Later, at the trial, Mr. Summers asserted that he had established the Precious Metals as an experiment, because he’d seen that a system of ranks and privileges gave him a means for gaining the undivided attention of boys who, when they sat in his science classroom, often stared out the windows for long periods of time and paid no attention to him at all. He had, he claimed, developed a theory that he could, by using a hierarchy like that of the Tars as a system of rewards and punishments, accomplish something that he had begun to despair of ever accomplishing inside his science classroom: actually teaching something that the children in his charge would remember. To test it on a small scale, he had chosen a group of Tars by weight and set out to teach them humility. He had, he said, tried to explain his theory and methods to some of the other teachers, but they had pooh-poohed it.
Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
An important process in human behaviour is attributed, none too accurately, to ‘reward and punishment.’ Thorndike described it in his Law of Effect. It is now commonly referred to as ‘operant conditioning’—not to be confused with the conditioned reflexes of Pavlov. The essentials may be seen in a typical experimental arrangement. Figure 1, plate 50, shows a hungry rat in an experimental space which contains a food dispenser. A horizontal bar at the end of a lever projects from one wall. Depression of the lever operates a switch. When the switch is connected with the food dispenser, any behaviour on the part of the rat which depresses the lever is, as we say, ‘reinforced with food.’ The apparatus simply makes the appearance of food contingent upon the occurrence of an arbitrary bit of behaviour. Under such circumstances the probability that a response to the lever will occur again is increased (Skinner 1938).
The basic contingency between an act and its consequences has been studied over a fairly wide range of species. Pigeons have been reinforced for pecking at transilluminated disks . . ., monkeys for operating toggle switches which were first designed for that more advanced primate, man, and so on. Reinforcers which have been studied include water, sexual contact, the opportunity to act aggressively, and—with human subjects—approval of one's fellow men and the universal generalized reinforcer, money. The relation between a response and its consequences may be simple, and the change in probability of the response is not surprising. It may therefore appear that research of this sort is simply proving the obvious. A critic has recently said that King Solomon must have known all about operant conditioning because he used rewards and punishment. In the same sense his archers must have known all about Hooke’s Law because they used bows and arrows. What is technologically useful in operant conditioning is our increasing knowledge of the extraordinarily subtle and complex properties of behaviour which may be traced to subtle and complex features of the contingencies of reinforcement which prevail in the environment.
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