A lesson in Conditioning

First, how does everyone like the new Americana look. I probably should have been getting ready for church or something in that realm but I was playing instead. It's okay though because we managed to get to church about 10 minutes early still. Now, take a quick second and scroll down paying particular attention to the number of comments on each post this month. Now that you have looked at that let me tell you a quick story about B.F. Skinner. Skinner is a very famous psychologist who developed a theory of personality called Behaviorism. In large part Skinner said that the only way to truly scientifically study psychology is through behavior since cognition is beyond the scope of experimental testing. He was wrong, but at the time it caught on like wild fire. A major component of this theory was based upon Pavlov's work. Pavlov inadvertently trained a group of dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by pairing the presentation of food with a bell. Soon Pavlov had dogs that would salivate whenever the bell rang. Skinner believed this was an extraordinary example of the power of behavioral measures. The story continues that in a class where Skinner was explaining this to his students his class decided to perform a little conditioning on Skinner. Skinner had a habit of pacing the room when he lectured, and the class decided to perk up when he spoke from the left side of the room and act disinterested when he spoke from the right. The process continued of splitting the lecture area in half until he was speaking from only one corner of the room. Skinner was completely unaware until the end of the semester when the class informed him of their little experiment. Now what, you ask, does that have to do with the comments section on the previous posts. Essentially in my over analytical mind I see a very positive reinforcement for posting pictures of Carol and I and very little reinforcement for posting pictures of the girls. (In any experiment you have an independent - read manipulated - variable and a dependent - read outcome - variable). In this case the IV is the type of picture and the DV is the amount of comments. I cannot change the amount of comments without changing the type of picture. Now obviously I am not going to start posting pictures of just Carol and I, (I actually considered weeding it down and finding out if there would be more comments for just me, just carol, or both). However, this has practical importance, not because it validates me and the things I have learned, but because this is the type of research that goes into every commercial and advertisement you see. And consequently without ever realizing it, your purchasing dollars are reinforcing companies for the type of advertisements they use. For example, if a company puts a sexually explicit ad in a magazine that is typically traditional in its values (lets say Martha Stewart Living) and they have an increase in sales, they are going to assume the ad had an effect. If they are privileged enough to have any demographic data they will be further reinforced when they see an increase in sales in their product that correlates with sales in the magazine. And now you have some sense of the torturous nature of not being able to shut this voice in my head up when these things start rampantly spuing forth into my consciousness. And we haven't even touched on the unconscious forces at work. FUN no. Beyond that. Everything here is going well. Church was the same as usual. Third Sunday and all, the girls managed it better than I. I was seriously considering holding Maren on my lap just to get her to start whining so I could sit in the Foyer. But all that aside my class was surprisingly well behaved during primary. I actually think they might be improving. (I wonder if I could condition them). And then I talked to Mom after church and she told me all about the crazy snowiness in Utah. Sorry that sucks for all of you there. Anyway, not much else has changed here. We are looking forward to another visit from Zeb and Leah in two weeks, and hoping Zeb gets a second internship in Dallas, so he can take us out to dinner with all that extra income (just kidding, but I do really like Texas Roadhouse, just in case you were thinking about it). Beyond that valentines was good. I got Carol some flowers and well I won't go into details about what else, and she got me Jack Johnson's CD. It's quite good, and very relaxing. It has that kind of island, layed back, feel to it. And now I need to go check on the girls and see about dinner. (I will be posting some pictures soon, I just don't feel like it right now.)

Josh