The Pigeons and the Psychology of the Human Mind

B f Skinner was a hugely influential psychologist from the fifties to the nineties. His insight that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards, has come to dominate our environment. So this system of arbitry rewards, if you look at that animal, it looks like it's just choosing to do what it wants to do, but actually it's been programmed by an external programmer. This is how they train dolphins at seawold, for example. You can train animals to do incredibly complex things. Using that system of rewards, you can train pigeons to play ping pong and rabbits to pick coins up and put them into piggy bags. And it works right just like