A hungry pigeon will hit a disk 12,000 times in an hour when food comes only once in 110 pecks
Unpredictable rewards make people and animals work hardest and quit latest, the trick behind slot machines.
Farnam Street · The Power of Incentives: The Hidden Forces That Shape BehaviorUnpredictable rewards make people and animals work hardest.
A hungry pigeon hit a disk 12,000 times in an hour when food arrived on average once for every 110 hits. The bird was part of experiments by B.F. Skinner, a psychologist who studied how rewards shape behavior. It was on a variable-ratio schedule, where a payoff follows an unpredictable number of tries.
Unpredictable pay is cheaper for the payer. It also saves time handing out rewards, and surprise itself spurs more effort. It is the same setup facing slot machine players, salespeople, and telemarketers, who never know when the next win or sale will come.
That uncertainty also makes behavior hard to stop. Picture two gamblers, one paid every pull and one paid now and then: when both machines go dead, the steady winner quits fast while the occasional winner keeps pulling for a long time. The unpredictable schedule normally gets more responses than other schedules do.
Questions people ask
What is a Skinner box?
A Skinner box is a small test chamber with a lever or disk and a food dispenser. An animal inside learns that pressing the lever can produce food, which lets researchers count exact responses under different reward rules.
Do unpredictable rewards work the same way in people?
Yes. People on unpredictable payoffs, from commission sales to slot machines, also respond at high rates and keep going long after rewards stop. Psychologists call that persistence resistance to extinction, and casinos depend on it.
If unpredictable rewards produce the most work, why ever reward every time?
Paying every time is best for teaching something new, because each success makes clear what was correct. Once the behavior is learned, switching to occasional, unpredictable rewards maintains it more cheaply and produces faster responding.