What's Shaping You?

You might be surprised...

After spending five wonderful days with Susan Garrett (a blog entry I still plan to do one day!) one of the things I am more aware of now is the many things that shape US in our everyday lives. Throughout her days of lecturing Susan wore a microphone headset with a portable speaker. If she crossed in front of the speaker or went too close it made a loud unpleasant buzzing noise, which led her to mention on several occasions about how the speaker had shaped her not to walk in front of it!!

I have since smiled to myself on numerous occasions about how I'M being shaped by apparently inanimate objects. My iPhone is a prime example.

When I first got my iPhone, I was a little worried that it didn't come with an extensive booklet of how to operate it. I guess I could have looked it all up on the Net, but that seemed altogether too much effort so I opted instead for the trial and error method. Being as it is a touch screen, I just touched various things to see what they did and learnt through this (i.e. the phone SHAPED me to offer various behaviours that would reward me with the successful operation of its features, in exactly the same way I would shape a dog to perform whatever behaviour I wanted him to learn).

A great example of machine shaping human occurred just last night - incidentally, this involved me trying to view Susan's blog!

Previous history of reinforcement has led to me to believe that when I see the link to Susan's blog posted in my news feed on Facebook (on my phone in this case), tapping it with my finger will reward me with being able to view the blog. Not this time. After making me wait a long time, up came the error message. Hmph. Tapping the link on FB usually works. Well, what shall I try next? Go out of FB and open my Safari app and try typing the blog address directly in there. Also has a strong history of reinforcement. Hmph. Same error message. (Getting more frustrated now because I want that high value reward of reading Susan's blog and have not been successful in receiving it). Must keep trying... what if I hit the refresh button? What if I hit it again? And again????!!!! HMPH!!! What if I hit it again whilst this time glaring angrily at the screen and pressing exceptionally hard?

So far, the phone has now shaped me to offer repeated taps at the refresh button. If I'd been rewarded at the end of this by the blog appearing, possibly in the future I would then have been more likely to hit refresh even MORE times and even MORE forcefully in an attempt to get that reward. Thinking doggy nose taps anyone???

However, because there was no reward at the end, this behaviour eventually extinguished itself - at least for the time being. Now, I tried a different behaviour which had also been successful in the past (but which I had not tried initially because of the higher response cost) - getting up, walking through the house to the study, turning on the computer and viewing the blog there - SUCCESS! High value reward! Read the latest blog entry and have a party!!!! :) :) :)