Summary
Highlights
The video introduces the concept of pigeons being taught to distinguish between two words and respond appropriately. This behavior is learned through food rewards, demonstrating that the bird's actions are shaped by controlling its environment, not independent thought.
Skinner's methodology involved isolating individual behaviors and observing how they could be changed. Pigeons were kept at reduced weight to ensure hunger, making food an effective and automatic reward. They were placed in a 'Skinner box' where pecking a colored disc was measured.
Pigeons learned that pecking the disc produced a reward. The study focused on how often the reward was offered, referred to as 'schedules of reinforcement'. These schedules, such as reinforcing every tenth time or once a minute, have specific effects on behavior.
A highly effective schedule, the variable ratio schedule, is at the heart of all gambling devices. This schedule can lead both pigeons and humans to become 'pathological gamblers', demonstrating how principles learned from animal experiments can explain complex human behavior without attributing it to internal states like excitement or self-punishment.
The discussion extends to the concept of free will. The behaviorist perspective suggests that what we perceive as internal states or free will to act is actually a result of external causes. By discovering these causes, the need to attribute behavior to an 'imagined internal cause' or 'internal Act of Will' diminishes, as articulated by Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century.