Unbiased and unnoticed verbal conditioning: the double agent robot procedure.
Automatic cues like smooth tape can unconsciously shape polite speech—no human praise needed.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two adults thought they were running a study. They sat at a panel and asked a robot questions. The robot answered through a speaker. Some replies were smooth. Some were choppy.
The adults did not know the tape speed changed when they used polite request forms. Smooth tape was the reinforcer. The robot never said 'good job.' The tape itself did the shaping.
What they found
Both adults slowly started asking questions more politely. They never noticed the rule. Even when the researchers asked, the adults said nothing had changed.
The tape speed alone worked like praise. The adults reinforced their own words without knowing it.
How this fits with other research
Critchfield (1996) got the same result with human feedback. Adults talked more about a target topic when the experimenter said 'mm-hm.' Both studies show verbal shaping works without the person noticing.
Mace et al. (1990) pushed the idea further. Preschool kids said they were pressing a button fast. Just saying it made them press faster. The 1970 robot study started this line; the kid study proves it works with younger learners and real objects.
Davison et al. (1968) looks opposite at first glance. They used response cost to stop too much talking. The 1970 paper adds the flip side: you can also grow new verbal forms with tiny automatic cues. Same lab, two tools—shrink or grow speech.
Why it matters
You can shape client language without constant praise. A chime, click, or short silence can act as reinforcement if it follows the target form. Try pairing a brief pleasant sound each time a client uses a full sentence. Fade the sound later. The words may stick even after the cue is gone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Subjects who were told they were "experimenters" attempted to reinforce fluent speech in a supposed subject with whom they spoke via intercom. The supposed subject was to say nouns, one at a time, on request by the "experimenter", who reinforced fluent pronunciation with points. Actually, the "experimenter" was talking to a multi-track tape recording, one track of which contained fluently spoken nouns, the other track containing disfluently spoken nouns. If the "experimenter's" request for the next noun was in a specified form a word from the fluent track was played to him as reinforcement; requests in any other form produced the word from the disfluent track. Repeated conditioning of specific forms of requests was accomplished with two subject-"experimenters," who were unable to describe changes in their own behavior, or the contingencies applied. This technique improved upon an earlier method that had yielded similar results, but was less thoroughly controlled against possible human bias.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1970 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1970.14-99