Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

by Charles T. Munger

We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The Coca-Cola trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses. And how does one create and maintain conditioned reflexes? Well, the psychology text gives two answers: 1) by operant conditioning and 2) by classical conditioning, often called Pavlovian conditioning to honor the great Russian scientist. And since we want a lollapalooza result, we must use both conditioning techniques, and all we can invent to enhance effects from each technique. The operant conditioning part of our problem is easy to solve. We need only 1) maximize rewards of our beverage’s ingestion and 2) minimize possibilities that desired reflexes, once created by us, will be extinguished through operant conditioning by proprietors of competing products. For operant conditioning rewards, there are only a few categories we will find practical: Food value in calories or other inputs Flavor, texture, and aroma acting as stimuli to consumption under neural preprogramming of man through Darwinian natural selection Stimulus, as by sugar or caffeine Cooling effect when man is too hot or warming effect when man is too cool Wanting a lollapalooza result, we will naturally include rewards in all the categories.