A Reaction to Hull, Tolman and Skinner

            Hull, Tolman and Skinner are all animal behaviorists who specialize in animal testing of conditioning.  Skinner discovered something called “superstitions” and Tolman was able to work with “regression”, “fixation” and “displacement of aggression onto outgroups”.  Hull just talked about how animal studies could help determine the causes of certain human behaviors and how we may be able to prevent certain behaviors from developing or progressing.

            “In short, the attainment of a genuinely scientific theory of mammalian behavior offers the promise of development in the understanding and control of human conduct in its immensely varied aspects which will be comparable to the control of human conduct in its immensely varied aspects which will be comparable to the control already achieved over inanimate nature, and of which the modern world is in such dire need.”, this statement explains how Hull felt about learning behaviors in humans through animal studies.  I would have to agree with him as well.  Of course, animals are not human beings and they cannot tell us everything that they are feeling, but by us observing their behaviors towards the experiments we can get a feel as to what they might be feelings or going through.

            “We must subject our children and ourselves to the optimal conditions of moderate motivation and of the absence of unnecessary frustration whenever we put them and ourselves before that great God-given maze which is our human world.”  Tolman had a great point by saying this.  The fact that we need to do our best to not go through repression, fixation and displacement of aggression onto outgroups is vital to making a better society.  If we could only figure out how our brains do this then can we fix it.  At least we have figured out what causes these habits for the most part, so now we just need to discover how to prevent them and stop them.

            Skinner’s article on “’Superstition ‘in the Pigeon” involved him doing various experiments with pigeons, obviously.  They started out just conditioning the pigeons by putting a bowl of food in their cage at various time intervals.  After taking photos every couple of seconds they discovered that some of the pigeons would continuously do a certain thing repetitively, such as, a head bob, a counter clockwise turn, a peck at a corner, a scratch at the bottom of the cage.  Once they saw this Skinner and his colleagues then tried to condition them a different way by waiting to give them their food until after they started doing something else just to see if they would recondition or just to see if the first response would eventually extinct.  Another response they discovered was called “Superstition”.  An example of this is, “The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder. This behavior has no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down the alley.”  This is just a habit that one has created in hopes that it will help even if they know that it truly does not help.  They would be more prone believing it worked if they got a strike nearly every time though.

            Skinner’s article “Walden II” was a dialogue between Frazier, Castle and a few other people here and there.  They were trying to discuss Frazier’s experiment of making the children in his school (?) forget the emotion of jealousy. Frazier thought this an excellent experiment since he did not feel we needed the emotion of jealousy or anger for that matter.  However, Castle did not like this method of trying to make the children learn self-control since it involved them standing in front of a bowl of soup for five minutes or walk around with a lollipop tied around their necks.  Castle did not understand this type of study at all since anger, envy/jealousy, and lack of self-control was natural for young children to have.  Frazier felt that if our society to become a better place it would be better to learn it at a young age and grow with it instead of into it.  Frazier and Tolman would get along great.

These three men seemed to specialize in animal studies or rather preferred them if you would like to see it that way.  Skinner obviously had a friend or two who preferred to work with humans over animals and I am sure these other two gentlemen had friends like that as well.  Whether they worked with children, pigeons or rats their studies seemed to be along the same lines or conditioning; whether it was conditioning that lead to extinction or condition that led to a repetitive habit.