The Drooling Narcissist (Reinforcement and Conditioning)

Pathological narcissism is perhaps the only mental health condition that involves both operant conditioning, instrumental conditioning and classical conditioning, all the types of conditioning we know of.

Today I'm going to introduce you to the concept of conditioning, reinforcement, and other related issues. I'm going to tie this in with the narcissist's early childhood and how this phase in the narcissist's life affects the rest of the narcissist's life, the rest of the narcissist's biography, adolescence, adulthood, and so on.

Now before we proceed, there are strong indications that pathological narcissism, exactly like psychopathy, exactly like borderline personality disorder, the other members in the cluster B, the dramaticerratic group of personality disorders in the DSM, it seems that pathological narcissism also has a hereditary component.

In other words, it's somehow linked to genetics. There's a genetic predisposition, proclivity or propensity to develop narcissism in response to trauma and abuse in early childhood.

But this is mere speculation. We have no rigorous studies which connect pathological narcissism in all its manifestations, including narcissistic personality disorder. No study connects these to any specific gene or array of genes or to a hereditary transmission. There's no proof of this.

Similarly, there's absolutely a dearth. There are very few studies and all of them are not rigorous and not serious that connect pathological narcissism to brain abnormalities structural or functional.

We tend to believe that there is a hereditary genetic component. We tend to believe that pathological narcissism somehow must have an effect on the brain or that brain abnormalities somehow create or cause, they are the etiology of psychopathological narcissism.

But we have no proof to any of this. This is mere speculation. And anyone who claims otherwise is either ill-informed, which is a nice way of saying ignorant, or a charlatan. As simple as that.

Okay, we got this out of the way.

Today I'm going to discuss trauma and abuse in early childhood.

And remember, very few children who are exposed to trauma and abuse develop personality disorders, which is the strongest indicator that there is a genetic component at play.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I am also a professor of clinical psychology and within my remit I teach neuroscience as well.

Okay, let's delve right in

I will start by explaining concepts and as I explain the concepts I will link them to events in the narcissist's early childhood and later life.

So you begin to see that pathological narcissism is a conditioned response. It's the outcome of conditioning.

And therefore it's extremely difficult to extirpate, to reverse, because the conditioning takes place at a phase in life where the brain is highly neuroplastic and probably affects the brain massively.

And I don't know if it's irreversible but it sure looks like it.

Okay we start with classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a type of learning. Conditioning is a learning process.

And in classical conditioning there is a neutral stimulus. This is known as the conditioned stimulus. It could be a sound, it could be light, could be anything.

And this neutral conditioned stimulus is coupled with, is paired with a stimulus that elicits a reflex response, the unconditioned stimulus.

What is a reflex response? When you're hungry, you want to eat, you eat, that's a reflex response. You're thirsty, you want to drink, you drink, that's a reflex response, okay, got it.

So the condition stimulus is linked to the reflex response, the unconditioned stimulus.

Consequently, this linkage repeated time and again and again and again results in learning, a learned conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is presented.

So let's take an example.

There's a dog and the dog is presented with food. Every time the dog is presented with food, there's the sound of a bell. Some sound in the background. Food, sound. Food, sound.

The dog learns to connect the two. The food is the unconditioned stimulus. The sound is the conditioned stimulus. And the dog learns to associate them.

Finally, there's only sound. The tone is not followed immediately by food. There's only tone. And yet, the dog reacts as if food were present the dog salivates.

So the dog learns to salivate in response to sound not only to food and this is the classical form of conditioning.

The tone which initially has had no effect on salivation, was neutral with respect to salivation, will elicit salivation, even if the food is not presented.

This was first discovered by how else a Russian, Pavlov. And it's also known as Pavlovian conditioning, respondent conditioning, type 1 conditioning, type S conditioning, etc.

It was discovered long time ago in the early 20th century almost 100 years ago by Ivan Pavlov a Russian doctor.

And so the narcissist as a child undergoes classical conditioning. There's a conditioned stimulus, condition stimulus, this neutral stimulus, the sound or the tone, that is repeatedly associated, paired in a process known as pairing, with an unconditioned stimulus, like food or water or something, until the condition stimulus acquires the ability to elicit a response that it previously did not salivation in the case of the dog.

In many but not in all cases the response elicited by the condition stimulus is similar to the response that the unconditioned stimulus elicists.

So for example the light or the tone repeatedly paired with food, the unconditioned stimulus, would eventually produce the same response as food, salivation.

Okay, remember that.

The narcissist as a child experienced classical conditioning between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus.

The condition stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are paired.

The narcissist as a child experiences love, which is the unconditioned stimulus. Love, caring, empathy, compassion, affection, acceptance, all these fuzzy, nice things known as empathy.

Maternal love, parental love.

The narcissist as a child experiences this, but it goes hand in hand with pain, rejection, shame, abandonment, negative affects, including envy. The child is sometimes envied by the parent.

So the child learns to associate the unconditioned stimulus, which is love, caring, compassion, etc., with a conditioned stimulus, which is pain, hurt, rejection, abandonment, aggression, abuse, trauma.

And so whenever the child, having grown and become an adult, experiences or comes across abuse, trauma, etc., that person experiences love and reacts to it as if it were love.

You remember the example of food and sound? The food is love. The food is love. The sound is abuse.

The narcissist as a child experienced love, coupled all the time with some form of abuse or rejection or humiliation or abandonment or fear.

And so when this child grows up, becomes adult, he learned or she learns to associate love with these negative outcomes and whenever they're confronted with the negative outcomes this elicits in them a love response.

Now, if you receive love this way, if every time you're exposed to love, you experience, you have a bad experience. Every time you're exposed to love you are terrified of pain of abandonment of rejection or so and every time you're exposed to rejection and abandonment and humiliation and shaming and hurt you experience love if you learn to associate this two inextricably and you learn to accept love this way you also give love this way you give love via abuse via trauma via pain.

When you try to love someone in your warped mind, in your distorted mind, you associate wrongly, rejection, pain, abuse of all four in all forms and so and so forth with love.

So whenever you approach someone in an intimate relationship, in a romantic relationship, in a friendship, in a shared fantasy, you would immediately abuse them, traumatize them, hurt them, cause them pain, humiliate them, shame them, because that's the only way you know how to love.

These are the manifestations of love as far as you are concerned, they elicit in you a love response.

And this is the form of conditioning, classical conditioning, that the narcissist as a child goes through.

The unconditioned stimulus, which elicits an unconditioned response. Love triggers love.

This unconditioned stimulus is now linked to a conditioned stimulus, pain, hurt, trauma, rejection.

And that's the only way you can experience love. And the only way you can give love.

That's point number one.

Now we move on to another type of conditioning. It's known as operant or instrumental conditioning.

Operant conditioning is when behavior changes, in other words, there's a process of learning, and it changes as a function of the consequences of this behavior.

Whenever you behave in a certain way, there are this one set of outcomes, and whenever you behave in another way, there's another set of consequences.

And you learn to associate your behavior with the outcomes, positive or negative.

Gradually, when you aim for the outcomes, when you strive to accomplish and attain the goals or the consequences or the accomplishments, you engage in highly specific behaviors.

So, you learn to be utilitarian, you learn to be self-efficacious. You learn that if you behave one way you get positive outcomes, we have another way you get negative outcomes, better to behave in the first way.

And this is operant conditioning.

So that's how we teach dogs to do tricks. We reward behavioral change in the dog.

Similarly, a misbehaving child can be treated this way by linking the child's misbehavior to negative outcomes, to punishments, for example.

So all this is operant conditioning.

And essentially it's equivalent to instrumental conditioning. It's a form of operant learning.

Instrumental conditioning is any form of conditioning in which the correct response is essential for reinforcement.

We will discuss reinforcement momentarily.

Instrumental conditioning is similar to operant conditioning. It involves complex activities in order to reach a goal.

And so when we have a rat, a rat and we train the rat to traverse and navigate a maze in order to obtain food, the rat is rewarded when it succeeds to cross the maze correctly.

So this conditions the rat to choose only specific trajectories and paths within the maze.

This is operant conditioning. It's not the same as classical condition.

In classical conditioning, the reinforcement is given regardless of the response.

Ultimately, the reinforcement causes a specific behavior, like salivation in a dog.

But it's not given on condition that the dog salivates.

So the conditioning, the operant conditioning is totally automatic. It's totally, it's regular, it's, and it's predictable, and it's unchanging, immutable, and so on. It has no flexibility, it's a rigid pattern.

Every time there's a sound, there's food. Sound, food, sound, food. The dog salivates.

If the dog were to not salivate, there would still be sound and food. If you take away the food and there's only sound, and the dog salivates, great. The conditioning worked.

But if the dog were not to salivate, we would still ring the bell. We would still make the sound.

This is classical conditioning.

Not so in operant conditioning. We reward behavior.

So the person is first to change the behavior and then witness the outcomes or experience them or benefit from them or be punished somehow.

The outcomes in operant conditioning, instrumental conditioning, the outcomes depend crucially and critically on behavior modification.

Now I mentioned that the narcissist is exposed to classical condition.

Every time the narcissist as a child try to approach a parental figure, someone who she loved, they were somehow penalized.

It's a punitive, abusive, traumatizing environment.

Love was frowned upon. Love was a vulnerability to be exploited. Love was a weakness to be leveraged. Love was bad for you.

But you couldn't help it as a child. Children love. It's an instinctual automatic response.

And so the child keeps loving and keeps getting hurt. Keeps loving and keeps getting rejected. Keeps loving and keeps getting hurt, keeps loving and keeps getting rejected, keeps loving and keeps experiencing pain and agony, keeps loving and keeps being humiliated and shamed until finally this kind of child associates love with all these negative outcomes.

This is the classical part.

Operant conditioning in the childhood of the narcissist is equally prevalent and equally dominant and important.

The parental figures, the parents of the narcissist, usually... figures the parents of the narcissists usually create an environment of rewards and punishments that are not linked to any affect.

Even healthy parents, even good parents, reward the child when he behaves, punish the child when the child misbehaves. That is normal, that is commendable and recommended.

But they do so with love. The love of healthy parents is unconditional, not in the sense that they would forgive everything or anything.

The love of the parent is unconditional in the sense that even when the parent is forced to punish the child, it is clear that the parent is in pain, equally in pain. It hurts the parent to hurt the child. It hurts the parent to punish the child. It causes the parent enormous discomfort and sadness to be forced into the situation.

In other words, there are many emotions involved.

The message is, I love you, I love you as you are, I love you and unconditionally, it breaks my heart that I have to punish you, but for your own good I have to punish you. Because you have to learn not to behave in a certain way.

This constant background of love mitigates the punishment, converts it into a learning experience, not into a form of conditioning.

Parents of narcissists are what is known as dead parents, metaphorically speaking. These are emotionally absent parents, depressive parents, selfish parents, physically absent parents, parentifying, instrumentalizing, abusive, exploitative, traumatizing parents.

So these kind of parents, while they also use rewards and punishments like regular healthy parents do, they don't do it out of love. They do it.

It's not even a relationship with a pet, you know, when you have a dog or a cat, you usually love the dog or the cat. Whatever you do when you condition the dog or condition the cat not to soil the carpet, for example, you don't do it because you hate the dog or you hate the cat. You do it because you love the dog and the cat. You want them in your life.

And so this is not the message that the parents of the narcissists gave him.

They gave him the message, you're an object, you're a manipulable object, like a smartphone or a television, smart TV or something.

And so we're going to program you. We're going to make you behave the way we want you to. We are going to punish you every time you stray, every time you deviate and diverge, every time you display autonomy, personal autonomy, every time you express emotions, every time you bother us, every time you express emotions every time you bother us we're going to punish you we're going to punish you we're going to program you we're going to program you we're going to push your buttons we're going to leverage your vulnerabilities we're going to hurt you we're going to touch you where it hurts.

It is in a way malevolent, actually, or at the very least, self-interested.

It's not about the child. It's about the parent.

And similarly, when this kind of parents reward the child, they reward the child because the child has gratified them. It's about them, not about the child.

So this is the huge difference between instrumental conditioning in healthy families with healthy parents where it's about the child, it's an attempt to mold the child so that the child attains accomplishments and happiness later in life.

It's all about the child, never about the parent.

And in dysfunctional families, dysfunctional families where the parents are basically dead parents or bad parents.

In these families, it's about the parents.

The conditioning, the rewards, the punishments, the messaging, the signaling. It's all about the parents. Not the child. The child is incidental. The child is an instrument, a tool of gratification.

When the child fails to gratify, of course, the child is punished. When the child gratifies, it's rewarded, but it's about the parent.

The child learns it very fast. The child learns to derive its sense of self-esteem, self-worth and self-confidence from the outside.

The child learns that if you want to be admired, if you want to gain attention, secure attention, if you want to be noticed, if you want to be taken care of, if you want to be fake loved, at least a simulation of love, you have to gratify people. You have to cater to their needs. You have to somehow manipulate them. Push their buttons. You have to program them.

So, a narcissist is born because what is narcissism? Narcism is a form of external regulation.

The narcissist has this emptiness inside, a brittle, fragile, vulnerable, wannabe self, fragmented self, a kaleidoscopic self.

And the narcissist's mind is a hive mind. He goes around eliciting responses from people, manipulating them in a way to provide him or with narcissistic supply.

And he has learned it as a child. He's learned as a child that he must render himself an instrument in order to obtain the most basic nurturance, most basic needs, any child requires.

And so this creates operant conditioning.

The narcissist learns that he must go through sequences of behavior which are rigid and immutable in order to obtain favorable outcomes.

He also learns to avoid certain types of behavior if he wishes to avoid negative outcomes.

But in the narcissist's mind, positive outcomes and negative outcomes have nothing to do with how these things are defined in the minds of healthy people.

In the minds of healthy people, positive outcomes would be, for example, love, a relationship, intimacy, social integration, satisfaction, and so on.

In the narcissist's mind, a positive outcome would be attention, being seen. Narcissistic supply.

In a healthy person's mind, negative outcomes is like when you hurt someone, or when you fail in accomplishing a goal, or when you self-sabotage, or these are negative outcomes.

In the narcissist mind, negative outcome is when you fail to secure narcissistic supply.

It's a binary machine. Yessupply, no supply. Feel good, feel bad, end of story. There are no nuances, nothing in between.

And so the narcissist develops this constricted behavioral set, constricted set of behaviors, which are essentially engaged in the pursuit of narcissistic supply. End of story.

And all this involves what is known as reinforcement.

Reinforcement is a process in which the frequency or probability of a response is increased by some kind of dependency, by some kind of contingency, by some kind of stimulus or circumstance, the reinforcer.

So we have a reinforcer, which again is a relationship, an event, circumstance, an environment, and so we have a reinforcer which again is a relationship, an event, circumstance, and environment, as we have a behavior, another person, we have a reinforcer and the reinforcer causes a certain type of behavior to become much more common, the frequency to increase and that is essentially reinforcement.

In classical conditioning, when we present an unconditioned stimulus together with a condition stimulus, this creates automatic reinforcement.

In operand conditioning, it's a bit more complex because usually the conditioning of the reinforcement comes after the behavior, not with the behavior.

So it's not contemporaneous, it's not coterminous with the behavior, but it follows the behavior, so it's not contemporaneous, it's not coterminous with the behavior but it follows the behavior.

In other words it involves an element of time perception, the person has to perceive the future, it involves elements of delayed gratification, it involves elements of anticipation and prediction.

It requires a much more complex mental apparatus.

Because if you behave in a certain way and you anticipate a certain outcome, you realize that there's a future.

You anticipate the outcomes, so you are capable of creating a theory and yielding predictions about the future, and you're able to mold your behavior and shape it so as to increase your self-efficacy.

That's a highly complex process.

And so all these involve reinforcements and reinforces.

Reinforcer is a stimulus or a circumstance that produces reinforcement when it occurs in some kind of dependent relationship or contingency with a response.

Always it's a stimulus and a response. Stimulus and response.

All this comes of course from a school in psychology known as behaviorism.

And the behaviorists said that every stimulus produces a response, but we don't know why.

They said that the human mind is a black box, not point in studying the human mind because we're highly dependent on self-reporting which could be skewed or biased or fallacious even a lie and we are highly dependent on speculation that's not science. Science is observation. What can we observe?

With a modicum of safety and certainty, we can observe stimulus, response, stimulus, behavior.

And that's why it's called behaviorism.

And so there are natural reinforces.

Natural reinforces are food. Water is a natural reinforcer.

Because these stimuli and circumstances inherently reinforce. They don't depend on learning to become desirable. It's like the learning is embodied, is in the body.

Natural reinforces are known as unconditioned or primary reinforces for this reason, because they're not learned, they're not acquired, as opposed to conditioned or secondary reinforcers, which are initially neutral stimuli.

Remember the sound with the dog? That's a secondary reinforcer or a conditioned reinforcer.

And then this reinforcer gets associated with a primary reinforcer, with a natural reinforcer, and produces a result, an outcome, a behavioral outcome, like salivation in the dog.

And this is what we call training, by the way. This is a good description of training.

So all this mess involves reinforcements.

And of course, all of us have heard of negative reinforcements, positive reinforcements, and intermittent reinforcements.

Instrumental conditioning, also known as type 2 conditioning, type R conditioning, we're not going into it.

In instrumental conditioning, negative and positive reinforcements play a major role.

And now there's a misapprehension, misconception, even among scholars and professors of psychology.

They say that a positive reinforcement is a reward, something good, candy, money, sex, something good, a reward, the price. And that part is true.

But they also say that negative reinforcement is a punishment, and that that part is not true, actually.

So let me explain to you the difference between positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is an increase in the probability of the occurrence of some activity, because that activity results in the presentation of a stimulus or of some circumstance.

So a positive reinforcement simply means that we provide some kind of reinforcer that increases the frequency and probability of a behavior.

End of story.

It does not have to be a reward, although in a majority of cases it is.

But it doesn't have to be.

For example, a child who would want to secure his mother's love, a mother that is dead, a mother that is rejecting, mother that is frustrating and abandoning, this kind of child would modify his behavior in order to secure the mother's attention at least, if not her love.

So here's a case of positive reinforcement, in the sense that the frequency and probability of the child's behavior, or some behaviors of the child, increase because the mother responds. The mother's responsiveness conditioned the child to alter behaviors, and that's a positive reinforcement.

One could say, of course, that love is a positive thing, but it's not exactly love. It's just paying attention to the child.

Positive reinforcement is anything, anything, it could be a negative thing, anything that increases the frequency or probability of a behavior.

Similarly, negative reinforcement is more or less the opposite.

But negative reinforcement, strictly speaking, is the removal, the prevention or the postponement of a punishment or some other aversive stimulus as a consequence of a response which in turn increases the probability of that response.

So negative reinforcement is not punishment. That's a common mistake. Even professionals make this mistake, not only self-styled experts.

Negative reinforcement is not punishment. It's not something active or proactive.

Negative reinforcement simply means that if you behave in a certain way, the chances that you will be punished, the chances that you will go through something unpleasant, uncomfortable, repulsive, repugnant, the chances of that are reduced.

So if you choose to behave in a certain way, the aversive stimulus, the thing, the occurrence, the stimulus, the circumstances that evoke avoidance or escape behavior, this thing that you want to avoid, this thing you want to escape from, the chances that this aversive stimulus will happen are reduced. The aversive stimulus is removed or is prevented or is counted or is reprimed or is postponed. At any case it disappears.

So if you behave in a certain way, the chances that you would be punished go down.

Negative reinforcement is not the punishment. That's exactly the opposite.

Negative reinforcement is when you behave in a way that there will be no punishment. That's what it means.

And this increases the probability of your response.

Both positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement are very common in the lives, in the early autobiographies of narcissists.

We know when we interview narcissists in clinical settings that even when there was no overt abuse, discernible, ostentatious abuse, conspicuous abuse, there was still ambient abuse, something in the atmosphere.

And so there was a lot of reinforcement going on. Some of it positive.

If you behave in a certain way, if you fulfill my dreams, if you meet my expectations, if you take care of my needs as a parent, if you obey me, if you respect me, if you become my slave, if you don't bother me, these are the messages from the parent.

Then the parent says, I would pay attention to you from time to time. That's a kind of positive reinforcement.

Or if you're a nice kid, I will not punish you. That is negative reinforcement.

These are very common in the early lives of narcissists. They've been exposed to this.

But what's even much worse is what is known as intermittent reinforcement.

Intermittent reinforcement is an alternation, unpredictable alternation between positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements.

When there's no way to foresee what's going to happen, there's no theory that could accommodate the behaviors of the parental figure, nothing explains it, nothing, there's no way to make sense of it.

So the parental figure becomes the source of pain and gratification, hurt and love. The parental figure holds the keys to the kingdom of the inner landscape of the child.

So the child becomes trauma bonded with the parental figure. The child becomes dependent on the parental figure.

Only the parental figure can inflict pain on the child, so only the parental figure can take it away.

And so intermittent reinforcement is blowing hot and cold. It involves a bit of splitting, you're bad boy totally, you're good boy totally. It's unpredictable, it's indeterminate, it's uncertain, it's terrifying because a child is highly dependent on the parent for its survival.

So intermittent reinforcement is a core problem.

The thing is that when this kind of child grows up, they tend to export. They tend to impose these patterns on people around them, future intimate partners, their own children, their friends, their colleagues and so.

They engage in intermittent reinforcement, which is sometimes indistinguishable from bullying.

And they can't see the problem with that. They believe this is the way people behave with each other. They believe people reward each other or withhold punishment. People manipulate each other, the Machiavellian kind of. People change or modify each other's behaviors with reinforcements. It's a give and take system. It's utterly transactional.

And in their minds, the minds of narcissists, there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way of the world. That's the way it should be.

And so they are very, very hell-bent on maintaining ledgers and accounts and settling accounts. You know, they're balancing the books, mental books all the time.

You never accumulate credit with a narcissist by the way. Your balance is zero every single day. Start the day, it's a Groundhog Day. It's always zero. But you do accumulate debit all the time.

The narcissist is utterly fixated on settling this debt, on you paying the price.

And so reinforcement is a major instrument in relationships with narcissists, both positive and negative.

Combined together, we get intermittent reinforcement, which usually leads to trauma bonding.

And so we describe this kind of relationships as reinforcement contingencies.

Contingency is simply another word for a relationship between response and reinforcer.

The contingency can be positive. If the occurrence of the reinforcer is more probable after the response, the contingency is positive because it elicits a specific type of behavior.

And the contingency can be also negative if the behavior is less probable after the response, if the reinforcer is less probable after the response.

So negative positive contingency is when the reinforcer happens more often after the response.

And positive and negative is if the... sorry, positive contingency is the reinforcer happening more often after the response. Negative contingency is the opposite. The reinforcer happens less often after the response.

And so contingencies, in reinforcement contingencies, these kind of relationships, this is how the narcissist perceives the world and any interactions with people.

He plays with stimuli and responses, with reinforces and reinforcement and behaviors. He is a manipulator and not in the sense that he, like the psychopath, sits back and has a master plan, Dr. Moriarty.

No, he's a predatory manipulator in the sense that he keeps pushing your buttons. He keeps reinforcing you. He keeps introducing reinforceers, eliciting from your responses, until you find yourself trapped in a rigid tunnel of responsiveness, unable to exit this tunnel and develop other responses. Your responsiveness is narrowed down, constricted until you become a binary machine.

He pushes button one, you behave one way. He pushes button two, you behave another way. You find yourself totally programmed, totally reduced in many ways.

That's what rats do. They pull levers in order to obtain food. Or they react when a door opens in a maze.

You become a rat in a rat colony or a rat maze and this isresponse reinforcement contingency. The mass-assist increases or decreases the reinforcers in accordance with your behavior. If he obtains favorable behavioral outcomes from you, as far as he is concerned, he will modulate the level of reinforcement and the occurrence, the incidence of reinforces. It's totally machine-like structure. The relationship with narcissists are like being trapped in a giant machine, like being a cog in a machine. And even the... it's not a machine that is aware of itself, self-aware. Even the narcissist doesn't really know what he's doing. There's no awareness there. At least with a psychopath, there's a mind. There's a presence of mind. The psychopath knows. He has a goal. This is the plan. He's going to manipulate you. It's going to gaslight you. And you can cope with it. If you learn the ropes, if you become more educated, you can cope with it if you learn the ropes if you become more educated you can cope with with psychopaths but the narcissist is really driven by the machine manipulated by the machine and he is the machine it's an amazing concoction amazing predicament and combination and all this is because narcissists have been exposed to these two types It's an amazing concoction, amazing predicament and combination. And all this is because narcissists have been exposed to these two types of conditioning as children. Because narcissists regard the whole world, everyone in it, and relationships and interactions with people as reinforcement contingencies, relationships that depend crucially on reinforcement and conditioning. Because of that, they are also, many of them, not all of them, are also irrational and superstitious, prone to conspiracies and so on, because they believe in something called accidental reinforcement. Marxists believe that everything in the world is stimulus and response, and that if you modulate the one, if you regulate one, you regulate the other. And so when they see an accidental occurrence of a reinforcer after an act which may inadvertently strengthen the likelihood of the occurrence of the act. They attribute to it causation. If they see one reinforcer and then there's some behavior. And then this behavior becomes more frequent after the reinforcer. They say, oh, the reinforcer caused the behavior this is the structure of superstitions

superstitious behavior is often the result of accidental reinforcement

so for example you play some kind of game. Or you gamble, actually. I used to be a professional gambler for two years. When I was in a casino, people were gambling. And then whenever they gambled after they drank something, they won. And whenever they gambled and they didn't drink something prior to the bet, they lost.

So they began to associate the act of drinking with winning. And so from now on, whenever they wanted to place a bet, they would drink something before they placed the bet. That's an example of superstition. Or you would wear something and you would have a winning streak, a winning night. And then the next day you would wear something else and you would lose all your money. And you would say, see, I need to wear these specific shoes, these specific clothes, and I need to wear this specific chain and this specific bracelet. Only when I wear these things do I win at the casino.

This is a superstition that connects rain forces with outcomes or actions or behaviors or consequences. And of course the connection is spurious, is nonsense. But people believe that. There's no causal effect between the reinforcer and the outcome, but people make this association. The accidental contingent relationship between the reinforcer wearing something specific, behaving in a specific way, and the outcome, winning, for example. This accidental contingency is cemented in the mind of the superstitious person, or the conspiracy theories, or the magical thinker. And narcissists are all three. They're superstitious. They're prone to magical thinking. And they believe in conspiracy theories.

Because narcissists are the product of conditioning and reinforcement from the first moment they open their eyes as newborns.

They're born into an environment which uses conditioning and reinforcement as the only tools of human interaction. An environment that links goods such as love and caring and attention and compassion, links these natural goods to specific behaviors, specific actions, specific utterances and words, so that these linkages, these reinforcement contingencies become the natural way of the world.

From now on, the narcissist goes, having become an adult, and tries to find connections. Ask himself all the time, what causes this, which reinforcer, which stimulus, and how can I take advantage of it in my favor?

Narcissus tries to become self-efficacious by manipulating his environment, especially his human environment, via reinforcement and conditioning.

And the shocking thing is all this is literally unconscious.