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Gah. This is not how it works! Behaviors, not emotions are conditioned. Attacking tigers are a (likely unconditioned?) cue to feel fear. When in a fearful state, the person is likely to try running away. The behavior of running away from them is negatively reinforced because then the scary tiger is further away. The person will run next time.

To change emotional responses to things, you need classical, not operant conditioning.

See here for a much better, imo, example of self-reinforcement: http://caninesinaction.com/2013/03/on-tagteach-and-skill-building/.

It seems obvious to me that our own internal processes can and do reinforce behaviors all the time! For example, I think happy thoughts about how I’ll thank myself later to reinforce plugging in my phone. I don’t use victory gestures or candy, but I definitely use the feeling of “yay, I’m doing the thing I thought would work!”

In the case of the dinner plate, I would say that setting the table for dinner is something System 2 has under stimulus control. You know you’ll be rewarded iff you’ve been given the “set the table” cue, so you don’t do the behavior otherwise. I don’t see a similar issue arising with the self-reinforcement plan

I’m also a bit of a skeptic about the whole extrinsic rewards reduce motivation to do the thing when they’re removed business. I think that can happen, but a different thing can also happen where you’ve created a habit that’s easier to maintain even after the reward are gone. I would expect internal framings to matter quite a bit here.

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The idea was to reinforce my own noticing. Since this action is generally considered gross and/or shameful, my brain generally tried to avoid thinking about it, which meant I definitely would never notice I’d done it until it was too late. By rewarding myself for noticing (whenever it happened) I taught my brain that it was a good thing to think about.

I think perhaps this functions in a slightly different way than Skinner’s pigeons though. It’s almost like I’ve made a game out of noticing my brain’s urge, and I get an (uncounted) point every time I successfully do so. Regardless, this made me more aware of these urges, which meant I started noticing more and more when it was just my nose feeling itchy or my hand moving up. I would then reward myself and not bother actually doing it.

Within the first day, this almost completely eliminated the habit, although I forgot to go back for vaccines 2 and 3 so I confess that it’s not quite gone. However, during this comment I noticed once during, and YES’d, then not a minute later I noticed beforehand and YES’d again.

I believe this could work for a number of these sorts of impulses, although I haven’t yet tried (upon reflection, this would be really valuable; adding near top of queue)
• the urge to open facebook/twitter/hackernews/reddit/etc in a new tab
• the urge to go on the internet if not already on
• the urge to switch away from this tab where I’m writing a blog comment and go check my email (has happened twice thrice four times so far)
• the urge to grab a snack when I’m already full
• the urge to click on a link that is linkbaity but that I don’t anticipate actually being valuable.

In addition to helping notice these urges, it could also be valuable for noticing thoughts to the effect of “this may not be a valuable use of my time” or “I’m doing something I don’t want to be doing”. Normally, my brain shies away from those, because if that’s true, it means I’ve been wasting my time. However, like being wrong, the only way to fix that is to admit it (to yourself, at least). This ranges from:
• “Why am I still reading this site?”
• “I’m not really sure what I’m getting out of this video…”
• “This conversation/person-I’m-talking-to isn’t really very interesting…”
• “Gah, I was going to submit that form this morning and I forgot…”
… and of course any ugh field or thought about a belief that’s generally aversive.

Since there can be a fair bit of cognitive overhead to this at the start, I would recommend starting by focusing on only one type of thought or urge at a time, but it’s fun to do. I had to leave for a few hours in the middle of typing this and my attention to it while writing made it really easy to apply it to both the original unhygenic habit mentioned and also to the email-checking impulse when I came back.

Writing this post has made me realize that there’s a lot of really low-hanging fruit for me here, and so I’m going to try adding a new noticing every few days for the next while. I’ve made this a blog post for myself as well, and will post results there.

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