"I once got an email from a teenage girl in China who watched an online lecture of mine in which I talked about the partial reinforcement effect. She told me that this helped her resolve a romantic situation. She was flirting with a boy over text and realized that she was responding with a heart whenever this boy texted her. She then worried that if she ever missed a few of his texts, he’d quickly give up on her. But if she responded with a heart only some of the time (partial reinforcement), he would persist in contacting her and then—and this part goes a bit beyond what I said in the lecture—she would eventually win his love."
". . . partial reinforcement effect. If you want to teach something quickly, reinforce it every time. But if you want it to stick once the teaching phase is over, reinforce it occasionally. This makes intuitive sense. If I get a reward whenever I do something and then the rewards stop, I'll try a bit more, and then give up (This just isn't working, I might think). But if I get a reward only occasionally, and then the rewards stop, I'll keep at it, assuming that the reward is just around the corner. (Of course, 'thinking' and 'assuming' is not how the behaviorist would describe it.)"
"On those occasions a vacant, absent expression appeared in his eyes, and I would have suspected he was in the power of some vegetal substance capable of producing visions if the obvious temperance of his life had not led me to reject this thought. I will not deny, however, that in the course of the journey, he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look. He kept some of it with him, and ate it in the moments of greatest tension (and we had a number of them at the abbey!). Once, when I asked him what it was, he said laughing that a good Christian can sometimes learn also from the infidels, and when I asked him to let me taste it, he replied that herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not good for a young Benedictine."