Auto Shaping

The fundamental principle in behavioural psychology says that an organism only behaves in order to acquire a reward or a reinforcement of some kind or other. That stands to reason doesn't it? For why should we waste our time and energy doing something and getting nothing out of it. However, in an experiment by Williams and Williams (1966), pigeons who were put in a cage where a key could be pecked for food continued to peck even though pecking did not result in food being delivered. In fact pecking was a useless behaviour because it was so arranged that food pellets dropped into the cage only when the birds desisted from pecking. How does one explain this in terms of the reinforcement theory? Back in the seventies there was an American guy working as a lecturer in the psychology department of the university of Copenhagen, Denmark. His name was Melvin Lyon and he had written a paper in a fancy journal in Sweden with an outlandish theory which purported to explain this phenomenon. He sent a copy of it to me because I was a student there. He got quiet offended when I criticized it in my own paper which I submitted to the university as part of an exam, so much so that even though he had previously privately approved my exam paper he now rejected it during the official examination. When I pointed to his duplicity he angrily asked me to explain Auto Shaping. Luckily I had studied Auto Shaping and fired back the following very simple explanation.

The birds, I proudly told him and the censor who was watching intently, were simply pecking and waiting for the reward, which was fully in keeping with the Law of Reinforcement.. Mr. Lyon didn't look happy at all that day. To his credit he sent me a letter of apology.

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