The Button Factory  
Joe Ferguson, PhD | December 25, 2009

     Where do your buttons come from; the ones that can be pushed? Over the holidays many of you will return to the bosom of complicated families, to the factories where your most pressable buttons were manufactured and installed. I got this pithy metaphor from Joy Dorrell, from whom I also learned the surprising new meaning of the word cougar. Of course there are button factories everywhere, not only in the nuclear family, and new buttons can be manufactured and installed throughout the lifecycle. A button is just a trigger for some latent response, as a lingering kiss gets the romantic ball rolling or as the proverbial nuclear button initiates an elaborate process of global annihilation. There is no question about the reality of personal buttons, and they do provide a convenient explanation for all manner of irrational behavior, but they reduce the status of those who rely upon such explanations to that of laboratory rats and pigeons.

     The theoretical foundation of personal buttons is behaviorism and operant conditioning, which dominated academic psychology during the middle half of the last century, until the “cognitive revolution” rediscovered thinking as an important component of human behavior. Behaviorism and operant conditioning describe you as a machine that is programmed by reward and punishment, which are the tools used to manufacture your buttons. I have no doubt that this is quite literally true, but it misses the important reality of rational thinking and decision making, which are conditioned behaviors themselves but which are open-ended, and which incorporate rational, empirical, scientific judgment and decision in themselves. In addition to your personal buttons, along the road of life you have probably learned to think for yourself to some extent, and to make at least some decisions on the basis of that thinking. This is an extremely valuable capacity and it opens the possibility of disabling or overriding your buttons, whether they are original equipment or not. You should develop that capacity further.

     Happy Holidays! Call me after.