August 2022
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 29
At one time we [Ferster and I] intended—though, alas, we changed our minds—to express the point in this dedication: “To the mathematicians, statisticians, and scientific methodologists with whose help this book would never have been written.” (p. 175)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 28
Fortunately, a statistical program is unnecessary. Most of what we know about the effects of complex schedules of reinforcement has been learned in a series of discoveries no one of which could have been proved to the satisfaction of a student in Statistics A. Moreover, a statistical approach is just wrong. The curves we get […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 27
Beyond the prediction and control made possible by recent research in reinforcement lies the broader field of interpretation. And it is a kind of interpretation so closely allied with prediction and control that positive and successful action are frequently within easy reach. (pp. 173-174)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 26
. . . where the analyst has studied behavior in a given environment as the manifestation of hidden (even if eventually-to-be-revealed) forces, we can now interpret the same behavior and environment as a set of reinforcing contingencies. In doing so we gain a tremendous advantage, for all terms necessary for such an analysis lie within […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 24
. . . what reinforcers are available to the teacher? The answer to that question is sometimes discouraging, but even in the worst possible case she can at least reinforce a class by dismissing it. The point is that she must understand that dismissal is reinforcing if she is not to throw away the small […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 21
When two young children are left alone in a room with a few toys, conditions are almost ideal for shaping selfish and aggressive behavior. Under these circumstances one child’s reinforcement is the other child’s punishment, and vice versa. (p. 171)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 20
The parallel between the contingencies now being studied in the laboratory and those of daily life cry for attention—and for remedial action. In any social situation we must discover who is reinforcing whom with what and to what effect. (p. 171)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 17
The technology [of behavior] is difficult. It cannot conveniently be learned from books; something resembling an apprenticeship is almost necessary. Possibly we may explain the fact that psychologists in general have only slowly accepted these new methods by noting that under such conditions knowledge is diffused slowly. (pp. 170-171)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 16
The technology resulting from the study of reinforcement has been extended into other fields of psychological inquiry. It has permitted Blough, Guttman, and others to convert pigeons into sensitive psychophysical observers. It has allowed pharmacologists and psychologists in pharmacological laboratories to construct behavioral baselines against which the effects of drugs on the so-called higher mental […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 15
The analysis of avoidance and escape behavior in the hands of Sidman, Brady, and others has made it possible to study combinations of positive and negative reinforcers in many interrelated patterns. The analysis of punishment in such terms has permitted a reformulation of the so-called Freudian dynamisms. (p. 170)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 14
What we have learned about the shaping of response-topography and about the techniques which bring an organism under the control of complex schedules has made it possible to study the behavior generated by arrangements of responses, stimuli, and reinforcements once classified as the “higher mental processes.” (p. 170)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 13
As the result of careful scheduling, pigeons, rats, and monkeys have done things during the past five years which members of their species have never done before. It is not that their forebears were incapable of such behavior; nature had simply never arranged effective sequences of schedules. (p. 170)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 12
In the usual study of problem solving, . . . the experimenter constructs a complex set of contingencies and simply waits for it to take hold. This is no test of whether the organism can adjust to these contingencies with a performance which would be called a solution. All we can properly conclude is that […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 11
The fact that it is the combination of schedule and performance which generates reinforcing contingencies can easily be overlooked. A physiologist once asked to borrow one of our apparatuses to show his class the behavioral effects of certain drugs . . . When one [pretrained] pigeon died through an overdose of a drug, the physiologist […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 11: Reinforcement Today. Quote 8
When one has watched the actual shaping of behavior, it is obvious that such [traditional learning] curves do not reflect any important property of the change in behavior brought about by operant reinforcement . . . Yet the prestige of the learning curve is so great that psychologists are unable to believe their eyes when […]