A preface to a book.

Have you ever been in this situation, waiting for the elevator, knowing that you can't get there if you press the button, but you still keep pressing it?

Have you suddenly remembered that you left the door open after going out and rushed home only to find that the safety lock was firmly inserted in the anti-bolt?

Have you ever heard of frontal lobectomy, which is equivalent to evil in movies and games? I don't know why Egas moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this terrible operation.

Without modern pathological and neurological observation methods, can you prove your innocence in a mental hospital by mistake?

Skinner's box, Stanley milgram's defibrillator, Bruce Alexander's drug addict mouse, Dali and bin Laden's smoky room. These nouns have a faint sense of familiarity and exude a mysterious atmosphere close to birth.

You want to explore the mystery, but you are rejected by psychological literature and monotonous statistical charts?

Maybe you stumble outside psychology; Perhaps you already know psychological terms such as "confirmation deviation"; Maybe you are vacillating about behaviorism in the past.

But let's follow in the footsteps of Lauren Slater and re-examine this ingenious psychological experiment in the 20th century from many angles. Look at the significance and contribution of the experiment itself and the complicated inside story behind it.

After all, we all love stories, don't we?

"Does the human free will that we cherish and praise really exist?"

Guide reading

Chapter One Open Skinner's Box

It is said that he once raised his precious daughter in a test box and trained her with cruel punishment and pleasant rewards, just like training monkeys to ride unicycle in a circus, which led to his traumatized daughter shooting herself.

It is said that he is bent on "shaping" human behavior, and his ideal is that the whole world will become one and the people will be trained by the ruling class of psychologists, which is vaguely similar to the Nazi's bent on "purifying" human inferior genes.

His impressions include "evil scientist", "vicious madman" and "the most influential psychologist".

Psychologist and historian Mills once said: "Skinner is a mysterious figure, he is wrapped in layers of puzzles." The author thinks that the key to understanding Skinner's experiment lies in the content and facts, which is true, but few people can do it, and it depends on how she spins the cocoon.

Skinner spent his student days in the Institute of Psychology of Harvard University, when World War I was over.

10, psychoanalysis was all the rage, and Freud was in the ascendant.

First, the author described a story that everyone loved according to his biography and memoirs, and left it to everyone to read the original text. Then she wrote: "When Skinner first entered the field of psychology, this subject had nothing to do with mathematics at all, and its philosophical similarity was more than physiology. At that time, the first question that psychology should answer should be:' What is human nature that we can watch and feel when we are awake; Pause everything when you sleep and disappear forever after you die?' "。

Obviously, at this time, Jung has gained great fame for discussing the possible attitude of conscious mind to the world with psychological types, and the Secret and Comment of Golden Flower will be published soon. The mainstream of psychology is to pay attention to the internal psychological process, and introspection is the most important means.

Then Skinner caused a wave of new behaviorism in America.

The author writes that Skinner became interested in Pavlov and Watson. "pavlov's discovery" table [if! vml]

[endif] Ming: "Animals have instinctive reactions, such as blinking, fright and drooling. Can be artificially restricted. " "Subversion of music has long been taken for granted"-the innate animal instinct cannot be changed.

From this, she leads Skinner to think that saliva secretion is a kind of reflection, and the whole action is completely instinctive. What about human beings? Our behavior of eating with the lid open is not instinctive but conscious. If instinctive reactions, such as Pavlov's dog's drooling, can be restricted by thinking, can behaviors that are generally regarded as free will, such as somersaults or other actions, also be restricted?

Skinner made the famous box-Skinner's box from waste wires, rusty nails and blackened metal sheets in a small factory. In June of the same year, a classmate gave the mouse for the experiment to Skinner, and the experiment began.

The author helps us trace back to two sources of Skinner's experiment:

One is Pavlov's dog: emphasizing the animal's response to the previous stimulus, that is, the bell that appeared in advance.

The second is Thorndike's Cat: it emphasizes the role of time, that is, when to send a message about food, and its influence on animal behavior-a cat in a wooden box occasionally steps on a pedal and gets some rewards, and then it can step on it.

Are you familiar with this after reading it? The author may not be familiar with it, but is the farmer in China's well-known Waiting for the Rabbit like a cat in a wooden box? Let's think about it again: in this case, what is the free will of the farmer and the free will of the rabbit, as well as the instinct?

Let's go back to Skinner bocks's experiment, and the author goes on to write the conclusion. Although Skinner's experiment obviously followed Thorndike's, the result far exceeded that of two people. )。 Skinner's experiment is: "First, let the mouse accidentally step on the lever and drop out food particles. Because of the reward, the unintentional behavior turned into intentional behavior "(this part is also consistent with the cat-fascinated experiment). He further experimented to remove or change the frequency of rewards and observe how this affected the behavior of mice. Finally, he summed up the universal law of human behavior, which is still unbreakable. "

It's really indisputable. Let's think about the behavior of gamblers first, then think about the behavior of people who play mobile games, and then read on with the author.

The author describes the design of Skinner's box like this: "At first, as long as the mouse presses the bar, you can get food. Later, Skinner changed his so-called fixed proportion reward. If the mouse wants to get a reward, it must press it 3 times, 5 times or 20 times. "

Do you think something is wrong?

The following is a detailed description:

"Think of yourself as a mouse. At first, there was something to eat every time I pressed the lever. Then you press the lever, but there is no food. Press it again, but it still doesn't work. Press it again, and the silver nozzle finally falls out of the food. You finish your food and walk away. " (You pressed it once, once. )

After a while, you want to eat again. This time, you don't need to press it with thick claws once. Now you only need to press it three times in one breath. "

Congratulations, "the frequency of reinforcement has changed the way animals react."

Skinner then tried to remove the reward, trying to find out how long it took the mouse to learn the new response when the reward was fixed, and how long it took the mouse to stop responding after the reward was suddenly removed. What if the reward situation is uncertain?

After removing the fixed proportion reward, the result is very intuitive, and the mouse gradually does not press the lever. Finally, even if it heard something rustling in the nozzle, it was indifferent.

However, the situation has changed around the non-fixed ratio.

"Skinner changed the proportion of news columns to get food rewards. Most of the time, the mouse came home empty-handed, but perhaps at the 40th or 60th time, it suddenly got a food reward. Most people intuitively think that random rewards with such a long interval will make rats give up hope of getting rewards, which will lead to the disappearance of the pressure bar behavior. That was not the case. Skinner found that intermittent food rewards made these mice keep putting pressure on them like addicts, whether they could get rewards or not. "

Skinner compared fixed proportion rewards (such as giving food after four strokes) with irregular intermittent rewards. He found that "in the case of irregular reward intervals, it takes the longest time to eliminate existing behaviors!"

Aha, got stuck in gambling? Addicted to cards and krypton? Whether you can connect. Let's go back and think about the popular "liver (spending a lot of time training)" and "krypton (spending money to get a small probability reward)" in mobile games.

"Liver": 1 level has the least experience in upgrading to level 2, which only takes 30 seconds (mouse presses the lever once)-the experience of upgrading from level 2 to level 3 has increased, which takes 2 minutes (mouse presses the lever four times).

Krypton: Although the yield of this thing is very low, maybe I will pay the bill next time. I haven't released the rarest five-star SSR three times before! (The reward interval is irregular, and it takes a long time to eliminate the existing behavior. )

Or a combination of online games or stand-alone games. (such as legend, Diablo, etc. )

Of course, in the author's time, video games were far less popular than today. She wrote, "Why do our good friends wait by the phone for the bad boyfriend to have an occasional whim, but they still think it is a great favor?" Why do some people lose everything in a smoky casino when they are physically and mentally sound? ""Skinner let us know that all this is intermittent reinforcement, and also let us see its operation process and the resulting coercion. This psychological effect is so powerful that no one has been unaffected by it since the beginning of mankind. We are deeply involved, unable to extricate ourselves, and no one can resist. "I am convinced.

The author then introduces Skinner's follow-up experiments-training birds to hold plates and cats to play the piano. , and then the favorite story link. I'm here to extract some of the author's views:

"Skinner first denied that human beings can be independent, and at the same time gave the word autonomy a new meaning, which made people full of hope again."

"His experiments revealed shocking facts and pointed out human stupidity. This is a rare wisdom. "

"When life comes to an end, does he realize that the last scene of life-death-cannot be learned and overcome?"

As for the follow-up story of The Child in the Box, the story of Skinner's visit to Harvard University with colleagues of similar age, the story of Skinner's argument with other psychologists about human "free will" and the story of Skinner's other daughter, let's leave it to everyone to watch carefully in the original text.