Things usually get interesting when I come across one concept or example being explored in separate books. The fun comes in trying to put them together.In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and Derren Brown's Tricks Of The Mind, both authors make a reference to Skinner's pigeons to serve as a cautionary reminder that humans are just as prone as birds in developing superstitions because our mental circuitry has evolved to draw causal inferences, even where none exists.
A little word about Skinner's pigeons first: In 1948, the Harvard psychologist, B.F. Skinner, conducted an experiment involving famished pigeons in a box. Food was dropped into the box for the starving birds at intervals over a period of time. It was observed that the birds started to develop elaborate rituals (such as head-twirling and beak-pecking) as if believing that their actions had some sort of connection to the appearance of food.
Of course, from the perspective of humans, their bird-brain inspired actions were independent of the food being dropped into the box by the observing researchers.
But humans should wipe that smirk off their faces.
Skinner's experiment was insightful because it illustrated the way gamblers (of the human variety) also tend to develop tics and rituals as well: The belief that by performing a ritualistic jiggle or being in possession of a "lucky" charm will help improve the outcome of winning, gamblers are acting in a similar fashion as pigeons.
Both species assume causal connections between doing one thing that is completely unrelated to another. Worse, they keep doing it with faith unshaken.
Yes, Skinner's experiment and conclusion was mind-boggling, and that was fair and good. And we were all the better for it because we learnt something insightful (about birds and ourselves).
But faulty human reasoning does not only afflict gamblers. That faultiness is democratic in such a way that it also affects academic thinking and the discipline of behaviorism itself!
And here is where The Undercover Philosopher by Michael Philips provides a cautionary reminder against a cautionary reminder, which is to avoid swallowing wholesale the central assumption of theories such as behaviorism.
According to Philips, behaviorism suffered as a discipline because it was willfully ignorant of contravening evidence from other fields (i.e. those that showed that behavioral outcomes were not solely determined by the stimuli of rewards and punishment) and was too narrowly focused on behaviour, which it had assumed beforehand to be produced by stimuli (reward and punishment).
This basic idea of humans responding solely to stimuli is easily shown to be faulty if you consider how people make up their minds.
Public opinion and consumer choice are constantly being shaped by images and association put forth by advertisers (e.g. sexually suggestive tag lines come to mind). Brain chemistry, altered by drugs and alcohol, can influence a person's judgement and perception (i.e. every girl in a smoky club with dim lights suddenly becomes attractive).
People tend to do all kinds of crazy stuff not only because they are motivated or accustomed to a process of reward or punishment. People are suggestible in other subtle and discreet ways and it is often impossible to tell what is going on inside the "black box" that is the brain.
The bottom line is: People do not make all choices in life just because they have been conditioned to see outcomes as rewards or punishments.
And the other bottom line is: Humans are not pigeons, that's for sure. But we tend to display traits that make us appear as more sophisticated pigeons.
We can be so blind to our blindness (like behaviorism is of itself) but at the same time penetrating elsewhere (finding out that birds and humans display behaviour suspiciously resembling superstition).
Ironic.
Read more about psychology
from the perspective of a mentalist:
from the perspective of a mentalist:
