AUTHOR’S NOTE: That quandrennial festival of madness and sorrow, the World Cup tournament, is officially underway… on North American soil no less, so there’s quite a bit of soccer buzz where I live, a place where futbol fandom normally means a small but committed cadre of Arsenal “Arses” meeting at a local barbeque restaurant on Saturday mornings during Premier League season to forge a curious synthesis of — and European purists, I am sadly not making this up — the Beautiful Game, Bud Light, and pit-smoked pork in breakfast foods. Anyway, as a nod to World Cup fever I’m reprinting this (slightly updated) post that originally appeared on February 26, 2024. Acknowledgement: Adrienne Jennings provided helpful feedback on a draft of this post.
The Enigma of Empty Entreaties
| “I’m still alive but I’m barely breathin’ … Just prayed to a God that I don’t believe in“ |
| From “Breakeven,” performed by The Script. Written by Andrew Marcus Frampton, Daniel John O’Donoghue, Mark Anthony Sheehan, and Stephen Alan Kipner. Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group |
Every time I release a new blog post, I mutter to myself something like, “Please please please let somebody actually READ this.”
To be clear, when I say this it’s just me and my laptop, so my verbal behavior — something that’s inherently social, we’ve been told — has no actual audience. If you take my words at face value, then, you might think I actually believe those words can change other people’s probability of reading the post.
I’m not the only one who acts as if verbal behavior has the power to dictate the future. Recently the author of a short essay in The Guardian (“How can you tell if someone’s really an atheist? Watch them at a penalty shootout”) offered up this observation regarding soccer (i.e. futbol, i.e. “The Beautiful Game“):
There are no atheists in a penalty shootout. I contend that most fans of the teams involved engage in something approximating prayer.
To explain, in some soccer situations tie matches aren’t allowed. A penalty shootout is a tiebreaker process in which players from each team take turns trying to kick the ball into a goal, challenged only by a goal keeper from the opposing team. The team with the most successful kicks wins the match, so the stakes are high, and given the fever pitch of soccer fandom, it’s (almost) logical that partisans would appeal to the highest possible authority for assistance.
This kind of behavior isn’t limited to sport. People shout at sluggish stop lights to change already. In a drought they plead with the clouds to drop some moisture (they may even perform a rain dance, a sort of non-vocal request or command). An acquaintance of mine orders her dog around despite the poor creature having completely lost the capacity to hear two years ago. And there’s a superb YouTube video of a boy in the midst of an extinction burst (known affectionately as “Crazy German Kid“) somewhat colorfully commanding his computer game to load faster.
Note about rain dances
Regarding the verbal-like properties of rain dances, check out this fun but challenging treatise on functional similarities and dissimilarities between verbal and nonverbal events.
What’s fascinating about these instances is that the people involved are unlikely to really think their words have the power to alter fate. Most people understand that stop lights, computers, and deaf dogs do not actually respond to human pleas. But we inveigh them anyway. Even many people who believe in an all-powerful deity will acknowledge the folly of sporting-contest-specific prayers [After all, the outcome of human sporting contests is not the sort of thing on which one may expect divine intercession. Indeed, as religious scholars have noted, if partisans from competing teams pray to the same deity with equal fervor for assistance, and said deity were inclined to fulfill said prayerful wishes, how would that God even choose a winner?].
Note about World Cup “insanity”
Magical mands are by no means the only illogical behaviors evoked by the World Cup. Many participants believe that an active player touching the trophy before it is won guarantees defeat of that player’s team. Soccer fans, applying amateur numerology to Lionel Messi’s hotel room number, 202, have concluded that it foretells a 4th World Cup Championship for his Argentina team (2 + 0 + 2 = 4, get it?). A “prophesy” of the late Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga has been interpreted to mean that humans will make contact with extraterrestrial life during the 2026 World Cup. Fans, of course, took things one step further and assumed aliens influenced the selection of teams for the tournament, possibly explaining the inclusion of ridiculous longshots Curaçao and Cabo Verde, which may or may not be predicted to benefit from cosmic assistance during competition. If they start pulling upsets, well, you heard it here first. Update 6/27/26: OMG it’s really happening.
A Migrating Mand Repertoire
Overall, we’re talking about more or less rational people doing a seemingly irrational thing with their verbal behavior. In technical terms, this verbal behavior takes the form of a mand, which in Verbal Behavior Skinner defined thusly:
A mand is characterized by the unique relationship between the form of the response and the reinforcement characteristically received in a given verbal community. It is sometimes convenient to refer to this relation by saying that a mand “specifies” its reinforcement.
Note about magical epithets
The most interesting form of verbal behavior in the entire universe, cursing, can have mand properties when it is directed at an “impossible” audience — neither that car in front of you inching along at 10 mph below the speed limit nor the hammer that just accidentally struck your thumb will listen and obey.
But the cases we’re discussing violate the strict definition of a mand in a couple of ways: First, there is no conventional audience and, second, there is no history of reinforcement for the particular mand (nor, in a strict sense, can there be, given that the “audience” in question is incapable of coming under instructional control). Skinner anticipated this problem, suggesting that stimulus generalization might be responsible.
An example of extended stimulus control is seen when people mand the behavior of dolls, small babies, and untrained animals. These “listeners” cannot possibly reinforce the behavior in characteristic fashion. Nevertheless, they have enough in common with listeners who have previously provided reinforcement to control the response, at least when it shows appreciable strength…. We acquire and retain the response Stop! because many listeners stop whatever they are doing when we emit it, but as a result we may say Stop! to a car with faulty brakes or to a cue ball which threatens to drop into a pocket of the pool table…. There are mands which cannot be accounted for by showing that they have ever had the effect specified or any similar effect upon similar occasions. The speaker appears to create new mands on the analogy of old ones.
Several studies verify that mand repertoires can generalize to new situations (see here and here and here). And it can be a good thing when mands generalize — for instance, when a child who learned to ask Daddy for food can do so with any adult. But in some cases, of course, the generalization is to a false audience, that is, to something (“dolls, babies, and untrained animals”) incapable of being under instructional control. In Skinner’s words:
This sort of extended operant may be called a magical mand…. Flushed with our success under favorable reinforcing circumstances, we set out to change the world without benefit of a listener.
Magical mands are a spillover effect from the forces that shape up practical mands (ones that actually work), but as Caio Miguel has pointed out, this isn’t always garden-variety stimulus generalization, in which the setting for a new mand is similar to that in which manding previously was reinforced. Mands are always driven by some motivating operation — in casual terms, we mand when we “want something” — so novel (and nonsensical) mands can arise due to generalization based on similarity of MOs. A child who successfully mands for food may spontaneously do so for water if food and water deprivation are experienced similarly. And, of course, an adult who has successfully directed the movement of human beings (“Go to the corner and take a right”) may attempt to do so for a soccer ball (“Go into the goal!”). The MOs are similar: In both cases, speaking loosely, the person wants something to go somewhere.
In writing Verbal Behavior, Skinner explained a lot about mands, both magical and practical, but what he couldn’t have anticipated is the powerful, complex derived stimulus relations that behavioral research began to illuminate starting in the 1970s. Since then Relational Frame Theory has guided research showing how novel mands (including those deemed “magical”) might arise quite separately from simple generalization (e.g., see here and here). For anyone interested in fully understanding the mand repertoire, that stuff is worth a read because it shows that the emergence of novel mands is far more complicated than Skinner’s 16-page introduction to it in Verbal Behavior implies.
Note about mands in RFT context
What’s “new” in a derived relations account of extended manding is that the extension is not mediated by physical similarity of either MOs or stimulus contexts. Stimulus classes can cause a person to treat dissimilar stimuli as “the same,” including by manding in their presence. Here the stimuli may be said to indicate what’s currently “mand-able” (i.e., what kind of mand will be reinforced). Those kinds of relations then intersect with MOs, presumably, to dictate the probability of a given mand occurring.
There’s yet another critical wrinkle about novel mands, one that Skinner did anticipate:
In moments of sufficient stress, the speaker simply describes the reinforcement appropriate to a given state of deprivation or aversive stimulation. The response must, of course, already be part of his verbal repertoire as some other type of verbal operant.
Those motivating operations mentioned earlier: The more powerful they become, apparently, the more likely a mand repertoire is to propagate into some context where it hasn’t been previously reinforced. Hence people seem most likely to verbally “dictate the future” when the stakes are high. When I’m not in a hurry, for instance, I tend not to bark orders at a laggardly stoplight. But let me be late for class, and I will verbally rip that light a new metaphorical asshole. The stop light, of course, does not care.
An Audience Problem
The soccer article I mentioned referenced a man who under normal circumstances was entirely nonreligious — for instance, he never, ever, asked an unseen deity to alter the future on his behalf. But the man freely “concedes he resorted to prayer when brain tumours put his life in danger.”
Religion is a fascinating crucible for evaluating “extended” mands.
Regarding the presence or absence of an audience for prayer, well, to some extent that is in the eye of the beholder. To a nonbeliever, spoken prayers are merely sound waves cast into a void. Any presumed audience is a figment of the believer’s imagination. Yet I think that nonbelievers sometimes trivialize, and therefore oversimplify, the experience of the believer. To the nonbeliever, the absence of an audience makes prayer simply another case of magical manding. To the believer, however, that divine audience is real, so it might be said that, where verbal behavior is concerned, it matters less that a communication partner exists than that one is perceived.
None of this is terribly new. Skinner himself demonstrated as much in the 1930s with the “verbal summator,” which presented non-language speech sounds that listeners often “heard” as coherent statements. More to the point, in the 1960s “Eliza,” an early chatbot programmed to mimic therapist verbal behavior, fooled many people into thinking they were interacting with a human therapist via computer interface. Today, “audience simulators,” like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, are everywhere, which begs a critical question. When a human converses with Siri or Alexa, is this verbal behavior? Consider a specific example: When I tell Alexa to turn out the kitchen light, there is an audience (just not a human one), and my instructions arise partly from a history of reinforcement (Alexa usually does what I ask her to). As long as we don’t get too hung up on the distinction between contingent and adventitious reinforcement, how is that functionally different from human-specific manding?
Note about artificial audiences
In the short time since this post originally appeared, the sophistication of “artificial audiences” (AI chatbots) has grown dramatically. If you pay attention to the news at all you’re aware we now live in an age of AI girlfriends and AI therapists (among other things) that some humans respond to more or less as they would other people. Thus advances in technology are rapidly shifting the definition of what it means for behavior to be “social.”
When religious believers pray they believe they have an audience. Moreover, they believe the audience is capable of answering prayers because experience says this sometimes happens. After all, sometimes one’s prayers are followed by events that seem related to them. Penalty kicks sometimes go into the goal! Yes, the nonbeliever will call this adventitious reinforcement, but from a verbal behavior perspective it doesn’t matter whether it’s adventitious reinforcement or divine intercession. From the believer’s perspective, a prayer was answered, and an answer requires an Answerer. In this sense prayer satisfies the two prerequisites of the mand: an audience and a suitable history of reinforcement. To me, that makes prayer a practical mand… unless, of course, it comes from a nonbeliever.
Notes on inveighing an audience that may or may not be there
I take no position on the ontological status of anyone’s preferred deity. My goal (soccer pun intended) in mentioning prayer is simply to show that, functionally, it’s less different from everyday practical manding than might otherwise be assumed. Therefore, please, Dear Lord in Heaven, I entreat thee, don’t let any reader brand me a religious bigot!
•• In Verbal Behavior, Skinner provided an account of literary behavior that is not too different from what I’ve described here. A writer writes for, and often mands to (e.g., “Call me Ishmael”), an audience that is not present at the time of writing and in fact may never be encountered. In terms of the momentary control of writer verbal behavior, then, this audience is strictly hypothetical. Unlike with prayer, which benefits from occasional adventitious consequences, the writer’s entreaty to the reader may never be reinforced (adventitiously or otherwise). It might therefore be suggested that prayer is sometimes less “magical” than literary manding. What Skinner gets right is that literary composition, like prayer, is often the product of strong states of deprivation (“Evidently the lyric poet needs many things and needs them badly”!). Strong motivating operations can promote the generalization of practical mand repertoires to “magical” circumstances.
My magical mand
For this World Cup I’m all in on Cabo Verde. Go Blue Sharks!
A Commandment
Which brings us back to that man who freely “concedes he resorted to prayer when brain tumours put his life in danger” and raises an interesting question about motivating operations. If the motivation for manding is strong enough, does that affect the tendency to believe in an audience that may not actually exist? In radical behaviorism, belief is behavior, and therefore malleable by the same forces that alter physical behavior.
The unsettling thing is that if “belief in God” means perceiving an audience that others do not, well, that seems to drag the analysis of verbal behavior into subjective territory. Basically, we’re saying that reality is whatever a given individual thinks it is. But of course “subjective” merely implies that any given person’s verbal behavior is a unique product of that person’s learning history and current environment… which is what behavior analysts have maintained all along.
Still, we behavior analysts have a tendency to look down our noses at people who don’t embrace strict environmental determinism. That’s odd in a way, because we also hold that the organism is always right, or, as a clinical colleague often reminds me, “everyone is doing the best they can given their circumstances.” I’ve tried to show in this post how phenomena like praying to a God that you don’t really believe in are the natural and predictable result of forces that affect everyone’s verbal behavior on the regular. In my view, that’s a reminder for us to be less smug and judgmental about the behavior of people who are not behavior analysts. After all, although behavior has to obey natural laws, it doesn’t have to be rational. That’s equally true for magical mand-ers and behavior analysts who derogate “illogical” behavior which is obeying natural laws.
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