The Skinner box is a psychological experiment and common principle in game/interaction design. It is defined as a closed system in which a user’s active volition is automated over time by the possibility of a secondary conditioner being acquired through a repeated action. A pigeon, put in a closed box, is conditioned to press a button by infrequently being rewarded bread as it does so. Or to analogise, it’s as though a post-op patient has been given a faulty self-regulated morphine drip(1). When the Skinner box is explained like this, it can be seen as a somewhat exploitative and potentially dangerous system to feign engagement.
Ethics aside, this blog entry will focus on how the Skinner Box can be used as a system which applies to a broader degree of contexts, outside video games and interaction design. One of these ways could be through the idea of social Skinner boxes, and whether in our day-to-day lives, we move in and out of these closed systems of automated volition depending on our secondary (nonessential) needs of a specific time.
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It begins with WoW (World of Warcraft, an addictive life-sapping MMORPG). It’s easy to see how WoW employs Skinner’s principles, by rigging rare items to drop only by a small percentage, or certain events to occur, or certain quests/NPCs to open up. The whole game is designed to reward you for pressing buttons over and over again in the small chance that something rare (and therefore, good) will happen.
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In a strange way though, WoW’s Skinner box system flows outwardly from the screen, into the social interactions of the player themselves. Addicted players limit who they talk to in real life, and what they talk to them about. It’s as though the game has pigeonholed them into a whole new Skinner box, but one which is consequential, social and real. In a way, perhaps to a lesser degree though, we are all shoved into different social boxes whose walls only stand up by a significant restructuring of our thought, action and behaviour on a daily basis.
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This is definitely something echoed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, it is the “strict spatial partitioning” of panopticism, the inhabitance of “segmented, immobile, frozen space” which ‘regimentalises’ the performance of social scripts(2). In the same way, I feel the core of the Skinner Box system is intrinsically in the fact that it takes place in a box – that it is set up as a closed system which imposes physical limits on the movement of its user.
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When you think about it, there’s a whole cast of social interactions which restrict movements and force us to change how we think/act at the same time. They can occur in certain environments/institutions; the elevator, the classroom, the workstation, the boardroom, the traffic light, the queue, the restaurant, the hospital bed, the airplane.Or in roles/interactions; the audience member, the passenger, the prisoner, the jury, the couch potato’s malaise and the destitute’s helplessness, to name a few.
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If the Skinner box can be read as a closed system which restricts movement by automating its user’s volition then can these social interactions and institutions be understood in the same way? And if so, how much of our social interactions are automated and conditioned by the best possible outcome of those specific social interactions?
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In the biggest sense, often perceived as the best possible outcome for life is to retire successful, rich and happy. Of course, there are many factors which contribute to this, and it means many things to many people. But for a big slab of the population, there’s only a small chance that they will achieve the retirement they so ardently imagine. Skinner would say that it is this small chance which keeps us pushing the button, (or rather the alarm clock) as we go to work, day in day out, way beyond the point of novelty.
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That’s quite depressing, and hopefully a lifestyle dying out, but it’s an interesting thought. Buttons, by virtue, substitute one action for the other act of pressing a button. They complete a human action for us. They replace and abstract action. It must be measurable then, how much of our potential thoughts, energies, actions and behaviours remain unperformed when we push a button. How much autonomy and spontaneity are we taking away from ourselves? Interaction designer, Erik Adigard, writes of buttons:
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“Machines, like humans, are meant to touch and to be touched, so they come with hands, a reassuring reflection of ourselves in an attempt to convince us of their existence as avatars of the workers they have replaced. Hands are attached to bodies; therefore they also reaffirm the presence of the machinery they belong to.
…The first tool was a hand and the last tool deserves to be a hand, but what happens when tools escape our grip to become mere buttons? We still need to grasp and hold objects in order to make contact with the physical world, so we intently hold our computer mouse to touch information, we obsessively hold our cell phone to talk and now we choose our iPod as dancing companion. These devices are holding our hands and, if anything it is our eyes doing the touching”(3)
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I recommend reading the rest of Adigard’s article, it’s quite short and encapsulates a lot of these ideas. In summary, Adigard says that the buttons we touch remind us of what we no longer do. Similarly, the buttons of the Skinner box change the way we think. They make us think abstractly, in terms of what could be and what isn’t, rather than what is. It’s inaction disguised as action.
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Thinking about the Skinner box forces us to question how much of modernity hinges on the ability to abstract thoughts, actions and behaviours, and wonder what the erasion, and potential rekindling of human error (as the Skinner era passes) can teach us about ourselves.
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1. In this hypothetical, every time the patient feels pain and presses the regulator to administer the mg of morphine they need, there’s a large chance it won’t work.
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By Mark Starmach 2011
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