Suspicious Little Pigeons

I majored in psychology in college. One of my classes, sort of affectionately nicknamed Pigeon Lab, met each week to put pigeons into Skinner Boxes (side note, these are named for B.F. Skinner, a psychologist and behaviorist that developed the idea of operant conditioning). The boxes are programed to reward our little feathered friends for doing certain tasks, aka pecking the red light instead of the green light, so they could be rewarded with a pellet of what must be incredibly delicious pigeon food. Turns out these birds are really smart. Skinner trained a few to play ping pong using these techniques, you can check it out on the Smithsonian's website, really.

One of the most difficult behaviors to stop is a behavior that has been reinforced randomly. If every time the pigeon pecked a green button it received food it would just keep pecking away.  But, if you stop rewarding that behavior, it will eventually stop pecking the green button. However, if sometimes you give the pigeon food, and sometimes you don't, the poor little guys will just keep pecking at that little button because they just never know if a delicious pellet will appear.

I think we are creating little suspicious pigeons at our house. We try to be consistent with our plan, but it is hard. M is pretty regularly choosing Starve. She's not losing weight, she has plenty of food to eat, she just chooses not to do so. I think she had pizza all three meals yesterday because neither of us could argue any more. She woke up begging for "cold pep-a-poni pizza" for breakfast, she's basically ready for college. I know its bad in the long run, but it brings such a ridiculous amount of joy to my heart to see that kid eat.