The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano. The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments. “To the reader who is anxious to advance to the human subject a word of caution is in order,” Skinner wrote, in an essay called “How to Teach Animals.” “We must embark upon a program in which we sometimes apply relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. In doing this, we are quite likely [in humans] to generate emotional effects.