That time of the Year: Is my behaviour, Pavlovian in response to the Compensation Decision?

That time of the Year: Is my behaviour, Pavlovian in response to the Compensation Decision?

For most companies that follow the April-March compensation cycle, the outer limit for effecting the increments is the June payroll. It’s not uncommon to see a large number of employees (at all levels of the hierarchy) with the ‘victim’ look, navel gazing, shoulders drooping, with much lower energy every year, during this period.

I have, over the years, found my own reaction and those of others, predictable. Even in the rare years that I thought my boss did a fair job, all that was needed were a few new data points to puncture the sense of good feel! That you can predict how you will feel (or want to feel), then construe the reality to suit that feeling and being unable to control it, is so weird that it sounds almost funny. I have laughed at myself for my own predictable response while coaching others to behave differently.

This predictability of our responses and triggers reminded me of the Pavlovian experiments. As most of us are aware, Pavlov was a physiologist who measured salivation in dogs in response to anticipation of food. He observed his dog salivating in response to food and further observed the dog salivating to just the footsteps of the assistant that would be bringing the food. That insight was developed further in future experiments using food (unconditioned stimulus) paired with the sound of a musical fork (conditioned neutral stimulus) with salivation (unconditioned response). A new behaviour (conditioned response) was learnt by the dog to the neutral stimulus. ?

My emotional and physical response (unconditioned response) to the compensation decision/letter (conditioned stimulus) seems to be an acquired learning of competitiveness that seemed missing during my academic years, when I didn’t care much for scores. It was only after a few years in the corporate world that I realised that I was competitive. My victim behaviour to a compensation decision seemed consistent each year, appearing Pavlovian. When did this happen, how did I start having these goals (and responses), are some of the consequent questions.

An insightful paper, The Unbearable automaticity of Being[1] (Barg and Chatland,1999 ) explored the question – Do people consciously and actively through acts of will control the experiences and behaviour or are these experiences and behaviours instead, determined directly by external stimuli or internal, unconscious factors?

Different schools of thought have emerged in the last couple of centuries. From Freud (biological and psychic forces influence choice) to Skinner (not internal factors but external stimuli) to the self-theory and humanist movement (there is a ‘causal self’, a conscious choice is being made between the environment and the adaptive behaviour), research has explored different threads to the question.

Self-theory and the humanist approach have been popular and there is acceptance of the model i.e., there is conscious choice and automatic mental processes that are simultaneously operating and the focus has moved to researching the circumstances that dictate the dominance of choice or automaticity.

In essence, the authors address the question – Is my response to the compensation decision (and perhaps to all other judgements, evaluations response in life) an act of conscious will or an unconscious, automatic mental process?

The authors defined conscious mental processes as those that require awareness, intention, effort and control.

Automatic mental processes were more difficult to define but had the following broad features: we are acquiring skills as a goal-oriented process that happens continuously till it becomes an unconscious skill, i.e. the skill acquisition starts happening without us being aware of it.

Research demonstrated that these automatic processes happened without conscious will because our capacity is limited. It is simply too exhausting for us to make conscious choices all the time. Self-control for example, in not eating a dessert exhausts our energy and it would be difficult to exercise self-control in an unrelated aspect at the same time. Most of our mental process are consequently automatic and not of wilful choice.

Environmental features influence the process. Perception of the environment is widely accepted as an automated psychological phenomenon. Research has shown that the entire environment-perception-behaviour link is an automated process within us. It is our way of adapting to the positive and negative aspects of the environment.

But that research resulted in the logical question – If we are behaving in an automated manner, what is the role of goals and experiences? Are we having a passive existence? The answer to that question is that often our goals are as automated as our perceptions and behaviour due to the environment features under certain conditions. The environmental conditions that lead to this automaticity can be both intentional and unintentional.

For example, when a young person learns driving, he quickly morphs from being a novice to a skilled person by sublimating many of the processes through practice to free up mental capacity for other tasks. And this process is automatic without conscious choice.

?That implies that being part of the corporate environment for many years, the goal of higher compensation has automatically become part of the mental process and the subsequent victimised behaviour is a response that has also become automatic without any conscious will, much of it be observing others.

The authors quote research that indicates that the automatic processes are more pronounced in situations that have achievement motives at play. This phenomenon has uses – it helps us adapt to the environment by having a coping mechanism, a self-protection that makes us effective.

My victimised behavioural response to the compensation decision is therefore, certainly Pavlovian in nature. I am not even conscious of the mental process that decides my behaviour. It is how I protect myself when my achievement needs are not being met. It is automatic.

But we shouldn’t forget that humans can make a choice and respond differently if we consciously take the goal of not appearing dispirited. Though it will be tiring and drain our capacity from other conscious choices that we need to make, we would do it if it became a conscious goal with perceived benefits of that new behaviour.

It need not be Pavlovian. There is a choice on how I will perceive and behave. It will need to be a goal. It requires effort.

What choice are you making this year?

Let me know at [email protected].

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[1] Barg, John A , Chartrand, Tanya, The Unbearable Automaticity of Being, American Psychologist, 1999