terms of behavioral disease provides a new way to make sense of them. Perhaps the reasons aren’t as mysterious as they seem. Maybe we don’t need to be as discouraged about human nature as we at times have been. It could be we’ve just been looking at bad behavior the wrong way.

In the past we most certainly looked at physical disease the wrong way. Long ago it was common to interpret illness as the mark of sin, or at least disfavor in the eyes of God. The assumption was that when people got sick, it was because they were unworthy. In essence, they deserved what they got. We had trouble grasping that even good people can succumb to bad illnesses. The discovery of biological pathogens opened the door to a more useful way of understanding illness. Knowing how parasitic organisms can damage us gave us the freedom to perceive sickness in a value-neutral manner, without judgments about the sufferer’s character.  

That’s the main reason for casting maladaptive behavior in disease terms. It invites a similar kind of freedom. This is the freedom to see that rotten acts aren’t necessarily the mark of a rotten person. The ability to distinguish bad behavior from personal character puts us on a more constructive path toward psychological/behavioral health.

Chapter Two

Presents an example of a behavioral virus – alcoholism. Alcohol addiction is perhaps the best known and least confusing of all such viral patterns. In addition, alcoholism is relatively uncontroversial. Thus it stands in contrast to many other examples we might have chosen, examples hopelessly mired in conflicts of interpretation. There’s a reason for all this controversy. That reason is important, and will be discussed in a later chapter.

Alcoholism is a malignant pattern of behavior that involves repetitive, excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages. At the heart of this disorder is alcoholic denial, a bizarre and perplexing perceptual-conceptual distortion. Typically, alcoholics have a hard time seeing that their drinking has become a problem. But to outsiders this fact sticks out like a sore thumb. The example of alcoholic denial makes it clear that the world as viewed by those inside the pattern of a behavioral virus looks quite different from the world as viewed by individuals outside it. The quirky denial associated with alcoholism illustrates quite well the peculiar quality of the perceptual fog surrounding all behavioral viruses.

In light of their strange behavior, it was once thought that alcoholics must have some kind of personality defect. But decades of research aiming to identify “the addictive personality” have proven fruitless. In truth, alcoholism and other addictions don’t have the characteristics of a personality defect. They most closely resemble diseases. As with any disease, certain preconditions – for example, heredity, post-traumatic stress, and experimentation with alcohol use – do make the development of an alcohol addiction more likely. But the commonalities among alcoholics are better interpreted as signs and symptoms of a disease rather than as facets of personality.

By the time we reach the end of this second chapter we will have provided support for the following points:

• Alcoholism is a self-replicating pattern that operates mostly outside the control of the alcoholic.
• The alcoholic pattern is made up of mutually supporting elements of several types – for example learned habits and skills, denial, hereditary factors, and the ongoing experience of misery.
• The specific elements making up the alcoholic pattern vary from person to person. But each contributes to a feedback loop that replicates itself over time within the behavior of that particular individual.

Invariably, the ability of the pattern to persist depends upon its ability to disrupt awareness. The pattern must disrupt awareness because awareness is the human capacity that confers immunity within the behavioral realm.

Chapter Three

Takes a close look at at another behavioral virus – anorexia nervosa. This deadly eating disorder resembles an addiction in some important ways, though few clinicians describe it in these terms. At the center of this disorder we find a profound perceptual-conceptual distortion. Already dangerously underweight, the anorectic nevertheless perceives herself as “fat,” and experiences a strong need to “slim down.” She engages in a destructive program of starvation, failing to appreciate the very serious consequences.

To those outside the anorectic’s perceptual system it is apparent that she is already skin and bones, and that any further weight loss may put her in the grave. In fact the disorder often does prove fatal. The chapter illustrates the typical progression of anorexia with a detailed example. It highlights some general truths about all behavioral viruses: 1. That they are made up of psychological, physical, and behavioral elements opportunistically assembled and refined through a process of incubation. 2. That such patterns’ ability to perpetuate themselves depends in large part upon the perceptual-conceptual distortion the pattern induces.

Chapter Four

Elaborates the rationale for regarding alcoholism and anorexia nervosa as processes comparable to biological viruses. It looks at the defining characteristics of viral patterns of all types – both biological and behavioral. We naturally begin with an examination of cellular viruses. Many features of cellular viruses have parallels in behavioral viruses. Closely scrutinizing biological viruses sensitizes us to these characteristics, so that corresponding features will be easier to recognize within the behavioral sphere.

One of the central messages of this chapter is that viruses of all types are much simpler than their hosts. They compensate for their simplicity by exploiting the more complex capabilities of their hosts. The behavior of the infected host is always far more elaborate than anything that could be produced by the virus alone. This fact has important implications when it comes to people who have fallen under the influence of behavioral viruses. They start exhibiting all kinds of strange, nonproductive behaviors. We are tempted to explain their strange acts through our understanding of normal human motivation. But by and large this kind of explanation is useless, because the behavior induced by viral processes is not a product of ordinary human concerns. Confusingly, it does not serve human interests.

A virally-infected host of any kind is no longer the same organism it was prior to infection. Within the last decade scientists have increasingly acknowledged the fact that viral infection transforms a bacterial cell into something that is no longer a bacterium. The virus-bacterium complex has even acquired a special name – “virocell” – to remind scientists that its actions no longer reflect a bacterial identity. Infection has transformed it into a sort of hybrid “zombie” cell.

Chapter Five

Addresses this important question: where do viruses come from? The origin of biological viruses has perplexed virologists for decades. The most up-to-date evidence strongly suggests that a “baby virus” comes into being when a normal cellular product – for example messenger RNA – somehow acquires the ability to reproduce itself, and so begins to evolve independently of the cell. In fact, independently-reproducing genetic strands are quite common within bacterial cells. Normally benign, and sometimes even helpful, these proto-viruses may turn destructive if their interests diverge completely from those of the host cell.

Understanding the origin of biological viruses is immensely helpful as we struggle to comprehend how something as seemingly unlikely as a behavioral virus might come into being. As we will see, the origins of behavioral viruses closely parallel the origins of biological viruses. Evidence from animal studies suggests that behavioral viruses begin as unproductive habits that partially escape the corrective influence of attention. If they are able to entirely escape our attention, these bad habits can “go rogue,” morphing into forms that are distinctly pathological.

Chapter Six

Frames the behavioral flexibility of higher animals in terms of the Drive/Habit system. Because behavioral viruses are best interpreted as habits gone rogue, it is helpful to understand what a normal habit actually is.

There was a point in our evolutionary history when behavior was directly and rigidly determined by natural selection. At that time all animal behavior was instinctive. It had a robotic quality, with limited flexibility. The evolution of any new behavior had to be accomplished through natural selection over many generations.

The evolution of the Drive/Habit system partially resolved this dilemma. Rather than a focus on specific behavior, the natural selection of higher animals became centered on drives, which are more like general blueprints for the satisfaction of basic needs. A single drive can foster the development of a variety of different habits, each leading to the satisfaction of an underlying physiological need in a different way. The Drive/Habit system is the basis for the flexibility in animal learning. Under this system, their behavior can be altered “on-the-fly” to meet changing environmental demands.

This new system of behavioral control was superior in terms of flexibility. But it has a cost. It is the nature of habits to operate semi-autonomously. Habits are shaped by individual learning, not by natural selection. The proliferation of semi-autonomous habits created a need for close regulation of those habits, to keep them working as a team. How could beneficial habits be reliably differentiated from those which were no longer useful, or those which had become outright harmful to the animal? Strong on-board supervisory oversight was now required to allow the individual animal to regulate its legion of semi-independent habits.

The supervision and control of our normal, semi-autonomous habits is always remote and tenuous. The Drive/Habit system works this way: we create habits under our full attention, then set them free to operate on their own, semi-unconsciously, with minimal attention. Since our control of them is by their nature rather loose, there’s the potential for them to completely escape our control. Under certain conditions what began as a semi-autonomous habit can drift into full autonomy, beginning to operate in its own interest. Then it would start evolving on its own, guided by its own needs rather than ours. This is in fact how behavioral viruses come into being.

More than eighty years ago, psychological scientists made a momentous error in conceptualizing animal learning. Their error caused them to misunderstand the relationship between drives and addictive processes. The nature of their mistake is described in this chapter.

Chapter Seven

Details the conditions under which habits are most likely to escape control of the behaving individual, and the sequence of events in which the escape unfolds. The example of susceptibility to addiction provides insights into this process. A massive amount of evidence from animal research suggests that substance addiction is not caused, as is commonly supposed, by simple exposure to addictive substances. Rather, the animals most susceptible to addiction are those whose opportunities to satisfy their natural drives have been severely limited.

Every higher animal studied is prone to develop repetitive, nonproductive, stereotypic habits when its opportunities for fulfillment are minimized. One example lies in the stereotypical habits exhibited by animals caged in zoos, where their natural drives are almost totally frustrated.

Another example is (quite unfortunately) the abnormal behaviors engendered in rats housed in typical laboratory cages. The stereotyped and unproductive habits of caged animals are the consequence of a corrective feedback process that is prone to failure under conditions of severe habitat restriction.

Within an animal’s naturally rich environment, it constantly receives corrective feedback in the form of the consequences of its habitual acts. But in a severely limited environment, where opportunities for fulfillment are virtually nonexistent, the animal may experience the consequences of an abnormal and unproductive act as the most fulfilling of the available alternatives.

This falsely positive feedback kick-starts a pattern of stereotyped, unproductive behavior that may be hard to interrupt.

Chapter Eight

Provides a way of understanding the emergence of self-reproducing behavioral patterns. In this chapter we compare these self-reproducing patterns to the irritating screech that begins when a microphone is brought too close to the loudspeaker. The proximity leads to what is technically called “positive feedback” – that’s what causes the sound. It is useful to think of the repetitive and nonproductive habits we see in caged animals as “behavioral screeches.”

It is remarkable that this behavioral screech phenomenon, a tendency that appears universal among higher animals of all types, has been so profoundly neglected by behavioral experts. One reason for the neglect is behavioral scientists’ misconception of animal learning.

Chapter Nine

Discusses viral incubation. The Drive/Habit system is enormously helpful to higher animals. The vast majority of habits put together under this system are good and productive. They work well to satisfy the animal’s needs. Bad habits also exist, of course. But there’s a big difference between an ordinary bad habit and what we’re calling a behavioral virus. We have given the name viral incubation to the process through which the first morphs into the second.

What happens in the course of viral incubation mirrors the way normal habits are refined. Normal habits are developed through continuing feedback. The process is one of variation and selection, mimicking biological evolution. When we first learn to do something new, we generally aren’t very good at it. There’s lots of variation in our expression of the habit, though. As we keep doing that new thing over and over, we get better and better at it. When the habit is a positive one, this means that over time it comes to address the underlying need more and more effectively.

The path followed by rogue habits is similar. With repetition they, too, get better and better. But rogue habits – those that operate partly or completely outside our supervisory control – do not get better at satisfying our needs. Instead, they get better at satisfying their own needs. They end up doing what’s good for them – persisting, repeating themselves, reproducing themselves. One very important way they get better at reproducing themselves is by making it harder to see what’s really going on. The out-of-control habit itself dulls our awareness of it just enough to make its repetition more likely. How is such a strange outcome possible?

There are many conditions known to interfere with our ability to correctly evaluate our acts – for example conflict of interest, intoxication, patriotism, or religious fervor. Anything that diminishes our ability to realistically assess our behavior weakens our control of it. A habit that has begun to serve its own interests, a rogue habit, can incorporate these common sources of distortion into its evolving pattern.

Chapter Ten

Deals with the critically important issue of immunity. Immune functions are a universal feature of life. Disease-causing parasites are everywhere. Parasites are the rule in the living world, not the exception. Their hosts must deal with them or they will cease to exist. So life is always under pressure to evolve and refine immune defenses.

We can think of immunity as the bag of tricks host organisms create to trip up their parasites, and so make host survival more likely. Most of us are aware that our own physical bodies employ an intricate system of immune defenses to deal with our parasites. We are less likely to know about the methods the parasites themselves have evolved to defeat our immunity. But in truth, every time a host evolves a new way to defeat a parasite, the parasite is obliged to evolve ways to evade or disable that new measure. As a result, we always find a biological parasite and the host immune systems locked in an unending struggle – an arms race. To stay alive, each is driven to counter the moves of the other.

Science has long acknowledged the struggle between biological parasites and their biological hosts. Assuming for a moment that there really are such things as behavioral parasites, then logic leads us to predict the evolution of some kind of behavioral immunity. We would also anticipate that we would find any behavioral parasite locked in a struggle with this behavioral immunity. The critical question is this: what does immunity look like within the behavioral sphere?

As we will see, there is good reason to believe that humans’ capacity for focal attention makes up the greater part of our behavioral immunity. We defend ourselves against our own out-of-control behaviors by bringing to our awareness the destructive nature of those behaviors.

Consider this bit of logic:

• Any viral process (biological or behavioral) must thwart immunity, or that viral process will be eliminated.
• Within the behavioral sphere, focal attention provides the immunity.
• Therefore, any successful behavioral virus must possess a means of evading or degrading focal attention.

We have not been aware that behavioral immunity exists. So we have never pondered the monumental implications of ongoing arms races within the behavioral arena. One of these implications is that behavioral viruses fog our attention. Another is that disabling or degrading our powers of attention will undo the suppression of behavioral disease, allowing rogue habits to proliferate.

Chapter Eleven

Deals with a central and particularly problematic feature of all behavioral viruses – the attentional fog. Behavioral viruses are under pressure to diminish our awareness, because our awareness is our only means of controlling them. So they find ways to diminish awareness, thus ensuring their perpetuation. Within the behavioral arena, the critically important arms race is a struggle between our ability to attend and the out-of-control habit.

This explains why we always find operating behavioral viruses shrouded in a fog of perceptual-conceptual distortion. It also implies that any serious effort to understand behavioral viruses is an endeavor like no other. It is a battle for clarity that is necessarily fought in the midst of a perceptual-conceptual fog. The quest for understanding of such viral processes will be perennially plagued by confusion, misperception, and controversy.

Chapter Twelve

Introduces an especially problematic variety of behavioral virus – one that operates within groups of people. Behavioral viruses aren’t limited to individuals. Many viral patterns proliferate within social systems. The twisted endeavor we call Big Tobacco is an excellent example of an intensely destructive socio-cultural virus. The value of this particular example lies largely in the fact that it is partly history, and partly current events. Many people think this malevolent beast was vanquished decades ago. Though it isn’t in the best of health at present, it is far from dead.

As with the behavioral viruses that affect individuals, those that proliferate within social systems are shrouded in a dense attentional fog. This is most certainly the case with Big Tobacco. For many years the tobacco industry systematically distorted the way the public at large perceived it. The perceptual fog surrounding it was essential to the continuation of the pattern. More recently the public has gained some awareness of the intensely destructive nature of the industry.

At present tobacco is on the defensive, its power somewhat diminished. Nevertheless its malevolent influence continues. For the purposes of this book it serves as a very useful specimen. Looking closely at Big Tobacco can help clarify the key role of distortion in the perpetuation of such “social viruses.”

Chapter Thirteen

Suggests practical ways to turn away from virally-induced behavior, and begin moving toward behavioral health. Surprisingly, we already have most of the tools we need to accomplish this – tools similar to those that have been developed to fight biological disease. The difficulty is that to date we have not perceived the need to apply them.

Our blindness is not an accident, but a feature of the attentional fog. We can’t move to address a problem until we are able to see that it exists. This chapter suggests ways to drag it out of the shadows.

Chapter Fourteen

Differentiates the viewpoint detailed in this book from “meme theory.” The hypothetical entities labeled “memes” have often been called “viruses of the mind.” Because we are also using the word virus, there’s some potential for confusion here. This chapter is a necessary digression – one intended to sidestep this potential confusion by making it clear that behavioral viruses are not the same thing as memes.

Genes made of DNA have been called “replicators.” That’s because DNA-based genes hold the pattern of information that is copied (replicated) when most living things reproduce. Some years ago science writer Richard Dawkins voiced the possibility that replicators might exist in media other than DNA. He speculated about another kind – a replicator based upon imitation – and coined the name “meme” for this theoretical replicator. [i] 

The meme idea generated tremendous interest. In the next few years several books were published describing “mind viruses” based on the meme replicator. A new branch of science called “memetics” was brought to life, complete with its own journal. [ii]

In the form originally expressed, the meme idea ultimately lost favor among scientists. Memetics-as-science has run out of steam. Nevertheless, we are indebted to Richard Dawkins for introducing the notion of a psychological or behavioral virus, an idea that is quite viable. This book builds upon that idea. Even so, people already familiar with the meme concept should know that we are not trying to revive memetics-as-science. Memes and behavioral viruses aren’t the same thing.

Chapter Fifteen

Highlights a uniquely destructive aspect of socio-cultural viruses– the alteration and/or removal of important concepts from the cultural zeitgeist. Socio-cultural viruses quite often alter concepts in order to degrade immunity.

We have noted that behavioral viruses always create an attentional fog, degrading our capacity to efficiently recognize and interrupt the viral pattern. This is a serious problem with individual behavioral viruses – for example, individual addictions. But it is an even more serious problem with socio-cultural viruses, simply because (a) the capabilities of such viral processes are much greater, and (b) the attentional distortion affects many more people. In effect, socio-cultural viruses can create a “perceptual bubble” within which the viral process can more easily maintain itself. This chapter also details some specific types of individual addictions that often play a role in maintaining socio-cultural viruses.

Chapter Sixteen

Provides a concrete example of the way a socio-cultural virus can spawn mechanisms that cripple our awareness of a viral pattern, and so weaken our ability to deal with it effectively. The example begins with the theoretical constructs of Sigmund Freud, and ends with conflicting claims regarding the so-called “False Memory Syndrome.” We will examine evidence that the controversy and confusion surrounding these topics have for many years weakened our ability to detect and effectively address the sexual exploitation of children.

Chapter Seventeen

Addresses the benefits of the behavioral virus concept. A better understanding of disease-causing organisms triggered a breakthrough in medical treatment. Now we stand on the brink of a parallel insight – the possibility that much of what we currently regard as malevolent behavior may in fact reflect the influence of behavioral pathogens rather than defects in personal character.

Epilogue

Prior to the emergence of behaviorism in the early 1900s psychology’s goal had been understanding mental life. Psychological scientists were driven by their interest in the nature and function of consciousness. But behaviorism introduced a stern prohibition against writing, speaking, or theorizing about consciousness. Within a few years, any serious reference to consciousness or individual interpretation of stimuli acquired almost the character of blasphemy. Strangely, this mindset outlived behaviorism itself.

The effect of the prohibition was to put the active study of conscious awareness on hold for several decades. That study is once again on the upswing. Some thoughtful consciousness researchers and theoreticians have commented that the behavioral prohibition on consciousness never made any real sense. They are seeking an explanation for this bizarre twist in the progression of psychological science.

The purpose of this Epilogue is to entertain one such explanation: that the prohibition came into being as one part of an attentional fog created by socio-cultural viruses. Speculation about this possibility may provide a new way of understanding the fascinating chapter in psychological history that we call behaviorism.

Notes and references

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[i] Richard Dawkins published his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins deliberately used the word “selfish” to emphasize that any given gene – a replicator in the form of the informational molecule DNA – can be viewed as acting in its own interest. Each gene has found its way into the company of the other genes in the cell for the simple reason that it can more easily perpetuate itself working cooperatively as part of a team. In doing so it is not acting altruistically, but in its own interest. Within the cell, DNA is the replicator – the structure that is reproduced from one generation to the next. But in his book Dawkins wondered whether there might be other kinds of replicators. He speculated that data passed through imitation might serve as a replicator, and proposed the term “meme” as a name for a replicator based on imitation. [Dawkins R. The Selfish Gene, 1976, Oxford, Oxford University Press.]

[ii] Editorial. Evolutionary models of information transmission. Journal of Memetics, 2002Though the journal is no longer active, the article can be viewed online at http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2002/vol6/editorial.html. Last accessed 4/6/2019.