Nowadays BF Skinner’s Behaviorism is only a little bit less suspect than Freud’s armchair secondary creation, his fictive ‘science of the mind.’ My friends with related degrees excoriate Skinner, and a little research uncovered that this near universal slam-dunk discarding of behaviorism stems from a paper by Noam Chomsky, a review, rather, of Skinner’s text Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In short, Behaviorism doesn’t explain behaviors like Nelson Mandela’s. Fuck Behaviorism.
That said, let’s look at this idea:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extinction-2795176
In operant conditioning, extinction occurs when a response is no longer reinforced following a discriminative stimulus. B. F. Skinner described how he first observed this phenomenon:
“My first extinction curve showed up by accident. A rat was pressing the lever in an experiment on satiation when the pellet dispenser jammed. I was not there at the time, and when I returned I found a beautiful curve. The rat had gone on pressing although no pellets were received…
The change was more orderly than the extinction of a salivary reflex in Pavlov’s setting, and I was terribly excited. It was a Friday afternoon and there was no one in the laboratory who I could tell. All that weekend I crossed streets with particular care and avoided all unnecessary risks to protect my discovery from loss through my accidental death.”
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This is fun quote, as it reveals Skinner’s deep, deep weirdness along with this pretty cool idea.
The problem with Behaviorism, in a nutshell, is something that a psychiatrist who worked with trans kids and their families said to me in an elevator in the 90s– thinking of people as being just like animals is often a really really bad idea.
Behaviorism of course, is everywhere in human culture. It’s the foundation of capitalism, among other things, that people will rationally compete in the market for more food pellets of various sorts.
And there are plenty of books out there that claim to show that you can use animal training models on people.
Bottom line, of course, being that animal training works. It’s a fucking science.
So, when we dive into this behavior, this internal theater, are we, humans, am I, best understood as that rat banging that button waiting for my food pellet?
Who will eventually give up on the behavior when I don’t get the food?
As I watch my hits on this blog drop off almost immediately to zero in a single day of not posting, I do feel, I think, social media’s allure fading. Without a Feed algorithm to guide me, reinforce me, titillate me, do I do this thing I am doing here less, do I do it the right amount?
Does this blog’s extinction curve help heal my social media, behavior?
Again, I am not begging you not to read or comment here. Do what you want. See, what I want to know is, what if social media was just people doing what they want, without it being meddled with by toxic billionaires?
What would that look like?
That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what I want to see in action.
I wasn’t aware of Chomsky v. Skinner, but I’m not surprised. I went looking for Chomsky’s paper but couldn’t find it online. I did find https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2223151/ , which indicates that Chomsky’s devastating review was not of _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ but _Verbal Behavior_ (1957), a less popular book that came much earlier.
By the way, according to the article above, Chomsky thinks behavioristic training doesn’t work well even for non-human animals because of “instinctual drift”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinctive_drift
and it turns out that it wasn’t Chomsky, but former disciples of Skinners who became animal trainers who observed this; the raccoons who when trained to drop coins into piggy banks, dipped them into the slot, took them out, and made washing movements; the training would get to them this programmed behavior.
Yes, Chomsky is a linguist, not an animal behaviorist.
The article is wonderful as it describes these people leaving Skinner, and science, going into the private sector as animal trainers and saying, oh, here’s a thing that seems to mess up your entire thing, which we figured out by trying to teach raccoons to put coins in a bank on stage. That’s hysterical.