Skinner's box: what it is and how it influenced Psychology

Burrhus Frederick Skinner is, without a doubt, one of the great psychologists of the 20th century. His contributions to the science of the mind have led to powerful therapeutic techniques such as token economics and aversion therapy.

His main contribution, the findings of operant conditioning, could not have been made without his well-known skinner box, a contraption he used to further study this phenomenon with pigeons and extrapolate it to humans.

Next we will see how this curious box worked, in addition to understanding some of the main behavioral phenomena that can be studied with it and understand the controversy that occurred with another invention as well by Skinner.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

What is a Skinner box?

Burrhus Frederick Skinner is, without a doubt, one of the greatest references in behaviorist psychology of the 20th century, along with the figure of John B. Watson. Skinner contributed to behavioral science by creating a sophisticated contraption that allowed him to further study animal behavior, specifically experimenting with pigeons. From these experiments he was able to describe and draw conclusions from an interesting behavioral process: operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning is a process in which control is exercised over the behavior of an organism by controlling the variables and the environment in which it is found, especially through the application of reinforcements. Reinforcements consist of events that follow a certain behavior carried out by the organism, and that alter, in turn, the probability of that behavior occurring, either by increasing it or reducing it.

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

The experiment

To carry out the scientific study of operant conditioning, Skinner manufactured his well-known box. It had the objective of measuring how the animals reinforced their behavior or not, in relation to the consequences of their actions.

Skinner put a pigeon in his box, which had enough space to be able to browse freely inside the contraption. In the box there was a small disk that, in case the bird pecked it, it would obtain small balls of food.

The animal did not discover the disc the first time, but first it was randomly pecking the entire box until, at some point, it bit that disc and then it obtained the reward. It was a matter of time before the bird pecked repeatedly at that disk, seeing that he received food and learning that if he did, he would have a reward.

To ensure that the pigeons would peck at the puck several times, Skinner kept the birds at three-quarters of their weight, thereby keeping them hungry. In this way the pigeons would always want more food. In a matter of very few minutes, the animals adapted to the operation of the box, repeatedly pecking at the disc and hoping to receive a prize each time they did so.

Throughout the experiment Skinner recorded the total number of times the pigeons pecked at the puck, comparing them in graphs. While the original intention was for the pigeon to learn that pecking would get food, Skinner went a bit further, making sure that not all pecks were always rewarded. He sometimes only rewarded every 10 pecks, and other times once a minute. He wanted to see how changing the way the reward was obtained also changed behavior.

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

Skinner and pathological gambling

From his experiments with pigeons and operant conditioning Skinner drew very useful conclusions for psychology, but the most striking thing about all this was that extrapolated his findings with birds to people, specifically those who were victims of pathological gambling. In the same way that he had managed to make the pigeons associate that pecking a disk would receive food, pathological gamblers associated pulling a lever with making money late or early.

The way that 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 control the situation or because really behind the slot machines or roulette there is some kind of regularity, what causes a prize to be received every X attempts.

Basically, Skinner's box had served its inventor by inducing 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, as they were. the idea that people were gambling because they wanted to punish themselves or because they felt a lot of emotions when they gambled. What really happened was that the game was a reinforcement program that induced a psychological disorder.

• You may be interested in: "The theory of B. F. Skinner and behaviorism "

The baby in a box

Given the well-known fame of Skinner's box, it is inevitable to speak of another of his inventions that, far from being something harmful, it ended up gaining the fame of being a version of the famous box only used with human children. It was not really such a thing, but the rumors were very acid in his time and the fame of experimenter behavior turned what could have been a great invention into a "diabolical" experiment.

After having her first child, Skinner realized that raising a child was really exhausting. Upon learning that his wife was pregnant again, Skinner He decided to design a crib that would facilitate the care of the little ones and take a bit of the burden off the parents. In this way, with the birth of little Deborah in 1944, a revolutionary device for the care of babies would also be born, a true automated crib.

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

Being the heated interior, the baby could go in diapers, with which the only thing they had to do The parents were to be aware of whether she had relieved herself or if she needed food or pampering. Thanks to the fact that it was a closed compartment, there was no risk of the baby escaping or getting hurt by getting out of the crib, in addition to the fact that it was an isolated environment, the entry of germs was avoided.

Definitely, Skinner's invention was a futuristic crib, very advanced for the time (even today!). Skinner was truly happy with this groundbreaking invention. No one in the 1940s would have imagined such 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 a somewhat accurate title in the magazine where he promoted it made this invention a kind of human experimentation device.

Skinner featured this crib in the "Ladies Home Journal", focused on improving the lives of housewives by introducing them to new household cleaning products. Originally, the title of the article in which she presented her new invention was going to be “Baby care can be Modernized” and it was not going 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 decade of the Fourty.

However, of the magazine edition he did not consider that title to be very striking, so he decided to change it to "Baby in a Box" (Baby in a box), an apparently modification that, without wanting it or drinking it, would cause a huge controversy. To make matters worse, the magazine put a photo of little Deborah using the device that, far from looking like she was taking care of her, she seemed like she had her locked up to see if she pressed any lever to receive food.

Skinner's title, unfortunate photography, and experimental fame made society firmly believe that this psychologist experimented with children.. People thought that he had grown tired of using pigeons and rats and now preferred moldable babies to do all kinds of experiments on them that touched the line of ethics. The Second World War was in its final stages, and it was no longer a secret what Nazi scientists had done with humans, with which the fear of human experimentation was on everyone's lips.

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

Other behavioral phenomena and Skinner's box

Other interesting behavioral phenomena can be observed with Skinner's box.

1. Generalization

Let's take the case that Skinner's box instead of having one disc had three, of different colors. For example, there is a red disk, a green disk, and a blue disk. If the pigeon pecks any disk to obtain food, we speak of generalization. That is, since you have associated pecking a disk with food, you indistinctly peck at one of the three to get more food.

2. Discrimination

The discrimination would consist of the pigeon learning that only one of those three discs is the one that is going to give it food as a reward. For example, if you peck at the green disc you will get food, but if you peck at the red and blue you will not. In this way the pigeon learns to discriminate between the discs according to their color, associating the green color with food and the other two with not receiving anything 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, for several attempts, sees that it gets nothing, it stops giving its pecking response. He now considers that by pecking the disc he will not receive any more reward, that it is over.

4. Molding

B. F. Skinner also investigated shaping, the process through which behaviors that approximate the target behavior are reinforced. Because the behavior sought cannot always be achieved on the first attempt, it is necessary to condition the behavior to achieve that, little by little, the behavior of the animal becomes more similar to the behavior that we are interested in learning.

• You may be interested in: "Molding or method of successive approximations: uses and characteristics"

5. Therapy

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

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

Bibliographic references:

• Skinner, B. F. (1975). The behavior of organisms. 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