Superstition revisited: Sex, species, and adventitious reinforcement

Skinner’s (1948) ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon paper proposed that accidental response-reward contingencies, via adventitious reinforcement, could operantly condition the behaviors of pigeons under fixed-time (response-independent) schedules of food delivery. Skinner likened the behavior of pigeons under these fixed-time schedules to the superstitious behavior of humans and proposed that both response patterns were the result of contiguous pairings of rewards following some response. Alternative explanations of superstitious behavior have included Staddon and Simmelhag’s (1971) stimulus substitution account and Timberlake and Lucas’s (1985) elicited species-typical appetitive behavior account. Under both these alternative explanations of superstitious behavior, observations of pigeons under fixed-time schedules revealed a lack of idiosyncratic responding, which is a critical element in Skinner’s explanation of superstitious behavior via adventitious reinforcement. The following study implemented 4 fixed-time schedule experiments to further study superstition. In Experiment 1, male and female pigeons were compared, which provided support for the disparity in response patterns observed in previous studies. Experiments 2–4 examined the behavior of roller pigeons, ring-necked doves, and bantam chickens. In all the above studies, a lack of idiosyncratic responding and emergence of species-typical foraging behavior was observed. The results provide additional evidence that the ‘superstitious’ behavior that emerges in pigeons and other organisms under response-independent food schedules is the result of elicited species-typical food getting behaviors, and that these behaviors emerge as a result of frequent food deliveries in environments that support such foraging repertoires.