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| quote: | Originally posted by josh4
lol thats funny but while superstitions is a clever analogy to the meaning of the word it suggests the birds possess the level of intelligence to "believe" something like that. they don't. its all chemicals and stuff |
Not exactly. Skinner was clever in that he titled this 1948 article that appeared in The Journal of Experiemntal Psychology 'Superstition' in the Pigeon. he purposely put the word superstition in quotes as to avoid any anthropomorphism. Kellogg also showed in 1949 that other animal species can exhibit such superstitions, like the dog, and orang-utang.
later on skinner was shown to be not entirely correct. He believed that an accidental pairing of being fed with any type of behavior caused a connection to form. Therefore that behavior which just so happened to occur at the time of feeding will have a highyer chance of occuring more frequently, and thereby be reinforced again, by accident. However Staddon and Simmelhag believed that there are only a few types of behavior that will occur when the pigeon is anticipating food.
Later animal experiments showed that a learned behavior like being reinforced for pecking a certain key, is reduced when it is put on a response independant schedule of reinforcement like skinner put his pigeons on. This is believed to occur because of the more frequent reinforcement of other behaviors. However the detail of that have been left alone for some time.
yea, I am basing my masters thesis on an experiment almost exactly like this one, except with humans. I am also completing a project to see how this one Skinner article has been cited in a wide variety of literature.  this is mah shit, and I could go on for days on it.
why did you bring up this article anyways?
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