h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So we all know the great joke about the mice - where Slartibartfast explains that:

"the mice did arrange for you humans to conduct some primitively staged experiments on them just to check how much you’d really learned, to give you the odd prod in the right direction, you know the sort of thing: suddenly running down the maze the wrong way; eating the wrong bit of cheese; or suddenly dropping dead of myxomatosis"

This has a parallel in a genuine piece of behavioural research, a paper which is written on the way in which the researchers behaviour is controlled by the reactions of his experimental subjects - that the animals have 'trained' the scientist to come in to work each day and feed and house them, by eliciting a variety of correct or incorrect behaviours. The point being that consciousness, desire or motivation are largely irrelevant to descriptions of behaviour (and the world). A similar argument can be made that grasses, far from being domesticated by man, have them domesticated mankind changing his behaviour to revolve around cultivating, feeding and spreading grass crops around the world, to grasses benefit and our detriment.

Anyway - back to the lab experiment - i'm sure i read this in the works of B.F. Skinner, i think the experimental animals described were pigeons, but they may have been rats. I'm also sure i've seen this perspective of Skinner's referred to on tv in the last 10 year - QI maybe, perhaps one of those Dara O'Brien or Robin Ince sciencey shows.

However, now i want a reference for it i can't find it! Can anyone point me t the paper/book/citation???

I can't help with sourcing, but I can give a humorous anecdote.

My freshman year at Community College, I took a psychology class.
My teacher was rather new. (She was also a former nun and had no knee caps. Those facts are related but not to this story.)

We were up to the chapter on Classic Conditioning and Skinnerial Behaviorism. She asked for a volunteer to demonstrate. Uncharacteristically, I raised my hand and she escorted me out to the hallway and said to just wait here while she preps the class. A couple of minutes later she retrieves me and just tells me to do whatever I'd like when I return to the classroom but don't speak to the class.

OK... So, I walk in and see the entire class staring back. As I proceed through the room they begin smiling, then laughing pleasantly. I go to the far side of the class from the door to the windowed wall and as I proceed along the rows of windows, they begin to applaud, increasing in pitch and furor as I adjust, raise, and lower the first three of four sets of blinds. By the time I reach the final blind, they are at a standing ovation.

I do nothing with the final blind. I proceed back to the front of the class, noting exactly where they go from applause to a "golf clap" to just smiling, to frowning, &c. At some point I bounce back and forth across the line that prompts their first claps and draw a line on the chalkboard indicating that division and never cross it again. I spend the next minute or so on the chalkboard opposite the windows, eliciting various groans and boos until the teacher can't take it anymore and ends the demonstration.

She suggested I never volunteer for any experiments or demonstrations again... ever!

...and how long did it take you to realise they we trying to get you to close the blinds? Was it pretty instantaneous? Did you have to cross the whole of the room to get back to your seat?

I love this experiment. And of course it didn't go wrong - it just showed how we derive rewarding stimuli in differing and unexpected ways according to our prior learning history.

Did they call it Skinnerian Behaviourism back then? (When was back then?) It was originally called (including by Skinner) Radical Behaviourism, but as it's opponents in mystical psychologies railed against it they both conflated Radical and Stimulus/Response behaviourism and painted it as reactionary, conservative, fascist even - and avoided the term Radical (as that appeared progressive, left-wing, cool).

Either way, she sounds a pretty hip nun.

Former nun. She preemptively told her tale as rumors were spreading. She was in the choir at a performance when the risers the choir was standing on collapsed. She fell 30 feet and landed on her knees. The pain and extended rehabilitation she experienced made her question her religion and eventually renounce her vows.


I didn't really figure out that they wanted me to raise (or lower) the last set of blinds myself. I didn't really care. I had forgotten what we were studying at the time so I was just riffing. I was having fun controlling the classes actions rather than realizing they were trying to control mine.

And yes, I assume that we did refer to it as Skinnerian behaviorism as that's how I remember it and I never took another psychology class. This was the Autumn of 1985, my first semester of college.

DNA was only slightly wrong ... its not the mice... its the viruses.... they've remodeleled our DNA, our genetics, our biochemistry, and thereby transported themselves back of fthe plannet, which is, of course, from where they origionally came. - My University supervisor/lecturer/porfessor, really believed this... and... I think I'm with him.... define intelligence.... viruses do so much, with so little, wastage reduced to just the essential parts necessary to forfill their existance... and humans... just wasting their time with 'things' of no import whatsoever to their existance and furthering of, only to further the needs of the viruses

I'm afraid I can't actually help you with the question (but I may be able to look it up), but I do know about one of his experiments - he taught an actual two year old child to be afraid of its mother's fur coat. Apparently, the child's parents withdrew the child from the programme before he could reverse the process.

Simpler times, simpler times.

Science is boring nowdays... I keep coming up with such exciting ideas for my Drs to test on me... and ten they just give me odd looks.... and start muttering about HSE and safety protocols... and....

Gosh, I am having fun with Skinner. But it turns out the fur coat story is not true... about Skinner (it's his forerunner). You do not want to know what they proposed to do to get the kid to like the fur coat again.

Think it's from this: Beyond Freedom and Dignity 1971 (about how to design Utopia) - a quote from the book which I found in Ayn Rand's cross review (including her comment on why she left out a sentence):

"The relation between the controller and the controlled is reciprocal. The scientist in the laboratory, studying the behavior of a pigeon, designs contingencies and observes their effects. His apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, but we must not overlook the control exerted by the pigeon. The behavior of the pigeon has determined the design of the apparatus and the procedures in which it is used. Some such reciprocal control is characteristic of all science. . . . [Here I omit one sentence, which is an unconscionable misuse of a famous statement.] The scientist who designs a cyclotron is under the control of the particles he is studying. The behavior with which a parent controls his child, either aversively or through positive reinforcement, is shaped and maintained by the child's responses. A psychotherapist changes the behavior of his patient in ways which have been shaped and maintained by his success in changing that behavior. A government or religion prescribes and imposes sanctions selected by their effectiveness in controlling citizen or communicant. An employer induces his employees to work industriously and carefully with wage systems determined by their effects on behavior. The classroom practices of the teacher are shaped and maintained by the effects on his students. In a very real sense, then, the slave controls the slave driver, the child the parent, the patient the therapist, the citizen the government, the communicant the priest, the employee the employer, and the student the teacher." (P. 169.)

Rand wasn't impressed by the reciprocity argument (or anything else) - she says 'To this, I shall add just one more example: the victim controls the torturer, because if the victim screams very loudly at a particular method of torture, this is the method the torturer will select to use'.

"I was having fun controlling the classes actions rather than realizing they were trying to control mine. And yes, I assume that we did refer to it as Skinnerian behaviorism as that's how I remember it." [Baron Grim]

My college psychology course [circa 1967] covered a lot of the Skinnerian stuff. They always seemed to be interested in what the majority of experimental subjects did, not the minority that thought for themselves or saw the situation in different terms. Since then, nee schools of thought have developed to deal with outliers. The "black swan" and "long left tail" theorists. Maybe the way forward is determined by the various minorities that want to move things ahead.

Or maybe there is no thought, perhaps there is no way ahead, just response and counter response.

Of course the tortured influence the torturers - by their very presence: if there was no one to torture, they wouldn't be able to BE torturers.

Rand's problem is with the word control - she mistakes it for the word driver - the controls of a car do not drive the car, any more than the driver of a car has any real influence over the controls which drive him. The book is about looking beyond the idea of freedom, beyond dignity; beyond those meanings of control that imply influence, cognitive motivation or self-determination, and look rather at actual behaviour.

I'll have another look at BFF&D.

Problem is, often with a lot of science, scientists, anything outside of the expectted, or norm, is often just discredited as an anomaly or random blah blah..... and not even noted, or considered.... and often even when faced with inadvertable evidence that a resonse is found, that is opposed too, opposite of or just not what the 'response' should be, they... can't process how to even start disecting what is happening. - I do this to my Drs and specialist nurses..... Drug X, works in way y. I take drug X, and rather than getting Y, get a worstening of initital symptoms, and... they sort of say 'how interesting,', and... do nothing quite amusing really watching them not work it out so I guess it can extend beyond psychiology and philosophy and sociology into other areas too

My problem is with giving much attention to Rand . She has an almost cult status in my country -- 8% of Americans polled said they had read at least one of her books -- despite some critical misgivings about the quality of her writing. But what do I know? I'm not one of the 8%.

[Someday I will read "Atlas Shrugged," since I feel some sympathy for the poor guy. Once you step in to take a load off the other guy's shoulders, you're usually stuck with it indefinitely ]

Many conservatives read Rand as gospel.

Rand?

I wonder what percentage of those folks that have only read one book, other than required school reading, have read an Ayn Rand book?

The older ones might have read read Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a conservative," and some of William F Buckley's early writings -- before he started writing detective stories....

Sol's story in #6 is Watson, not Skinner.

What do coats have to do with the spiral helix?

Anything that looks like torturing children in the name of science gets lumbered on Skinner. According to many reports he drove his daughter to depression and suicide - despite her still being alive and well and defending her father's legacy.