I’m sitting here with my cat Arthur purring on my chest, which he likes to do when I’m laying on the futon, which I like to do because it’s the only working position I can assume for extended periods that does not hurt. The purring is responsible for me loving him; if he didn’t jump up here and purr, I would love him less. He jumps up, settles in, I pet him, and he purrs. That is how it works.
In human development, primatology, and artificial intelligence, the notion of contingency matters way more than you’d imagine. Contingency, in a phrase: I do something and it causes you to do something. Contingency matters in human development because infants react contingently to certain stimuli, which allows developmental psychologists to intuit various things about their cognitive abilities; and because, like with Arthur, the infant’s contingent reaction to its mother is an important part of the bonding experience. Later it will matter in a host of shared-attention features necessary for language use; these kind of contingent reactions is the most important thing that separates humans from non-human primates (cognitively speaking; other differences matter more when it comes to dating, for example.) Contingency’s role in AI is discernable from those already mentioned: devices that react to you seem intelligent — you call, the robot comes running. The effect works like magic.
What I find remarkable is how powerful this simple idea is, even in day to day life. I like the waitress who says something in response to the stupid joke that I said to her, something that indicates that she has actually heard the joke. I do not like the snotty lesbians at The Spy House because nothing I could do would seem to alter their condescending attitudes. Come in with my pants around my ankles? Yawn. Come in with Arthur in a backpack, wearing a little Vikings helmet? Just more tiresome visual stimuli their retinas are forced to transduce. You’d think they’d grown up in that bar from Star Wars where Han Solo shoots Greedo.
Anyway. Here’s a tip, for free: to be twice as charming as you already are, behave contingently. Listen to what people say to you, and then say something back to them that contains the seed of what they’ve said. There’s interesting work to be done here. You can get a long way in life without mastering much more than this one skill.
But now I wonder if it’s a skill that can be mastered, if you’re not predisposed to master it. If chimps can’t learn to do declarative pointing, can people learn to listen, to _really_ listen? Hmm.