Skinner's Law

Operant Conditioning, sometimes called Instrumental Learning or Skinner’s Law, is a term coined by psychologist B.F. Skinner to gesture at a collection of influences that he suspected shaped human behavior.

This concept was based on an earlier idea proposed by another psychologist—Edward Thorndike—who posited that behaviors paired with satisfying consequences, one after the other, would tend to be reinforced (repeated over time), because organisms learn to associate cause with effect, and we're prone to pursuing satisfaction.

Thus, if I push a button and receive a slice of cake, I'll be more likely to push that button in the future.

If I work out and receive a flood of pleasurable endorphins, I'll be more likely to work out again and again, chasing that outcome (and logically assuming that this action will continue to lead to that followup consequence).

The more we do one thing and discover another thing happening, the more likely we'll be to lock-in that association, and also behaviors like button-pushing, exercising, or whatever else is being reinforced through this associative process.

Thorndike called this model the “Law of Effect,” and it seemed to be pretty sturdy, as theories go, though Skinner thought it wasn't resilient enough: he believed “satisfaction” was too fluffy a concept to stand up to real-deal scientific scrutiny, and decided to delve a little deeper into the idea that our associating causes with effects might somehow influence our behaviors and habits.

He built an “operant conditioning chamber,” which is more casually called a “Skinner box,” and the idea was that animals put inside this box could be exposed to positive and negative stimuli, and researchers could then reliably connect those stimuli with the test subjects’ resulting behavior.

The most vital metric in such experiments was the rapidity at which these subjects responded to the varied stimuli; so they might provide food when a rat pushed on a lever or jolt them with a mild electric shock when they stepped into a specific corner of the box, and then over time, they would measure how quickly the subjects responded to these sorts of reinforcement variables.

That helped them determine the relative behavior-shaping ability of (for instance) punishments and rewards, but also allowed them to assess how specific such things must be to effectively shape behavior (if an element of randomness was introduced into whether or not food would be delivered when the lever was pressed, would that impact the development of a new behavior? What if a corner of the box only sometimes shocked the subject? What if the size of the jolt was varied?).

The grand theory of operant conditioning remains controversial, in part because it purports to explain significant portions of what we perceive to be our innate nature—how we live, what we choose, why we pursue certain goals in certain ways—but also because, if accurate (or partially accurate) it raises questions about whether we might be able to solve certain psychological and social issues by manipulating people in similar ways—and that can be tricky ground to tread.

If we could reduce the impacts of various addictions, for instance, by tweaking our reward systems (internal and external, chemical and environmental), would that be moral? Should we only do this in cases where people sign up to be reconditioned, or should we build it into our systems and institutions with the understanding that recalibrating some peoples’ influences might, for instance, stifle reflexively violent behavior or reduce their likelihood of developing unhealthful eating habits?

If we did decide this was okay, might we go too far?

And who decides which behaviors are net-positive and net-negative?

Might these sorts of understandings be used to manipulate people toward objectively (or subjectively) negative ends, beyond the marketing and ideological (and gamification-related) utilities to which they're most commonly applied, today?

Lots of good questions, but no policies that would seem to enable positive outcomes without also possibly leading to abuses and oversteps.