11
My grandmother was born in the same year as the behaviourist B. F. Skinner. My grandmother used to threaten to put me in a box and keep me there until I learned to behave. This, she said, was how Skinner had trained his daughter. Apparently, this is a myth — Skinner’s “baby box” was more like “an upgraded playpen” with a “thermostatically controlled environment” and padded corners (Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century) — but I didn’t know this at the time. My grandmother told me that she would get my grandfather to build the box. He had a workshed and had built a bird table and I knew that he could easily build a box. Whenever I misbehaved, my grandmother would tell my grandfather to go to the workshed and get on with constructing the box, and he would go, and I would try very hard to behave. “If you even think of getting up to anything, Sylvia,” my grandmother would say, “I will be the first to know about it.” Even if I left the room, she would call after me, “I’ve got my eye on you!”
I tried to do helpful things, like dusting the mantelpiece or washing up the teacups, but my grandmother did not like me to do it. “You’ll do it all wrong,” she would say, or, “You’ll break something. I know what you’re like.” If my mother let me carry my own glass to the table, my grandmother would say to me, “You’re going to drop it,” and when I did, and while I stared down at the smashed glass at my feet, my grandmother would say, “I knew you would.”
My mother read child development manuals, turning back the corners of the pages here and there: “Failures of every sort are usually traceable not to a lack of ability, not to bad luck… but to a tendency in the subject to maintain the condition in which he has learned to feel at home… One of the deepest impulses in the very social human animal is to do what he perceives is expected of him” (Liedloff, The Continuum Concept). My mother asked my grandmother not to talk to me that way. “If you say she’s going to drop it, she will,” said my mother, walking in with the dustpan and brush.
“So she dropped it because I warned her not to?” said my grandmother, raising one thin, scathing eyebrow. “Get away from that glass,” she said to me. “You’re going to cut yourself.”
“You didn’t warn her not to drop the glass,” said my mother. “You told her she would drop it. But Jean Liedloff says it’s the same either way. Whether you tell her, ‘You’ll drop it,’ or whether you tell her, ‘Don’t drop it,’ what she hears is your expectation that she will drop it, and so she does, she complies.”
“I didn’t tell her to drop it,” replied my grandmother. “I didn’t make her drop it.”
“On some level,” said my mother, “you did.” She bent down and picked up the big pieces of glass, holding them in her cupped hand.
“You’ll cut yourself,” said my grandmother. My mother pursed her lips and carried the big pieces into the kitchen, where I heard the sound of the glass being wrapped up in newspaper, the package going into the bin, a cupboard being opened. When she came back into the room, my mother made no reference to the fresh plaster I saw on her finger. She picked up the dustpan and brush and began to clear up the smaller pieces of broken glass.
“I hear you say such things,” countered my grandmother. “When she isn’t careful on the road, you tell her, ‘One of these days, a car is going to knock you down.’ When she walks on the wall, you tell her, ‘You’re going to fall.’ Will you make these things happen just by saying them?”
My mother, sweeping, said, “Jean Liedloff says I shouldn’t say things like that. She says that if we say to a child, ‘Watch out, you’ll hurt yourself,’ the child, quite unconsciously, endeavours to do so, as if following an order. If we say, ‘One of these days, a car is going to knock you down,’ the child understands that one day that is going to happen, as if they have been promised something. She mentions a child who got over a fence and into a swimming pool and drowned because he was warned so often about that happening. He drowned because he was expected to.”
My grandmother made a noise with her mouth and went outside, into the garden, where my grandfather was working in the shed at the end of the path. My mother went back into the kitchen with the dustpan and brush and I heard her tipping all those little broken bits into the bin. I stayed where I was. Was I more likely, I wondered, to drop a glass that I was carrying, or knock over the ornaments on the mantelpiece, or break the teacups in the sink, if I was told I would, or if I was told not to? I stood still, in socks on the living room’s swept-clean floorboards, looking for the glint of a stray shard.
At school, in the sixth form, I began reading Freud who, in explaining a dream of his, revealed that when he was born, an old peasant-woman prophesied to his mother that she had brought a great man into the world. I was studying psychology at the time, and came across Rosenthal and Jacobson and the elementary schoolchildren who were given a fake assessment, after which a randomly chosen group of these children was reported to the teachers to be showing signs of imminent intellectual blooming. This so influenced expectations regarding the children’s abilities that those assigned to the “spurting” group actually did spurt, finishing up with higher IQs. And what about the other ones, I wondered, the ones who did not “spurt”: how were they doing now? Thus, I discovered “the Golem effect”, in which low expectations cause poor performance in subjects, the observation of which confirms and reinforces low expectations, and so on. I read some of Merton’s work: his demonstration of how a “prophecy of collapse led to its own fulfillment”. In a footnote, Merton had added: “Counterpart of the self-fulfilling prophecy is the ‘suicidal prophecy’ which so alters human behavior from what would have been its course had the prophecy not been made, that it fails to be borne out” (Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure). I wondered about the influence of personality type on the outcome of a prophecy, on whether the prophecy proves to be self-fulfilling or suicidal. One pupil is told that she is “going nowhere” and becomes stuck on this path that has been described for her, and she does indeed go nowhere. On the other hand, there have been children whose school reports have called them “hopeless” and said that they were “on the road to failure”, whose junior school teachers wrote that, “This boy will never get anywhere in life” and, “He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere”, and these children — John Lennon MBE, Eric Morecambe OBE and Sir Winston Churchill — have gone on to be exceptionally successful in life (Hurley, Could Do Better: School Reports of the Great and the Good). Some people’s internal drives are no doubt stronger than the external factors acting upon them, and some people’s drives must be weaker, or at least their drives are different. Perhaps, for some people, the prophecy itself is irrelevant, while for others it is clearly influential. There is also the question of the point at which we might say that a narrative is complete, that it has reached its conclusion. We do not leave the story of Oedipus when he sets out for Thebes, resisting the prophecy that has been explained to him by the oracle. We see what happens next, and in the end he cannot help himself. A prophecy that has not come true today might still come true tomorrow, or in twenty years’ time, or within the hour. The bubble might yet burst.
Having become interested in behaviourism, conditioning, and stimulus-response psychology, I begged my parents for a kitten, and when we got one I began to conduct behavioural experiments. In the acquisition stage of its conditioning, the kitten learnt to respond to my whistling at feeding time. I then tested to see how long it would take for the kitten to unlearn that association, to stop running to its empty bowl when I whistled. These were the extinction trials. It never did unlearn the response, although I suppose at some point I just abandoned the experiment. Ideally, I wanted to recreate the experiments which I had read about in my textbook, but I did not know how to go about making Pavlov’s one-way glass panel, or “an enclosed compartment [in which a subject could be] periodically subjected to electric shock (by electrifying the floor)” (Atkinson et al, Introduction to Psychology). I conducted experiments on my little brother. I would tell him, “Come here, I’ve got a present for you,” and sometimes, when he came to me, I would give him some little gift, and sometimes I would pinch him. I recorded the data as a graph.