This needs to be a well-defined psychological principle. I do stuff like this all the time

When I was a kid I pressed the "return coin" button on a vending machine at a rest stop and 50¢ came out. Gotta check every single vending machine now.

Have you found many?
- I do this too, and yeah you’d be surprised how many times there’s money in the coin slot
My dad said when they were kids they'd check the payphones for coins in the change slot, so sometimes kids would spit in them to fuck w people

Us: hahaha silly dog.

Also us: oh a waterfall, I'll check behind it.

Also also us: oh a lottery ticket that I know for a mathematical fact has such a tiny chance of winning that I'm literally more likely to be struck by a shark and eaten by lightning, well I'll try my odds, who knows?

I understand, Dusty. I would inspect the magic pie bush every day too. Who turns down a free pie?

If I knew where that bush was, I'd periodically put pies in the bush just for Dusty.
- Dusty is clearly a good boy or girl.
It's just silly to turn down free food. Not hungry? See if you can get a to go bag. That morsel will come in handy down the line.

My cats did the same thing when they found a mouse. They would stand guard where they first saw it for over a month afterwards.

My wife's Yorkie once chased a mouse into a kitchen cupboard. After moving apartments and a decade later, if you asked him "where's the mouse?" He'd run to the kitchen and stare at the cupboards
It's honestly not a bad strategy.

Our neighborhood has the Magical Chicken Wing bush. The dog thoroughly inspected it for months afterwards, and still checks on it now and then just in case.

Me watching Dusty find the pie I left for him in the bushes

This is my dog after she discovered she could pick her own blackberries. Too bad blackberry season isn't year round because she sure expects it to come back every day.

I wish. Berry season is the best. I love European blueberries (bilberries).
- I absolutely love the natives huckleberries we have here in the US Pacific Northwest. They're also related to blueberries but have some tartness to them.

This is seen in human society, and is called a Cargo cult

I once had a program fail to compile, but when I compiled it a second time it worked. No idea why, best guess is some kind of caching or dependency issue that got resolved by restating the compiler.

Now every time a program fails to compile and it's not immediately obvious what the problem is, I instinctively compile it again just in case. Well more like three or four times.

I might just be a dog though.

It is a well defined psychological principle called Pavlovian response.

Probably closer to intermittent reward than Pavlovian conditioning! But yeah, definitely already "well defined" by psychology haha
- I would suggest that the stimulus was strong enough to condition after one trial, due to the repeat behavior.

There is a part of the dog training book "Total Recall" by Pippa Mattinson that refers to this.

Pie-in-a-bush is her way of explaining the Jackpot reward training method.

Very surreal to see it realised so.

My dog once found a biscuit* in a bush near our home, from that day onwards he always checked the bush for a biscuit, there never was another one, the bush became known as "The Biscuit Bush"

Cookie if your American 🍪

What type of biscuit was it?
- Bush biscuit

And what if he found a new species of bush that grows pie huh?

Used to find porn mags in bushes back in my day. They were magic pie bush bushes I tell ya

My parents were big hippie environmentalists back in the '70s and they were always so proud of their son (me) for volunteering at the local recycling center every Saturday. Fortunately they never found out that I did it for the porn. I had like four or five copies of every porn magazine published in that decade.
When the Munich public transport introduced new trains around 20 years ago some of them had porn images stuck to the inside of legs of some of the benches. You can be sure that teenage boys find them.
The numbers quickly dwindled but it took the company years until they had them all removed.
I found them in local bushland (Australia) in the late 80s

I presume they were hidden by older boys who didn't dare take them home where a parent may find them

I also didn't dare keep them at home long, that book of bush went back into the bush

This isn't even remotely close to being a meme.

I agree but I think we're a minority at this point.
Most memes on Lemmy seem not to be. I've given up complaining about it, aside from right now.
- People just dump any garbage because moderators are either non-existent or don't care, and the bulk of the community mindlessly upvote literally any crap that gets posted here.
  
  Meanwhile other communities lack content that these posts would be a proper fit for, and the same people supporting garbage posts here use that lack of activity in other communities as an excuse to continue the garbage posts here.

There's a Norwegian prog rock band called Magic Pie, I haven't seen their bush yet though

Nothing like some prog rock and bush.

Found money in Vietnam once, and was forever looking at every piece of trash on the sides of roads thereafter.

The owner should put treats in that bush for Dusty to find.