Before my long career as a journalist, I was a teacher for Head Start and a co-op pre-school and kindergarten for three years. It was a wonderful, enriching and rewarding time. But the pay was never enough to raise a family so I left to take a newspaper job. I liked my 48 years of newspaper work, too, but no one warned me all those years ago that journalists don’t get paid very well either. Well, too late now.
Fifty years ago in my classrooms with 3-5 year-olds, every day was full of big discoveries, little emergencies and lots of love. I thought I was a pretty good teacher; I treated all my little students just like rats.
Wait! Please allow me to explain.
I followed the teachings of educator John Dewey who believed in the value of providing a rich variety of experiences and stimulating environments. He emphasized “whole child” approaches and independent learning instead of rote or memorized lesson plans. I also followed the writings and experiments of B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), who is known as the father of “behaviorism.”
Skinner is probably best known as the inventor of the Skinner Box. As a Harvard graduate student in the 1930s, Skinner put rats (and pigeons) in a lab box with a lever and a signal light. Each time the rat moved the lever it would be rewarded with a food pellet. By adding signal light patterns, sometimes chimes and punishments, Skinner reinforced “desired” behaviors. Eventually he could get his rats to perform a desired task even without the food reward.
I didn’t put my students in little boxes or make them nibble at food levers, but I handed out rewards for good behavior and lessons learned. Skinner called this “positive reinforcement.” His critics called it behavioral manipulation.
Today, thinking back on my lesson plans, I find it funny — startling, actually — to look around and see a modern world full of people stuck inside digital versions of Skinner Boxes — all being manipulated just like billions of lab rats. At least my little students got sweet treats, outdoor free time and big hugs from me.
Skinner’s approach has come to be called Reinforcement Learning (RL.) His original theories of radical behaviorism included what he saw as finite limits to human “free will” and autonomy. His experiments of inducing and rewarding behaviors is exactly what you will find in the base formulas of all those algorithms we keep hearing about that drive billions of people to thumb through their social media apps on their smartphones all day, every day.
All those digital “likes” on Facebook, X and Instagram that people clamor for are exactly like the food pellets Skinner fed to his rats. Instead of mechanical levers, today’s social media programmers employ the powers of computers and instantaneous global communication speeds. It’s all a call-and-response reinforcement loop that cries for “more, more, more.” It represents our world’s most widespread addiction.
Skinner got into lots of trouble for arguing that free will is very limited, but look where we are today. What do you have to say, Alexa or Siri?
Rats like their “selfies”
Augustin Lignier, a Paris photographer, was recently featured in a New York Times article (Jan. 23, 2024) for “teaching” rats to take selfies with a camera he set up in his version of a Skinner Box. To start, Lignier would reward the rats in his boxes with food pellets each time they clicked the camera shutter button. But after time, the rats seemed to grow fond of the “selfies” that would appear on a screen and they kept clicking even when they did not get a food treat.
None of us, me first, should be startled by this fact of digital life that our own smart phones and tools now manipulate and control our behaviors, attention spans and opinions. But it still seems too shocking that all this can be explained by putting rats in a box and tricking them. Is this really how Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Bezos and Apple’s Steve Jobs’ heirs all became billionaires?
Haven’t we heard enough about all the adverse consequences of living in our Digital Age by now? We’ve heard how alarming rates of teen-aged girls’ suicides have been blamed on Facebook and other social media platforms’ “engagement practices.” They’ve denied their wrongdoing and have paid millions in court and civil settlements.
We’ve been warned that when a service is offered as ‘free’ and without an obvious commodity, that the product is actually us. We get cheap Internet and they get our identity and deepest secrets. Lots of us claim we can put down our smart phones and unplug whenever we want — but we never do.
Social media has become the main arena for much of human life, rivaling the sunshine and fresh air outside our windows. It is not just about commerce, entertainment or information. The human race’s attachment to social media has become a psychological necessity for billions of us and has become our “virtual” replacement for the analog realm of personal interactions, emotions and self-identity. The unintended consequence is an epidemic of human depression, suicides and violent impulses. (For the record, none of that should be blamed on Skinner’s empirical research and theories. He died before there was a place called Silicon Valley.)
Listen to the experts
“This pattern of social media engagement has been likened to an addiction, in which people are driven to pursue positive online social feedback to the detriment of direct social interaction and even basic needs like eating and sleeping,” wrote Bjorn Lindstrom, a psychologist and author. (See Nature Communications, an on-line open source forum. (
https://www.nature.com
.) The forum’s origins can be traced to Nature magazine, first published in 1869.)
“It is possible that because rewards (‘likes’) are so readily quantifiable compared to offline social rewards (that) some social media users might come to be disappointed by the lack of rewards provided offline,” Lindstrom also wrote.
In other words, he suggests, lots of people “may find themselves preferring to stay inside a cyber Skinner Box.”