The Reflective Eclectic
What Pigeons Can Teach You About Expectations
A lot of psychological studies are just plain silly. Do we really need experimental data to tell us that power corrupts, or that pain and sickness are depressing, or that people like to hear things that confirm their biases? However, there is one bit of experimental psychology that, when I tell people about it, causes their faces to light up. It informs them of something that ought to be obvious, but isn’t. It can explain how you get caught up in the madness of doing what you have always done despite mostly getting the crappy outcome you’ve always got. What is this result of experimental psychology that has so much explanatory power? We call it the intermittent reinforcement schedule.
It’s easy to train a pigeon to peck at a lever. All you need to do is give it a piece of birdseed whenever they do. It takes just a few times before they get the hang of it. It’s nearly as easy to train a pigeon, once they have learned to peck at a lever, to stop. All you need to do is stop giving them the birdseed. They’ll keep pecking at the lever for a few times, but eventually they’ll learn that no birdseed is forthcoming and they’ll go on to do other things, whatever it is that pigeons do when they’re not pecking at levers.
