can pigeons read this one gives every indication because it's been taught to distinguish between two words and to behave appropriately he's learned his different response to each sign by being rewarded with food so the bird isn't acting independently its behavior is shaped by controlling its environment the first task was to isolate an individual piece of behavior and see how that could be changed skinner did this by keeping individual pigeons at about three quarters of their normal weight so that the birds were always hungry and food could be used as an automatic reward the pigeon was studied in a uniform box one it quickly grew used to one piece of behavior picking a colored disc was measured on a graph the pigeon learned that picking the disc produced a reward then the behavior of pecking could be studied in relation to how often that reward was offered or in skinner's terms what was the schedule of reinforcement the main thing is what's what we call schedules of reinforcement reinforcement of what the layman calls reward and you can schedule it so that a reward occurs every now and then when a pigeon does something we usually use a response with a pigeon pecking a little disc a little spot on the wall and you can be enforced with food but you don't reinforce every time you're every perhaps every tenth time or perhaps only once every minute or something like that there are a very large number of schedules and they have their special effects and there is a good example of how you can move from the the pigeon to the human case because one of the one of the schedules which is very effective with the rats for pigeons is what we call the variable ratio schedule and that is at the heart of all gambling devices and has the same effect the pigeon can become a pathological gambler just as a person can now the fact that we found that out with pigeons and could prove it by removing and changing the schedule makes it easy for us to interpret the case with the human subject we don't say that the human subject uh gambles to punish himself as the audience might say or gamble because he feels excited when he does so nothing is nothing of the sword people gamble because of the schedule of the reinforcement that follows and this is true of all gambling systems we all have variable ratios built into them so what we've learned from the pigeon it made it possible to interpret this vast field very effectively where does that leave free will because we all think we have a choice whether to do things or not to do things yes well you see we it leaves it in the position of a fiction we we have assumed somehow or other that these internal states feelings and so on have initiated something they have started something they have created we we have done something involved in a voluntary way we have willed to act if you now look at the actual history we find that there are external reasons why this has happened in other words by discovering the causes of behavior we can dispose of the imagined internal cause we dispose of free will as a an american divine of the 18th century jonathan edwards did he said we believe in free will because we know about our behavior but not about its causes and of course it's a science it's the the object of a science of behavior to discover causes and once you have found those causes there is less you need to attribute to an internal act of will and eventually i think we need to attribute nothing to it