A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I drove to Napier to meet a just-arrived colleague from the University of Oregon, Sheila Crowell, who is visiting Wellington until June. We spent a lovely evening in Napier and drove back to Wellington via Martinborough the next day. In between commenting on the beautiful landscape, Sheila told me about a news article she had read about rats taking selfies … I added that to my “things to write about in the Listener” mental file.
Usually, these news pieces have a hot-off-the-press scientific article at heart, but this time, it’s not a piece of “formal” research but an art project by French photographer Augustin Lignier.
Lignier used a modified Skinner Box to train two rats to take pictures. In a traditional Skinner Box, an animal will get a sugary or chocolatey reward for pressing a button in response to some environmental stimulus, such as a light going on. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, better known as BF Skinner, developed this method to test theories about how humans learn, but used animals, which are cheaper to run.
Along the way, he showed you can make pigeons superstitious by giving them random reinforcement – rewarding them regardless of what they’re doing. Researchers have shown this works for undergraduate research participants, too. Basically, when you can’t work out what the connection is between behaviour and reward, you’ll try different things, and if you happen to get a reward just after scratching your head, you’ll keep trying it. But next time, you were also hopping on one leg. Cue, participant scratching while hopping, and so on.
During World War II, Skinner was given US$25,000 by the American military research committee to “pilot” the training of pigeons to guide missiles to their targets. Yep, strap some pigeons in a missile and get them to fly it to the target. Wikipedia tells me that Skinner complained that the biggest problem he had wasn’t training the pigeons, but to get anyone to take him seriously.
Back to selfies. Lignier’s box rewarded his rats when they pressed the lever to take a photo, and the photo was then projected on screens around the box. Once the animal subjects got the hang of press-lever-get-sugar, he reduced the rate of reward and then stopped entirely. The rats kept on taking photos.
When your child does this – carries on good behaviour after you’ve stopped rewarding it – that might be because the reward is no longer the piece of chocolate but the warm internal glow of knowing they’ve done something good. Because rats don’t fill in surveys or respond to interviews, we don’t know exactly why Augustin and Arthur (he named the rats after himself and his brother) kept on taking snaps. But Lignier reckons there’s something metaphorical in there about human behaviour – in this case, addiction to social media: pressing the button long after there’s any objective reward for doing so.
Humans can fill in surveys, so we know a bit more about our own selfie-taking motivations. For example, it stands to reason that if we think we look good, we’ll memorialise it in a selfie. But research also shows that people who take and edit selfies are less secure in their appearance-related self-concept than those who don’t. Pay attention to your children’s posts, parents.
Although selfies have become ubiquitous over the past two decades, they’re a bit of a double-edged sword: we take and post heaps of them but they often attract criticism and disrespect. Research says we often see others’ selfies as presenting a false persona or signalling narcissistic tendencies. But we tend to think of our own as a little ironic, and that helps us to deal with the contradiction that we discredit other’s selfies but continue to post our own.
