Shaping
 

There is a concept in behavioral psychology called shaping. By offering rewards for the preferred behavior, and ignoring the undesirable behavior, incidences of the preferred behavior increase. Say for example the purpose of the experiment was to increase the (unknowing) subject’s use of the word “the.” The experimenter would smile every time the subjected said “the” and remain straight-faced otherwise. Over even a short period of time, the use of the target word (or other desired behavior, such as looking to the right rather than at the examiner) should increase in frequency.

Hee hee hee...

Whatever. As long as I get the cheese at the end of the maze. :lol:

But tw can't see you smile over the web.

:D

I think the "ignoring the undesirable behavior" is key. Attention whores don't care if the response is positive or negative as long as there's a response. ;)

A broken cookie is still a cookie .

Some day we'll all look back on this and snarl.

My friend said his class tried this experiment with a teacher in an elevator. All of them faced away from the entrance on purpose and the (unsuspecting) teacher soon followed. I wonder if it really worked...

Bump

Shaping does work wonders on message boards. But isn't this thread another example of a response that would feed aforementioned "attention whores"?

It wouldn't matter in this case. It as as simple as ABC.
A - antecedent newbie comes to cellar.
B- behavior newbie craps on rug.
C- consequence we ignore (this means you Mari)

Now B- if Newbie installs new carpet
C- newbie gets a cookie.

The worrisome part is our community does not have control over reinforcing behaviors by fellow exiles or short tempered old timers.

I AM short tempered, aren't I? Been that way since day one, too. I try to work on that with varying degrees of success. I do notice that I'm NOT the only one who has been ill tempered here lately, though.

I've been putting off packing and thinking about my up coming big scarey leap to a new town 400 miles from everything and everyone I've come to know here. Sniping at the AG'ers has been one of my forms of distraction.

In the future, you all can just remind me, "Go pack, Mari." ;)