Episode 7: Psychological Entrenchment

There's a pattern that I've noticed through the course of my life.
It's sort of a psychological phenomenon, and it has three basic steps to it.
The first, or at least I thought it did, the first step is that you start with some sort
of practical constraint or practical dependency.
So, in other words, you are going to do something for a practical reason, and I'll go through
an example of this in a minute.
So, you have a practical reason to do something.
The second step is that you begin to view the practical step as something that entices
you to do the second thing, whatever it's dependent on, or whatever the thing you're
trying to accomplish is.
And then the third step, so you've got practical dependency, you have a step where by doing
the practical piece, it sort of sets you up for whatever it is, and the third piece is
that you become dependent on that initial practical step in order to feel as if you even can accomplish
the second piece.
I know that was all very abstract, so let me go through an example.
I'm not sure if I'm explaining it very well.
So, for example, I'm not saying this particular chain of events necessarily is one that's
happened to me, but I'm going to use it as kind of a simple example.
I work out.
I like to lift weights, work out, into fitness, that kind of stuff.
So, first step, in order to go work out, in order to go lift weights, I need to put on
a pair of gym shoes.
Practical thing, right?
There's no reason that I wouldn't need to put on gym shoes in order to go work out.
So, that's step one.
Over time, putting on the gym shoes makes my body feel ready for the workout.
See the difference there?
In one case, in order to work out, I need to put on shoes.
Over time, though, the second, it flips eventually where putting on the shoes makes me feel ready
for the workout.
So, that's step two.
And step three becomes, eventually down the road, it's almost impossible, it's almost unthinkable
that I can be ready to do a workout without putting on the shoes.
So, it becomes a necessary, almost superstitious step to things.
So, again, just to outline it one more time, start with a practical step.
You need to put on shoes to work out.
So, number two, putting on the shoes makes you feel prepared for whatever it is you're
going to do.
So, you put on the shoes makes you feel prepared for the workout.
Step three, in your head, it becomes almost a point of superstition where unless you put
on the shoes in an exact way at an exact time, you feel as if you won't be able to work
out or you won't have a good workout or whatever.
So, it becomes sort of a superstitious thing.
And I've noticed this pattern with a number of things over the course of my life where
something that initially started as just a practical necessity eventually becomes a
psychological dependency.
So, I didn't know what this was.
I had never done any research into it.
I had never looked up to see, you know, is this a thing or am I just, you know, a bag of
nuts, like what's going on here?
So, I spent a little bit of time looking this up.
And lo and behold, there is a term for this.
It is called psychological entrenchment.
So, I've only begun with research on this and I was doing it mostly through, you know,
AI tools like ChatGPT.
So, forgive any glaring inaccuracies.
But this all sounds pretty plausible to me.
Turns out the research on this goes way back, you know, in terms of as long as psychology
has been really studied any formal way.
Um, and it's also interdisciplinary.
It spans several disciplines.
So, the first piece of this, as one would expect, is very Pavlovian.
It's very classical conditioning, right?
So, going from step one to step two, going from needing to put the shoes on to in order
to work out over to step two where it's putting the shoes on makes you feel ready to work out.
So, that is textbook classical conditioning.
So, a lot of the research, of course, at least initially stems from that.
Um, at least for that first part of things.
Interestingly, I mean, that research goes as far back as the late 1800s and early 1900s.
But in and of itself, there was that and some other scattered things.
But the real core piece was that classical conditioning piece.
But they hadn't gone any further than that necessarily.
Jump forward a little while, uh, you know, early 1900s up until maybe even the mid-1900s.
You get more into this research around habits.
And interestingly, this term of habit loops starts to show up in the research.
The idea of habit loops really becoming that over time, people will automatically follow
whatever habits they have, whatever habits they have formed, they will sort of automatically
follow without ever re-evaluating why.
Um, that's when this kind of early 1900s into the mid-1900s is really when this research is
is kind of coming into fruition.
Along with some other interesting research that starts to get into the research of organizations.
And I expect, and I didn't look at the correlation here, but I expect that this goes hand in hand
with a lot of management research that was being done at the time.
So, one of the things that they found organizationally is that just like any person with your habits that
you don't really re-evaluate, leaders and managers do the same thing.
And they find that they continue to, uh, dive into ineffective strategies just because they
feel tied to whatever past choices they made, not necessarily because that strategy is, is
bearing any fruit at that point in time.
And then you move out into a later portion, a later body of research, um, that, that starts
getting into the early and early 2000s and late 1900s, early 2000s, that really starts talking
about, and the, there, there's a piece of this that has by a lot, like the, the, the, the neuro
neuroscience, like how your brain is actually formed and how your brain actually operates
can become entrenched, uh, where the pathways that initially have to form as they form and they
get repeated over and over, or get used over and over again, they become better and better
at doing the same patterns.
You get into all these things around inflexibility within organizations and within, within people.
They find research around the higher degree of expertise you have in something, the harder
it is for you to change your behavior patterns, all those sorts of things.
So when you put all this research together, you end up with various, um, uh, various terms
around this.
You end up with things like psychological entrenchment, uh, neural, uh, neuro, uh, neuro, uh, neuro
routine, uh, neuro routine, um, the idea that you become very rigid in your habits and very
rigid in your thinking.
So, so earlier I'd said that there was really three steps to this as I, as I had seen it,
right?
Um, you had this first step of just having to do something practical.
Uh, the, apparently the, the, uh, term for this in the, in the field is practical routine.
It's just, it's a, it's a behavior.
It serves a clear function.
You do a thing as a dependency to do something else.
Then it goes into a psychological association as step two, which is this idea that now when
you put those gym shoes on, you feel ready for the workout.
And this is called a, this is this phase, the psychological association.
You then move into ritualization, which is that third step that I was talking about, where
you begin to believe that the behavior is, is essential in order to perform well at whatever
the last thing is.
But there's a fourth step, um, which maybe this is the, the piece that where things get
kind of, I don't know if dangerous is the right word, but where things sort of break out of
that box of just practicality.
And you end up in this phase of entrenchment and rigidity where not only do you need, feel
that you need to do that in order to have, uh, whatever that, you know, you need to put
the shoes on in a certain way in order to have a good workout.
Now you literally cannot think of any world where you don't do that.
Uh, and it causes you discomfort and anxiety.
Uh, and a lot of psychology of course is backed by this concept of like these, these underlying
anxieties that are always with you and they impact your behavior in certain ways and all
these things.
But in this case, it's that change, that movement from, oh, I really need to put these
shoes on in order to have the good workout.
And you, that moves beyond into now I'm actually anxious.
Uh, I go to do a workout without it.
And not only do I think it's not going to be a great workout, I'm jittery about it.
And it's in the back of my head and I can't get it out.
Again, I'm not sure how well my, this specific example necessarily plays through all these steps
because at least for me, um, I don't think I would get to that phase with this, but I can
think of other examples where you might.
Um, but anyway, I just thought it was an interesting phenomenon, something that I had noticed over
the course of my life that I never had a name for.
I didn't really even know if it was a thing, but this idea of psychological entrenchment,
uh, just being a really interesting topic, being something that, that I, I, you know, just
learned to put a word to and now have a, an interesting mental model around it and found
kind of this, this fourth step to things, which I wasn't really thinking about, which
is that if you ever find yourself in one of these patterns where you have a practical
thing that becomes a ritualized thing that becomes a, I'm sorry, a practical thing that
becomes sort of an association that becomes a ritual that then moves you into a place where
you literally can't function without anxiety.
If you don't follow the ritual, that's probably when things have gone too far and you need
to find a way to kind of back that behavior out.
Cause at the end of the day, um, you don't want to, these things are useful while they
are doing things positively.
Right.
And the first two steps are fairly positive.
The first step is really one around.
I just need to put the shoes on to do the workout.
That's a positive thing.
No reason not to put the shoes on.
Even the second step where you start putting the shoes on and you feel ready.
That's a positive thing.
It's a good thing.
Starts to turn a little bit in that third step where you start feeling, Oh, if I don't
put the shoes on in a certain way, now I've got a, now I'm not going to have a good
workout and you definitely won't want to get to the fourth step where if you are unable
to do so, you are literally anxious and uncomfortable without it.
So just something to evaluate a mental framework for things that might come up in your life.
Hope it's useful.