Nearly everyone in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (related fields are known as Human Factors, and User Experience) has heard of A/B testing. How should we lay out our web pages? Should we have a tool bar? Should it be always visible or only visible on rollover? What type fonts and color schemes should we use?
Clearly A/B testing is useful. However — there are at least two fundamental limitations to A/B testing.
First, for almost any real application, there are way too many choices for each of them to be tested. This is where the experience of the practitioner and/or the knowledge of the field and of human psychology can be very helpful. Your experience and theory can help you make an educated guess about how to prioritize the questions to be studied. Some questions may have an obvious answer. Others might not make much difference. Some questions are more fundamental than others. For instance, if you decided not to use any text at all on your site, it wouldn’t matter which “font” your users prefer.
Second, some decisions interact with others. For instance, you may test a font size in the laboratory with your friends. Just as you suspected, it’s perfectly legible. Then, it turns out that your users are mainly elderly people who use your app while going on cruises or bus tours. In general, the elderly have less acute vision that the friends you studied in the lab. Not only that, you were showing the font on a stable display under steady conditions of illumination. The bus riders are subject to vibration (which also makes reading more difficult) and frequent changes in illumination due to the sun or artificial light being intermittently filtered by trees, buildings, etc. Age, Vibration, and Illumination changes are variables that interact by being positively correlated. In other cases, variables interact in other and more complex ways. For example, increasing stress/motivation at first increases performance. But beyond a certain point, increasing stress or motivation actually decreases performance. This is sometimes known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law)
The story doesn’t stop there though. How much stress is optimal partly depends on the novelty and complexity of the task. If it’s a simple or extremely practiced task, quite a bit of stress is the optimal point. Imagine how long you might hang on to a bar for one dollar, for a thousand dollars, or to save yourself from falling to the bottom of a 1000 foot ravine. For a moderately complex task, a moderate level of motivation is optimal. For something completely novel and creative, however, a low level of stress is often optimal.
The real point isn’t about these particular interactions. The more general point is that testing many variables independently will not necessarily result in an optimal overall solution. Experience — your own — and the experiences of others — can help dissect a design problem into those decisions that are likely to be relatively independent of each other and those that must be considered together.
Life itself has apparently “figured out” an interesting way to deal with the issue of the interaction of variables. Genes that work well together end up close together on the chromosome. That means that they are more likely to stay together and not end up on different chromosomes because of cross-over. By contrast, genes that are independent or even have a negative impact, when taken together, tend to end up far apart so that they are likely to be put on different chromosomes.
So, for example, one might expect that a gene for more “feather-like skin” and more “wing-like front legs” might be close to each other while a gene for thicker, heavier bones would be far away.
Clearly, the tricky way variables interact isn’t limited to “User Experience Design” of course. Think of learning a sport such as tennis or golf. You can’t really learn and practice each component of a stroke separately. That’s not the way the body works. If you are turning your hips, for example, as you swing, your arm and hand will feel differently than if you tried to keep them still while you swung.
Do you have any good tips for dealing with interactions of variables? In User Experience or any other domain?
I was trained as a scientist. I believe in science. I believe that doing laboratory experiments about how we perceive, learn, decide, and solve problems has merit and applicability to the real world. One of the things I studied in the laboratory was perceptual adaptation. So, I had first-hand experience conducting experiments on perceptual adaptation. Please keep that in mind as you read this short story.
Many years ago, I drove to IBM Research five days of the week. It was a beautiful drive among Westchester reservoirs and at one point, my journey took me through an “erector set bridge” — you know the kind — they literally look to be made from a giant erector set. At the time, I was driving a sky blue Chevy with only an AM radio for entertainment. I typically listened to Imus in the morning on the way into work each day. AM radio being what it is, and steel erector set bridges being what they are, each time I drove through the metal bridge, the sound volume went down quite noticeably until I emerged on the other side. I did this for years.
At some point, I decided I would treat myself to an entertainment upgrade. I had never bought anything like this and I was somewhat nervous that I might be “taken” or that the installation would be shoddy.
I had a tape deck and AM/FM radio installed as well as stereo speakers. To me, it seemed marginally too luxurious, but I was really looking forward to some higher quality music and listening to books on tape. (I didn’t even know about NPR or WBAI at that point). I felt quite happy and contented as I drove to work that first day with my new tape deck. I had it playing some of my favorite and most spirited music. A perfect way to begin the workweek!
All at once, the sound volume went way up! And, then, a few moments later, it went back down again. My first thought was along these lines: “Damn! There must be a loose wire in the thing. Crap, now I’ve got to spend hours trying to straighten this out and argue about the bill. Yech.
Wait a minute! That was the bridge! I just perceived the sound to be louder because I so strongly expected it to be softer!
OK. But why the delay? Why didn’t it immediately occur to me as my first explanation? I knew that I was using my ear brain system to perceive the sound. I knew that expectation impacts experience. I knew I had spent years driving through the bridge and having the sound level go down. I believe in science, I participated in the visual analogue of such a phenomenon myself.
One explanation is age of learning. I learned about how people think and solve problems from watching my own family interact and listening to radio. Later, that was supplemented by watching television, and to a lesser extent movies. I had at least a decade of indoctrination of “finding who is at fault” and “if I perceive it, it must be true!” Before I ever heard of the “scientific method.”
Is it possible that those thought-patterns still influenced my initial takes on how to solve a problem? Is it feasible that they do not? In the instance related above, my “scientific and professional training” did come into play and overcome my initial impression. Indeed, the second hypothesis leap-frogged way ahead of the “loose wire” theory as the most plausible explanation.
Note too that not only did the “loose wire” theory initially come to the fore; it was embellished with a guilty party! Even if there were a loose wire, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the person who installed it had done a bad job.
I had a job for awhile as a projectionist, and I did make a few mistakes. But it also happened more than once that I was “blamed” for a film breaking when the real reason was not bad threading but the fact that the film had been spliced a hundred times! Or, I would be given a rotary slide tray by the lecturer and one of the slides would be out of order. That’s my fault? Was I supposed to get an advanced copy of the presentation and critique it? No-one mentioned that as part of the job description. But there it is: the tendency to blame someone who may or may not be actually to blame. I have been on the receiving end. I suspect everyone has. Yet, my mind jumped to the same nonsense.
Even if you’ve never been trained in science, you’ve almost undoubtedly had many experiences that show that your perceptions of reality are not necessarily reality. You’ve likely jumped to conclusions and later found out you were wrong. A good way to remind us all of this is based on Native American wisdom called “The Iroquois Rule of Six.”
In the case of the little vignette I shared above, I was driving to work. It took place before the invention of “smart phones” so even if I had been tempted to pull over and give that stereo installer a “piece of my mind” I had no feasible way to do it.
Bob had never realized how much he had been subvocalizing when he thought. His first day on the ventilator had taught him that.
“On the ventilator” — what a fun expression, thought Bob. It makes you feel as though you’re in control. You’ve got that damned ventilator just where you want him and he’d better do as you say. Well, poop. It isn’t anything like that at all! You’re not “on a ventilator” at all! It’s on you. Worse, it’s in you. And, what’s worse, I found that when I can’t mutter to myself, I can’t even think straight. And, maybe that’s a good thing because you have no right to think straight. Thinking straight means you get to a goal. But what goal? You’re going in circles because you can’t control anything. And, the only thing you want never to think about is how thick-headedly stubborn you were. And you knew! That was the worst part. You knew the pandemic was real. You knew masks and vaccines would work. You just wanted to show how brave you were. For what? You weren’t brave at all, Bobby Boy, were you? No, you were too chicken to show how horribly disappointed you were in that man. And, by the time you realized it, you just set your jaw and lowered your head and rammed it right into that brick wall called reality. And now, here you lie. Lie. Yeah.
And there was a time, Bobby Boy, there was a time when you was honest. You wouldn’t have dreamed of cheating in school. Or, football. Well, our coach would have kicked our ass if he found us cheating or even staying out past curfew! But this new coach! He’d kick our ass if we did not cheat. It’s what it’s all about. But I’m not really like that. Why did I go along with it? And, now — this! All I had to do was get vaccinated for Christ’s sake! I wouldn’t even have to tell my friends. Why the hell should I have to tell them? I could’ve just pretended I didn’t. They’d never know. Unless one of them punched me on the arm. Or asked my wife. So what? So what if they found out? It’s still better than being “on” this f***ing ventilator.
“Mr. Roberts? We’re going to have to move you to help prevent your bedsores from getting worse. Okay? You ready?”
Who knew, thought Bobby, that medical Doctors and not just dentists ask you questions when they know damned well you can’t answer! Why the hell do they do that? I guess it’s a power trip, right?
That’s right. It’s all about power. There is no good and bad, really. Isn’t that what Voldemort said? But still. Who cares? There is no good and bad, really.
Yet here I lie. Living a lie is what got me here.
“There we go, Mr. Roberts. Oh by the way, your wife and sons said to wish you a Happy Birthday. See you tomorrow.”
Yet, here I lie. Bob felt as though he were looking into a fog at night, nearly able to make out the strange shape coming toward him, but as it got closer, it remained elusive — almost shy or reclusive. He couldn’t even tell whether it was an angry bear or a very large crazed criminal. He thought, If it isn’t all about power, what else is there? Truth and Love, I suppose. That’s corny. That’s for suckers.
Now, the odd shape of the truth revealed itself, not as a vague nothingness in the fog but as clear and definite, much like a white rose in the bright summer sunlight. And there it was. Plain as day. And loudly reverberating in his own head.
“You know the truth, Bob. You and I both know the truth. The real suckers are the ones who put power above Love and Truth. They play the game for Death. So, it is of no great surprise that, as you say, ‘Yet here I lie.’”
Bobby Boy, he thought to himself, you are truly losing it. I need that nurse to bring me a pad of paper. I have to tell people. I have to tell the truth! Before it’s too late! But why would anyone believe me, even on my deathbed. The evil that men do lives after them. Isn’t that what … somebody … Marc Anthony, said? When you lie, no-one believes you even if you do tell the truth. I can’t change my vote now, can I?
The alarm rang, and people heard, and people came, and people did the usual things that people do when one of the over three million COVID patients dies.
Of course, the misery of a Bobby Boy’s death does not itself end with the death of Bobby Boy. In many cases, there will be more misery after a death than before. I imagine that to be so for Bobby Boy.
Before, his friends and relatives will likely have had hope. After, they will feel grief about Bob. They will feel angry that Bob didn’t care enough about the truth to face the truth and that he instead acted like a damned fool. And a selfish one at that. And, they will be in a spin about what to do next. Their lives have been changed forever and they have no idea yet just how to cope with that fact or even understand the magnitude — the depth and breadth and width of that massive gaping black hole of a change. And, they will feel loss of the things that they loved about Bob even if he was stupid enough to think power was better. They may not have each thought of it in precisely those same words, but they all felt that about Bob. And, they will feel fear. If this person, still in the prime of life can be struck down, what about the rest of us? Will we ever get back to normal? It’s important to understand in a clearer way than Bob ever did that his allegiance to power over truth did not just cause misery in his own life. It also caused misery in the lives of everyone who cared about him.
I could take pictures of the same rose bush, and never take exactly the same picture twice. In fact, it wouldn’t even take trying on my part. In fact, no matter how hard I tried to take exactly the same picture, it wouldn’t happen. Moment to moment, my hand would murmur, the sun would slide ever so slightly in the sky, a wanton puff of wind would blow the bush.
Of course, I don’t try to take exactly the same picture. Part of the joy is expanding the universe of possible pictures and being open to the possibilities that abound from angle, light, surround, seasons, my own mood, the bush’s mood, the sun’s mood, the mood of the clouds. No, of course, I don’t believe they have conscious emotions — necessarily — but mood describes it was well as any word and the moods of the world are sometimes extremely important in determining our moods. Ask the survivors of any natural disaster whether their “mood” was “influenced” by the disaster! (No, I won’t pay your medical bills). Of course, we know it in these extreme cases, but don’t we really also know it when it comes to less catastrophic events as well? Isn’t your mood influenced by the weather, the time of day, the noise you’re subjected to, the mood of those around you — all of these impact your mood to some extent and therefore, they will have some impact on the quality of the experiences you have.
Your experience with a photograph will be altered according to the mood of the photographer who took the picture, the mood of the planet at that place and time, and — let’s not forget — your mood as well. And, even if you’ve seen hundreds of my pictures, there is no way you or I could draw in detail what the next picture will look like.
I cannot, indeed, take a picture of a rose. I can only take a picture of the now-rose. And, another now-rose. But, since no two ‘now’s’ are identical, so too, the now-rose is never like any other now-rose. Even if we had two pictures a second apart that were pixel by pixel identical (exceedingly unlikely!) It would only be because of the limitations of our sensors. Let’s not forget that these are living plants doing the “business” of life every second! And even the molecules of inanimate things are moving about, assuming the garden is above absolute zero. Roses are not known to thrive at -435 C. That’s the state, though, that some strive toward now. Absolute predictability based on absolute power means nothing learns; nothing adapts; nothing is truly alive.
Here’s the deal folks.
Every experience with another human being is unique.
Yet, we like to try to categorize them.
By person.
By age of person.
By skin color of person.
By gender.
By religion.
By etc. etc. and so forth.
Yet, you have literally no idea for certain what the next moment will be like. Yet, some people are willing to treat what will happen as a certainty, which would be absurd for something as well-regulated and well-studied as, say, baseball. They would never bet their life that a particular hitter would or would not get a base hit. They wouldn’t do that even if they knew his batting average to the third decimal. But they are willing to stake everything, not on a knowledge of the other person, but based on “knowledge” of a category that is not only useless but based on folklore, propaganda, and fakery.
Instead of being scared by the bees, why not take the time to appreciate the now-rose of human experience — the ever-changing dance of all humanity — which moment will never ever come again. No, not that one either.
Distraction has many impacts, but one, at least in my experience, is that it greatly slows down learning to adapt.
Here is an example from much earlier in my life, (so you’ll know it’s not primarily an age effect).
One of my college part-time jobs was as an A/V assistant. It was actually a very cool job, because I got to travel all over the University and show movies or slides in classes in architecture, collagen, aging, genetics, sociology, Shakespeare, etc. I would typically arrive at work and get a “kit” which was basically a small suitcase with whatever A/V equipment was required for a particular gig. On the outside, the supervisor had used a magic marker to write on a piece of masking tape a building number, a room number, and the time I was to be there. Depending on the location, it could take anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes for me to get to a particular location, if I was already familiar with the room. There were maps on campus to show where all the buildings were, but once inside, signage varied tremendously from building to building. Some buildings were laid out logically and some had lots of signage. Some had both. Some had neither.
When I went to a new location, there were many times I came to T-shaped intersection and had to make a “blind” choice as to which hall led to my assigned room. If, say, I turned right, I might look at the numbers on various classrooms and determine that I had gone the wrong way so I’d turn around and get to the assigned room. What’s interesting is what happened the second time I went to that same room. You might think I would turn left because, after all, a week earlier, I had discovered that I needed a left turn to efficiently reach my goal. If someone had asked me where the room was, I would have known without a doubt. But in the actual moment, that’s not what I did.
What I actually did when I reached the choice point was turn right, just as I had initially done. I would take a few steps down the wrong hallway and wake up to the fact that I was going the wrong way. And what do you suppose happened the third time I reached that decision point? Would I turn to the left in a nice smooth way? No. I would still turn right. I would begin to take a step to the right and then stop dead in my tracks and turn to the left.
Why had it taken me three tries to learn instead of just once? You may think, “Oh, that’s just the way people are.” I think it would be closer to the truth to say, “Oh, that’s just the way we people are.” That is to say, the culture of hyper-competitiveness keeps most of us, certainly including me, pre-occupied most of our waking hours. Walking on the reasonably well-lit regular corridors of a university campus did not require my full attention. So, my mind was always churning on about something else when I came to the decision point.
Of course, that’s just one example. There are many others. I learned at an early age to multi-task. Sometimes, that may be useful to me just as your multi-tasking is sometimes useful to you. But there is at least one important downside.
You’re being in a constant state of busy-ness makes it harder for you to notice that you need to learn something new and it makes it harder to do something even if you do see the need. If you come to a choice point and make the wrong choice, in many cases, you can figure that out fairly easily — if you’re paying attention. If you cut yourself off from what is really happening, learning, change, adaptation — it all becomes much harder. You can cut yourself off in many ways: alcohol, drugs, being a workaholic — but my favorite is distraction.
While distraction has it’s pros and cons for me, and likely for you, the constant busy-ness is wonderful for business. They will sell you anything and everything to distract you. But here’s a fun thing to do.
Take a break.
Concentrate on one thing at a time.
Try it for an hour.
Try it for a day.
Do you really get less done? Do you have more pleasure or less? Do you learn more quickly or more slowly?
May well have nothing to do with one another. In addition, the speed of change, and even the acceleration of change, and, yes, possibly even the jerk might have an impact on what happens. Again, consider a few examples.
You are the major breadwinner (by being a bread maker) in your family of four. You are moderately “well off” financially but your business has been going steadily down for the last five years. You could relocate but you all love the private school your kids go to. Finally, your youngest is a senior, so next year, you will relocate to a part of your nation that is growing.
This is no doubt a fairly large change. But, it is also moderately slow. And, not only is it slow; there is only moderate if any acceleration. You will naturally see more details that need to be attended to as the date creeps closer. And, there will be some surprises. But for the most part, the speed and predictability of the change is within your capacity. If you didn’t perceive it to be so, you wouldn’t have decided on the move.
Now, let’s change things just a bit. Same family of four. Same worsening of conditions. Only now, before your youngest even starts her senior year, COVID 19 strikes. Your business is no longer slowly shrinking. It plummets to the ground. Some people were predicting this might happen months ago, but you chose to listen to the people who said it would all go away. But now is now. You are experiencing much faster and less predictable change. Not only that; the potential magnitude of the change is much greater. Before, you realized it would take time to build your business back up in a new location. But now? You might not even have the wherewithal to survive the next six months, let alone move. And when? And to where? You had a spot all picked out in one of the more trendy and affluent suburbs in Silicon Valley. But now? It’s a hotbed of COVID!
Are the same things that are important in situation one above the same things that are important in situation two?
Now, let’s add just a little more to the scenario, but without the COVID19.
As before, you are the major breadwinner (by being a bread maker) in your family of four. You are moderately “well off” financially but your business has been going steadily down for the last five years. You could relocate but you all love the private school your kids go to. Finally, your youngest is a senior, so next year, you will relocate to a part of your nation that is growing. You are on your way to your bakery and the sky grows dark. You worry that it will be pouring down rain just as you make the 50 yard dash to the front door of your bakery.
You need not have worried because the Class Five tornado delivered the front door to a spot only two feet from your normal parking spot. That front door was the largest remaining piece of what had been your grocery store. Your house was also destroyed. And, so was the private school. Luckily, your youngest was unharmed. Not so luckily, your other child and your spouse were killed in the storm along with 73 others in the area.
We all have the intuition that this person will make the most profound changes, but in what way? Of course, nearly anyone would be in complete shock for a time and not know what to do. But then what? It seems equally likely that the person would:
A. Decide that life is absurd and it’s out to destroy you and the only way to protect yourself is drink like a fish. And, the child’s better off somewhere else.
B. Decide that life is absurd and it’s out to destroy you and the only way to protect yourself is to never love again. And, the child’s better off somewhere else.
Of course, A and B are not mutually exclusive. They often go together.
C. You decide that life may end at any time and that the most important thing in life is to enjoy every moment. And, that means, among other things, spending a lot of time with your remaining family & friends.
D. You decide that service to others is the most important thing in life and you and your child both eventually become involved in a UN project to show people how to bake more nutritious bread.
There are endless possibilities of course. And, they are not fixed outcomes. The person may decide that life may end at any time and that the most important thing in life is to enjoy every moment — and to spend time with friends and then — three years later —- take path A or D instead.
As someone trained in “Experimental Psychology,” my disciplinary reflex is to try to identify parameters and try to relate conditions of change to results in terms of outcome as a function of those parameters.
Perhaps, however, a better approach is more like the Periodic Table. Rather than an “infinite variety”, it might be true that most cases fall into one of several dozen categories. Each category is basically a theme or premise for a story which we relate to precisely because they are common “types” of change.
Examples might include:
“Situation slowly deteriorates and protagonist makes adjustment.”
“A natural disaster destroys much (or all) of what the protagonist loves and they must create a whole new life.”
“Situation slowly deteriorates, and in turn, the protagonist engages in ever more self-destructive behavior, making the situation worse and eventually resulting in disaster.”
“Situation slowly deteriorates, and in turn, the protagonist engages in ever more self-destructive behavior, making the situation worse and eventually resulting in — enlightenment followed by a complete turn-around.”
[The poem below is one I wrote about 60 years ago. I still feel the same way today. So, here’s an example of something that hasn’t changed about me psychologically despite all that’s happened in my world and in the world..]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychology of change lately. For one thing, it’s quite relevant to the pivot projects (https://pivotprojects.org)
I thought it would be fun to write a series of blog posts on experiences of personal change, either as a student, as a teacher, or more commonly, neither. It would be even more fun if readers shared a bit about their experiences of psychological change. Wouldn’t it be to everyone’s benefit if we understood the general principles of psychological change so that we can do a better job adapting to this ever-changing world? So, think of the example below as just “my turn.” And, then, it will be your turn.
When I was in “Junior High School,” I was interested in some parts of school and not so much in others. I didn’t care about my grades but they were okay because at that point, I had a very good memory. And, then, one day near the end of eighth grade, I happened upon a book in our library that said good grades were important because — guess what?
You’ll get into college? Nope.
That you’ll get a better paying job? Nope.
This book claimed a reward much more meaningful than either of those were at that point in my life. It claimed that if a guy got good grades, he’d be liked by the girls! Here was a secret formula to success with girls. All I had to do was get good grades!
It did not even occur to me at the time that this claim probably had zero data behind it. It was likely written to induce guys to get good grades. I honestly don’t even think it said anything about what it meant for girls to get good grades. However, that may have been because the book was titled and aimed solely at boys. Of course, it could simply be the rampant sexism that is with us still — (sigh) — like that one guest who you know is about to barf on your rug because they’ve had too much to drink, and they live next door and they’re being obnoxious and you really just wish your neighbor would head home but they don’t. Instead, they stay until they disgust and insult everyone, barf on the carpet, then start screaming at you for serving cheap wine. That guest is what continued sexism & misogyny is like for most us. It’s also what all the other superiority BS is like for most of us.
I had no such consciousness at the time. I just remember reading it and feeling as though I had discovered something akin to “The Fountain of Youth” or “El Dorado.” What’s amazing is that reading something in a book altered my behavior immediately and in a way that lasted for years. Getting girls to like me. That was a motivation that I could tie into. I think because getting girls was also tied into competition, it also changed me so that I viewed getting the best grades as winning. I already liked to win! Oh, yes. I was competitive. Overly competitive. But I had never thought of grades in school as any kind of competition. I got my grades based on how well I did and you got your grades based on how well you did. The two had been, in my mind, completely unrelated events.
Until I read that passage.
How many people did that passage impact? For me, even if it wasn’t based on any real data, it had a positive impact. I got good grades and I did have wonderful girlfriends. I got praise from my classmates too. I didn’t ever really feel the envy & hate portrayed in so many modern movies about high school. Maybe I was just too busy studying to notice.
I wonder if the same passage could have impacted some people’s lives negatively? Maybe someone read that and they just found out that they had gotten their girlfriend pregnant. They might have read such a passage and thought it was a cruel irony. Or, perhaps they were gay. Or, maybe they had a learning disability and were already working their tail off to keep a C average.
And, I suppose that the majority of kids my age who read it might have known it was BS from the git-go. On them, it had little or no effect.
Even if I am the only one to have ever taken it seriously, it is pretty remarkable nonetheless that my behavior could be pushed into a new state simply by reading a sentence or two in a book.
This essay describes some of the blockages to change; in particular, what is sometimes called “cognitive dissonance” In general, our decisions, unlike those of classical economic theory, are path-dependent. https://petersironwood.com/2019/07/18/essays-on-america-wednesday/
My senior year at Case-Western Reserve, I went to college full-time but I was also head of a small family. I was married and we had small baby to take care of. I worked three jobs. One of those jobs was as a teaching assistant in downtown Cleveland at a place called “The Supplementary Educational Center.” The job involved a wide range of activities including putting new walls in, painting them, putting up NASA exhibits, running a planetarium and teaching about space and how airplanes worked. The Supplementary Educational Center bussed in sixth grade students (around 11 years old) from diverse parts of the city to learn about American History and about Space Science.
Another job grew out of my class on Learning. The Professor in the previous story about operant conditioning without awareness recommended me as a research assistant for another professor who was also a Skinnerian. He was doing studies on operant conditioning. I “programmed” the experiments by literally plugging together components such as timers and relays. I also ran the experiments. By sheer coincidence, the “subjects” for the Professor’s experiments on operant conditioning were also sixth graders.
The kids would go sit in a chair in front of a screen. On the screen, an image of a red circle would appear from time to time. In front of the kids was a lever. If they pulled that lever when the red circle appeared, a nickel would fall down as a reward. They were completely enclosed in what can be fairly described as a large Skinner Box. After a kid pulled the lever and received their nickel a few times, we began to “thin” the schedule. Now, they had to pull the lever 2 or 3 times before getting a nickel. Then, only every 5-7 times. Then, only once every 10-12 times. (Remember, it only “worked” if they pulled the lever while the red circle was there.) Finally, they were put into a phase where they would never get any more nickels no matter how many times they pulled the lever.
At that point, we (or more accurately, the relays we had programmed) stopped showing the red circle and showed other things such as a smaller red circle or a larger red circle or a green circle or a purple circle or a red ellipse. None of these ever paid off. But the instruments recorded their level pulling and we would soon satisfy our curiosity whether they would “generalize more” (i.e., pull the lever more) to a stimulus that varied in color, shape, or size from what they were originally trained on. I cannot recall how that actually turned out. As I look back on it, the notion that we would have a “general ordering” about the relative importance of these dimensions based on this experiment seems rather…naive.
Although the kids were run as subjects one at a time, it often happened that they came with a friend or two. The kids who were not being a subject just then, sat in a nearby waiting room and stared at the floor. I felt sorry for them. There were no magazines, games, books, etc. The room did have a blackboard though, so I picked up the chalk and began “teaching them” about the planets in the solar system. They seemed to enjoy my mini-lecture so I felt pretty good at having spread some enlightenment among the masses.
Despite the fact that the Professor was a devout Skinnerian, he still suggested that I debrief every subject — ask them what they thought they had been doing. So I did. What I discovered to my amazement was that some of them thought that my astronomy lecture was an advance organizer for the task in the Skinner box! “Well, first you showed me a picture of Mars many times and then Jupiter came up….”
In my mind, the little mini-lecture and the Skinner box experiment were two entirely different things that were not at all connected to each other, but each of which was connected with a specific job and conducted miles apart. The people I saw in these two roles were different; the hours were different. In this specific instance, I had used a bit of what I knew — and more importantly, what kids that age were interested in — to help them pass the time while waiting their turn. It never occurred to me how the situation appeared from their perspective.
From their perspective, they go to this strange place on a college campus and meet this college kid (me) who greets them and takes their permission slips and has them take turns at some weird way to earn nickels involving looking at circles and ellipses. And, this same college kid (still me) teaches them about the solar system with circles and ellipses. Of course, they would think they were related.
For me, there were two distinct circles. For the kids, there was one circle.
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”
—- Robert Burns, To a Louse
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First in a series of stories about the mythical Veritas tribe who value truth, love, and cooperation and their struggles against the Cupiditas who value power, greed, and cruelty. Our tale begins as the shaman/leader of the Veritas seeks an eventual successor so she devises a series of trials that mainly test empathy.
petersironwood 