[Question] Does anyone have a recommended resource about the research on behavioral conditioning, reinforcement, and shaping?

[Eli Tyre]

In animals or in humans. I was reading this post, and the linked paper, earlier today, and would like to know more of the science in this area.

A textbook would be great.

Individual papers, or anthologies, or youtube videos, or blog posts, or whatever, are also welcome.

Thanks,

Eli

[Pablo]

One book I’ve seen mentioned is Stephen Ray Flora’s The power of reinforcement. I read it a decade or so ago, and although my memory of it isn’t fresh, I remember not being too impressed by it. In particular, the book struck me as being written from the perspective of an apologist of reinforcement rather than a neutral, curious observer. Still, the book surveys the field in some detail and I think one could learn quite a bit from reading it.

Luke Muehlhauser wrote a post summarizing the literature, which provides lots of references for further reading.

Incidentally (and this isn’t an answer to your question, but a comment on the post you mention), I would take any self-experimentation findings by Seth Roberts with a big grain of salt. Gwern summarizes:

n=1 self-experiments aren’t that bad. The problem is, to speak a bit ill of the dead, Roberts systematically rejected randomization, blinding, appropriate statistical analysis, ignored power, published only anecdotes that supported his views, and wasn’t interested in fixing any of these problems even when they were very cheap to add (and he was well aware of the endless shortcuts he was taking—though he never criticized his own work the way he was able to criticize, say, Posit Science’s brain-game studies). When I did better self-experiments, I often reached different results.

[Eli Tyre]

Thanks!

The warning about Roberts’ standards is well taken.

[rmoehn]

These are the research-related resources listed in Karen Pryor’s ‘Don’t Shoot the Dog’, which itself is a great practical resource about training with reinforcement etc.:

• https://​​www.abainternational.org/​​

• https://​​behavior.org/​​