The Premack Principle
Grandma's rule, proven in a lab: the thing you already love can drag the thing you dread.
Grounded in the research on premack's principle
the rule
Take a behavior you do a lot, on your own, with no nudging. Now chain a behavior you avoid to it: you only get the first if you do the second. The high-probability thing becomes the reward. That's the Premack principle. It's grandma's rule with a citation: eat your vegetables, then you get dessert. The dessert isn't bribery, it's a reinforcer, and Premack worked out exactly when it works.
born in a lab
David Premack ran the studies in 1959 and 1962 and named the idea in 1965. He called it the differential-probability hypothesis. Forget candy and gold stars as fixed rewards. Premack's move was to say reinforcement is relative: a behavior reinforces another one only if you'd freely do it more often. Probability, not pleasure, is the currency. That flip is why his name is on it.