Skinner’s box: what is it and how it influenced psychology?

Let's see what an operant conditioning chamber, or Skinner's box, consists of.

Burrhus Frederick Skinner is undoubtedly one of the great psychologists of the 20th century. His contributions to the science of the mind have given rise to powerful therapeutic techniques such as token economy and aversion therapy.

His main contribution, the findings of operant conditioning, could not have been realized without his well-known Skinner's boxa contraption he used to further study this phenomenon with pigeons and extrapolate it to humans.

Below we will see how this curious box worked, as well as understand some of the main behavioral phenomena that can be studied with it and understand the controversy with another Skinner's invention.

What is a Skinner box?

Burrhus Frederick Skinner is, without a doubt, one of the most important referents of the behaviorist psychology of the 20th century, together with John B. Watson.along with John B. Watson. Skinner contributed to the science of behavior by creating a sophisticated device that allowed him to study animal behavior in greater depth, experimenting in particular with pigeons. From these experiments he was able to describe and draw conclusions about an interesting behavioral process: operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning is a process in which control is exerted over the behavior of a pigeon. control is exercised over the behavior of an organism by controlling the variables and the environment in which it finds itself, especially by applyingespecially through the application of reinforcers. Reinforcers consist of events that follow a certain behavior performed by the organism, and which in turn alter the probability of that behavior occurring, either by increasing or reducing it.

This definition of operant conditioning is somewhat difficult to understand, so let's give an everyday example. Let's imagine that we have a small child who, every time he wants a candy, goes to his mother and pulls up the bottom of his pants. The mother gives him the candy, making the child associate pulling up his pants with receiving a reward. In this way, the child learns that if he wants a candy he will have to pull his mother's pants, making him repeat this behavior more and more, seeing that he has been successful.

The experiment

To carry out the scientific study of operant conditioning, Skinner made his well-known box. His objective was to measure how animals reinforced or did not reinforce their behavior in relation to the consequences of their actions..

Skinner put a pigeon in his box, which had enough space to be able to freely browse inside the contraption. In the box there was a small disk that, if the bird pecked at it, it would get some small food pellets.

The animal did not discover the disk at first, but first pecked randomly all over the box until, at some point, it pecked at the disk and then got the reward. It was only a matter of time before the bird repeatedly pecked at that disk, seeing that it was getting food and learning that if it did so, it would get a reward..

To ensure that the pigeons would repeatedly peck at the disk, Skinner kept the birds at three-quarters of their weight and thus kept them hungry. This way the pigeons would always want more food. In a matter of very few minutes the animals adapted to the functioning of the box, repeatedly pecking at the disk and expecting to receive a treat each time they did so.

Throughout the experiment Skinner recorded the total number of times the pigeons pecked the disk, comparing them on graphs. While the original intention was for the pigeon to learn that pecking would lead to food, Skinner went a bit further, making it so that not every peck was always rewarded. Sometimes he would only reward every 10 pecks, and other times once a minute. He wanted to see how changing the way the reward was obtained changed the behavior as well..

The goal of these variations by Skinner was to study the different behaviors of the pigeon. The most striking thing is that the researcher extrapolated the results to human behavior and, in particular, with gambling addiction.

Skinner and pathological gambling

From his experiments with pigeons and operant conditioning Skinner extracted very useful conclusions for psychology, but the most striking of all was that extrapolated his findings with birds to people, specifically those who were victims of pathological gambling.. In the same way that he had gotten pigeons to associate that pecking at a puck would get them food, pathological gamblers associated pulling a lever with winning money sooner or later.

The way casinos and gambling halls produce gambling addictions is very similar to how behavioral reinforcement programs work in operant conditioning experiments. The person bets his money in an environment where he believes he will receive a reward, either because he thinks he has a strategy and controls the situation or because there is actually some kind of regularity behind the slot machines or roulette wheel, which that a prize is received every X number of attempts.

Basically, Skinner's box had served its inventor to induce a kind of controlled pathological gambling in pigeons. It is thanks to this that Skinner was critical of the theories of his time proposed to explain pathological gambling, such as the idea that gamblers were so because they wanted to punish themselves or because they felt a lot of emotions when they gambled. What really happened was that gambling was a reinforcement program that induced a psychological disorder.

The baby in a box

Given the well-known fame of Skinner's box it is inevitable to talk about another of his inventions that, far from being something harmful, ended up gaining the fame of being a version of the famous box only used with human children. It was really no such thing, but the rumors were very acidic at the time and the fame of behavioral experimenter turned what could have been a great invention into a "diabolical" experiment.

After having his first child Skinner realized that raising a child was truly exhausting. Upon learning that his wife was pregnant again, Skinner decided to design a cradle that would make childbirth easier. Skinner decided to design a cradle that would make child care easier and take some of the burden off the parents.. Thus, with the birth of little Deborah in 1944, a revolutionary device in baby care was born, a truly automated cradle.

It was a box measuring about two meters high and one meter wide. The walls were insulated to prevent noise from the outside. The baby was placed on an inner mattress one meter above the floor, and could see outside through a glass pane that was raised and lowered. Inside, the box had a humidifier, heating and an air filter, the box had a humidifier, heating and an air filter that circulated warm, cool air inside the crib.. Rollers made it possible to change the dirty fabric of the mattress into clean fabric without having to open the crib.

As the interior was air-conditioned, the baby could be in diapers, so all the parents had to do was to be aware of whether he or she had done his or her business or needed to be fed or cuddled. Because it was an enclosed space, there was no risk of the baby escaping or hurting himself by getting out of the crib, and because it was an insulated environment, germs were prevented from entering.

Definitely, Skinner's invention was a futuristic cradle.very advanced for the time (even for today!). Skinner was truly delighted with this groundbreaking invention. No one in the 1940s would have imagined such a technology, which would surely have competed with television and the computer as one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Skinner's background and an inaccurate title in the magazine where he promoted it turned this invention into a kind of human experimentation apparatus.

Skinner presented this cradle in the magazine "Ladies Home Journal", focused on improving the lives of women.focused on improving the lives of housewives by introducing them to new household cleaning products. Originally, the title of the article in which he presented his new invention was to be "Baby care can be Modernized" and it was to be nothing more than an informative article on the benefits of the new device invented by the prestigious behavioral psychologist Skinner, already very famous in the 1940s.

However, the magazine's editors did not consider the title to be very appealing, so they decided to change it to "Baby in a Box", a seemingly unintentional modification that would cause a huge controversy. To top it all off, the magazine put a photo of little Deborah using the device that, far from looking like she was taking care of her, looked like she had her locked up to see if she would press a lever to receive food.

The title, the unfortunate photograph, and Skinner's experimental fame led society to firmly believe that this psychologist experimented on children.. People thought he had tired of using pigeons and rats and now preferred the moldable infants for all sorts of experiments that toed the line of ethics. World War II was on its last legs, and it was no longer a secret what Nazi scientists had done with humans, so the fear of human experimentation was on everyone's lips.

Skinner denied everything and tried to see if he could get his invention the good reputation he wanted, but his attempts were unsuccessful. He did get some support so that he could market his revolutionary cradle, but but the rejection of the society was so great that, in the end, it was discarded.. The rumors were so strong that, as an adult, Deborah herself had to defend her father by saying that he had never experimented on her as if she had been a pigeon in one of his boxes.

Other behavioral phenomena and Skinner's box

Other interesting behavioral phenomena can be observed with the Skinner box.

1. Generalization

Let us take the case that the Skinner box instead of having one disk has three, of different colors. For example, there is a red, a green and a blue disk. If the pigeon pecks at any disk to obtain food, we speak of generalization.. That is, as it has associated pecking a disk with food, it pecks indistinctly one of the three to obtain more food.

2. Discrimination

Discrimination would consist of the pigeon learning that only one of these three discs is the one that will give it food as a reward. For example, if it pecks at the green disc it will get food, but if it pecks at the red and blue discs it will not.. In this way the pigeon learns to discriminate between the disks according to their color, associating the green color with food and the other two with getting nothing in return.

3. Extinction

Extinction would consist of eliminating a certain behavior by eliminating its reinforcement. Now, if the pigeon pecks at a disk and, after several attempts, sees that it gets nothing, it stops its pecking response.. Now it considers that by pecking the disk it will not receive any more reward, that it is finished.

4. Molding

B. F. Skinner also investigated shaping, a process through which behaviors that approximate the target behavior are reinforced. Since the desired behavior cannot always be achieved on the first attempt, it is necessary to condition the behavior so that, little by little, the animal's behavior gradually becomes more similar to the behavior we want it to learn.

5. Therapy

Skinner's findings were extrapolated to psychological therapy.. The best known methods derived from operant conditioning are token economy and aversion therapy.

In order to apply operant conditioning in therapy, it is necessary to analyze the reinforcers and stimuli that lead a person to engage in a particular behavior, whether it is adaptive or maladaptive. By modifying the stimuli and reinforcers, the patient's behaviors can be changed.

Bibliographical references:

• Skinner, B. F. (1975). La conducta de los organismos. Barcelona: Fontanella.
• Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. The science of human behavior is used to eliminate poverty, sexual expression, government as we know it, create a lifestyle without that such as war.
• Skinner, B. F. (1966). Contingencies of Reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan