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6

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 with 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. The company they formed spent the next half-century training more than 15,000 animals from 140 species for movies, traveling shows, amusement parks, corporations, and the government.

While writing about animal trainers, 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 reported, “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 may be able to teach—a fact that encourages animal trainers, and also parents, educators, and coaches. What has been learned we may be able to change by new learning—an assumption underlying stress management and counseling programs. No matter how unhappy, unsuccessful, or unloving we are, we can learn and change.

No topic is closer to the heart of psychology than learning, the process of acquiring, through experience, new and relatively enduring information or behaviors. (Learning acquires information, and memory—our next chapter topic—retains it.) In earlier chapters we considered the learning of sleep patterns, of gender roles, of visual perceptions. In later chapters we will see how learning shapes our thoughts, our emotions, our personality, and our attitudes.