Operant conditioning a white rat

By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk


ARE WE ALL NO MORE THAN PUPPETS?

The ability to control thought and behaviour depends upon power




About two decades ago I was walking in Kensington Gardens and spotted a black man with a dog. It was not at that time usual to see a black person there and a black man with a dog was unique to my experience in that park. I stopped to watch.

There is an open space on the east side of the Round Pond and there the man put his small dog through his paces. The canine creature was in top condition physically and well trained.

This helps to put the lie to the accusation that people of colour get on less well with the animals than “whites.” The dog was enthusiastic and bubbling with eagerness to please. It fetched and carried and frisked around its owner in a manner wonderful to behold.

That was a dog. What makes me write this article is that there are many individuals who are educated and intelligent and who think that humans should be treated – the technical word is conditioned – in much the same way as that dog.

This is part of learning theory in psychology which is a fairly controlled speciality insofar that the dangerous and deep methods of controlling thinking and behaviour are restricted to selected groups.

The morality of having a conditioned society was discussed in the famous book Beyond Freedom and Dignity by Professor BF Skinner, the former head of psychology at Harvard and a champion of the behaviourist school of psychology which advocated that humans as well as animals are not much more than giant telephone switchboards needing to be connected up.

As South Asians this topic is of more import than for others because (it seems to me) we get conditioned more than most and the third world is the happy hunting ground of Western control freaks, many of whom make careers of studying our good selves and our funny ways.

Just in case any of our readers need to be reminded, conditioning did not begin with Pavlov and his team of assistants in Russia. It is as old as mankind itself and extends to the animal kingdom. The dog baring its fangs at a rival is warning of the bite to come should closer approach be made. The Romans, when they crucified criminals publicly, were making examples of the victims to warn of the possible or probable consequences of disrespecting the government or whatever they were being put to death for.

In South Asia the ancient rulers used conditioning. Traitors were killed in public by being ceremonially trampled upon by elephants. That warned others who might be inclined to plot against the maharajah (or whoever) that horrible things might follow anti-state treachery.

The mind of Western man is essentially scientific and methodical and has an instinctive revulsion against implicit understandings and will not tolerate for long the “just do it by the seat of your pants” lifestyle school. This kind of man seeks, if possible, to reduce everything possible to measurable elements and to bring as much as possible into the laboratory. It is even so in the case of conditioning, with them.

The first thing which non-psychologists have to understand is that there are two kinds of conditioning, namely classical and operant and that the former was made explicit first.

The first kind, the classical, is associated with Ivan Pavlov, now famously remembered for his experiments in training dogs to salivate to bells and other stimuli. What this amounts to is that, based on activities controlled by the experimenter, the dog can be educated to link something which was previously not to do with food, in the dog’s mind, to food.

The model is a bit like this: S ----R
Where S is the stimulus and R is the response.

It can be detailed more as: US ----UR

Where US is the unconditioned stimulus (food) and UR is the unconditioned response (eating it).

The final position at the end of the experiment is: CS ---- CR ---- US ----UR
This amounts to: CS (bell) leading to CR (salivating) leading to US (food) leading to UR (eating). CS and CR are the conditioned stimulus and conditioned response respectively.

The experiments were incredibly detailed and a special building had to be constructed to accommodate them. The finance initially came from a socially minded businessman pre-revolutionarily and from the Soviet government after 1917.

The story of Pavlov’s findings is summarised in his 1927 book Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.

There are many deep lessons to be learnt from Pavlov and his life’s work. One of them is that conditioning only works in forward gear, as it were. In other words, if the bell (or whatever) precedes the food then by and by the bell gets to become a conditioned stimulus.

However, if the bell comes after the food then no matter how many times the food-bell pairing takes place the conditioning of the bell occurs not at all.

The moral is that if you want someone to associate being nice to you with pleasant consequences make sure you reward him after he has been nice to you and not before in hopes of improved behaviour towards you good self.

About three decades after 1917 a new kind of conditioning was discovered in the USA and Professor BF Skinner rapidly became its most famous champion, initially buttressed by the populariser of behaviourism - JB Watson.

The same diagrams as above apply but this time the onward flow of events are controlled by the “subject,” as the term for whoever or whatever gets conditioned is known. In other words the person or animal being experimented upon decides what happens and what the results will be within the constraints of the experimental conditions.

The best known of the examples is the Skinner pigeon in the Skinner box. Basically, one starts with a pigeon wandering about inside a box in a state of hunger. He gets hungrier and hungrier and finally gets frantic.

Eventually he does random behaviours inside the box in vain attempts to save its life. Purely by chance it presses a lever as a result of which a pellet of food emerges. The pigeon gradually learns to press the lever for food.

It goes: CS ----CR ----US --UR, where CS (the lever) leads to CR (pressing it) leading to US (the pellet) leading to UR (eating the pellet).

I am not doing justice to this vast and important subject. There is a great deal more to state but there is not room here. The training of animals like the man’s dog in the park is just the iceberg’s tip, as it were.

What concerns me is that many of the good and the great of the world, those persons who hold the fates of billions in the palms of their hands, use methods such as these to “condition” the thousands of millions of third world inhabitants to obey and to behave by administering rewards and punishments.

In other words, doing what some Western power or other wants leads to some kind of reward such as a promotion in the workplace or a job if one was previously without one.

The point I am anxious to make is that all this depends exclusively upon power and wealth, specifically, the possession thereof. If Ivan Pavlov did not have food he could not have reward conditioned his dogs. If Skinner did not have pellets of bird food he could not have conditioned his pigeons.

In the case of punishment conditioning, if the experimenter does not have access to electricity he cannot shock a disobedient experimental animal until it obeys. If powerful Western powers did not have military and economic power they could not get us to do anything other than by appealing to our good natures.

The second important point I would like to bring up is that this kind of push-pull conditioning is arguably inversely proportional in effectiveness to the complexity of the entity getting conditioned. In other words the more primitive the animal’s nervous system or, in the case of humans, the less naturally gifted the subject, the more it, he or she can be manipulated with classical and operant conditioning.

Did you notice that there was a dash between the stimuli and the responses in the outlines above? What do the dashes symbolise? I submit they symbolise the personalities of the subjects being acted upon.

For example, a primitive man with a naturally low IQ and conscience may just go with the flow and do what rewards most and punishes least as matters of high priority. The more highly evolved man with a relatively high IQ and conscience (especially social conscience) brings all sorts of considerations into play such as the long term well being of himself, his family, his friends, his society, his race and, ultimately, humankind and the entire natural world and universe.

Such a person is prepared to make personal sacrifices for higher goods which his less advanced brother cannot grasp, if that is absolutely necessary.

John C Wilson of New York takes an interest in educational matters. He says: “Behaviourism has gone out of fashion. Cognitive psychology is now being used more.”

The moral of all this, I submit, is to evolve such that we are conditionable less and become more agents of free will.



THE END

This article was published in the 10 September 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read everywhere from the Arctic to the sub-Antarctic.