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Learning

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In the early 1940s, University of Minnesota graduate students Marian Breland and Keller Breland witnessed the power of a new learning technology. Their mentor, B. F. Skinner, would become famous for shaping rat and pigeon behaviors by delivering well-timed rewards as the animals inched closer and closer to a desired behavior. Impressed by Skinner’s results, the Brelands began shaping the behavior of cats, chickens, parakeets, turkeys, pigs, ducks, and hamsters (Bailey & Gillaspy, 2005). The rest is history. They eventually formed Animal Behavior Enterprises and spent the next half-century training more than 15,000 animals from 140 species for movies, traveling shows, amusement parks, corporations, and the government. The Brelands also trained trainers, including Sea World’s first training director.

While writing a book about animal trainers, journalist Amy Sutherland wondered if shaping had uses closer to home (2006a,b). If baboons could be trained to skateboard and elephants to paint, might “the same techniques…work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband”? Step by step, she “began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him [and] as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.” After two years of “thinking of my husband as an exotic animal species,” she reports, “my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love.”

Like husbands and other animals, much of what we do we learn from experience. Indeed, nature’s most important gift may be our adaptability—our capacity to learn new behaviors that help us cope with our changing world. We can learn how to build grass huts or snow shelters, submarines or space stations, and thereby adapt to almost any environment.

Learning breeds hope. What is learnable we can potentially teach—a fact that encourages parents, educators, coaches, and animal trainers. What has been learned we can potentially change by new learning—an assumption that underlies counselling, psychotherapy, and rehabilitation programs. No matter how unhappy, or unsuccessful, or unloved we are, that need not be the end of our story.

No topic is closer to the heart of psychology than learning. In earlier chapters we considered infants’ learning, and the learning of visual perceptions, of a drug’s expected effect, and of gender roles. In later chapters we will see how learning shapes our thoughts and language, our motivations and emotions, our personalities and attitudes. In Chapter 8, Memory, we will see how the brain stores and retrieves learning.

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