How Your Self-Esteem and Instrumental Behavior Interacts With Technology

One of the marvelous aspects of observing infants and children learn and build skills is seeing the amazement and joy that they display upon recognizing that something they did had an effect on their environment. From the realization that their action of shaking a rattle is what is causing the noise they hear, to discovering that they can make a light go on and off by moving a switch. Kids are so taken by this cause/effect drama that they will initially repeat the behavior seemingly endlessly.

Let’s call this behavior of acting on the environment to produce a predictable, observable result instrumental behavior. A large part of infancy and childhood is devoted to the serial learning of instrumental behavior, sometimes known as instrumental learning. Behavioral psychology puts it this way: when a personal action results in a desired outcome, that action is more likely to be repeated. In more common behavioral parlance, the desired outcome “reinforces” the behavior that produced it.

From the sheer joy one observes when a young child learns and subsequently performs a new instrumental behavior we can deduce that there are other internal, non-observable things going on for that child. Any adult will tell you what those things are: the feeling states of satisfaction, accomplishment and pride, to name a few. The artist, the auto mechanic, the custom seamstress all engage in instrumental occupations that offer a new challenge with each job, and thus, a new opportunity to feel gratified and accomplished.

I believe, and I hope most would agree, that the positive feeling states that result from successful instrumental behavior contributes significantly to one’s positive self-esteem. Self-esteem is a core psychological trait of humans that falls on a spectrum from negative to positive. In my view, after a 35-year career as a clinical psychologist, self-esteem is a significant contributor to psychological wellbeing. Further, I am convinced that our American society, with its competitive, individualistic, first is best, beauty and wealth-oriented value system produces people, by and large, with marginal self-esteem. I would directly connect the high rates of depression and anxiety disorders observed in the US to the deficient levels of self-esteem endemic to our culture.

Work is not the only opportunity to engage in gratifying instrumental behavior, but it is typically the predominant one in peoples’ lives. Others are: pursuing an education, childrearing, hobbies, volunteering, even fixing things around the house. Of course, non-instrumental pursuits can also be gratifying and contribute to positive self-esteem. These may include having one or more close friends, a good social life, recognition for a talent or accomplishment and an inclination to view one’s life performance more or less objectively. By this last item I refer to one common and critical determinant of low self-esteem, the tendency of a person to undermine their actual achievements by denying they deserve credit, minimizing the accomplishment, assigning the credit to another person, to luck, accident or circumstances. A person who believes that they are not worthy of credit will not accept it and will suffer chronically low self-esteem.

Advancing technology is robbing people of their instrumentality. In our personal and work lives automation is taking function away from us. When it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks that offer little in the way of gratification, that may not be a great loss. If we lose our job due to automation, that is another story entirely, especially if it is a skilled job that we find fulfilling. When it does not affect their livelihood, people are welcoming of the technology. However, are they making a mistake? It may be fun telling Alexa to do things for us, but how much abdication of function can we tolerate before we have given up so much “doing for ourselves” that we are emptied out?

The theft by technology of our functioning has been gradual and insidious. Decades back, I used to enjoy working on my car, replacing or gapping distributor points, setting the timing and doing other major and minor repairs. It was a gratifying undertaking. Today’s cars are computer controlled and far more complex and intimidating, leaving little for an untrained home garage jockey to do but change the oil and filter. However, some of the theft of function is more than incidental to progress. To force consumers to use their repair services, rather than try to fix an item themselves, companies such as Apple try to legally retain ownership rights to parts of the products they sell us, prohibiting us from making our own repairs!

We hear much about the threat of automation putting greater and greater numbers of people out of work. To the extent that comes to pass, society will face a major challenge in dealing with all those unemployed. One compensating proposal we hear about more frequently has to do with a guaranteed minimum income. But aside from the purely economic aspect of such displacement, society will have to also address the issues of personal loss of purpose, loss of value and loss off function. Certainly, many jobs today are routine, oppressive and unrewarding. Skilled manufacturing jobs were replaced by low paying service industry jobs. Having no job may not be much worse than having one of those jobs. Nevertheless, in a society that has always valued work, even many minimum wage workers are glad they are employed and find meaning in it.

If the premise that work contributes substantially to positive self-esteem is correct, then masses of newly and possibly permanently, unemployed will create a mental health crisis for the country if solutions are not readied and implemented. The task appears to be monumental. Nothing short of an appropriate change in cultural values coupled with an aggressive public education project to disseminate the new way of thinking, will succeed. Perhaps people can prepare themselves by consciously bucking the trend and refusing to give up their personal instrumentality wherever they have a choice.

Choosing to do for oneself is a freedom we should not toss away casually. The unanticipated consequences may be more than we bargained for.