push-pull

The mechanism came out of a laboratory. In 1957 Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner mapped reinforcement schedules (opens in a new window) in a book of that name, and the finding that outlived them is that behavior rewarded on an unpredictable schedule persists longer, once the rewards stop, than behavior rewarded every time. In 2011 psychologists at Virginia and Harvard showed college women the profiles of men (opens in a new window) who had supposedly seen theirs. Told the men liked them a lot, the women were attracted. Told nothing certain, they were more attracted, and they thought about the men the most.

The pickup community packaged the effect as a technique. The Mystery Method taught push-pull as a way to hold interest: do a compliment, then take it away (opens in a new window), show interest and then withdraw it. Women’s content sells the same schedule from the other side, as making him chase (opens in a new window).

Under load, the technique assumes 1 operator and 1 subject. The market sells it to both, so 2 people who have each learned their half run the schedule on each other, each rewarded irregularly, each persisting, and each crediting the persistence to attraction. What the schedule reinforces is the pressing.

The study’s finding was about attention. The participants who did not know where they stood thought about the men the most, and the thinking accounted for the attraction. This file is a record of the thinking. Across 120 days it holds 16 forms on one person, and they run to 27,305 words. It records no technique. The uncertainty came with the arrangement at no charge, and the words were mine.