Active student responding...for evil
For more like this, say "McDonald's"
Gravity, it seemed, had been used for evil.
A heavy stone was placed upon his breast. Gradually other stones were added until his breath was gone.
An elliptical two sentences describe the torture and death of elderly asshole Giles Corey, who refused to admit to being a wizard, in 1692. What’s more, he refused to plead guilty or not guilty; hence he was sentenced to peine forte et dure, and remains the only American to be judicially sentenced to be “pressed to death.”
Gravity keeps us from floating away. Perhaps that was no comfort to Giles Corey.
Active student responding is a rather uncontroversial concept. As defined by Heward, it is “an observable response made to an instructional antecedent.” Simply put, this could be choral responding, response cards, electronic polling systems, etc. In the book Evidence-Based Educational Methods, active responding is highlighted in several chapters.
One mechanism at work in active student responding is an observing response. How do you know a student is “paying attention?” Students who sit silently while a teacher gives a lecture may not be attending to the teaching stimuli – they may be attending to other stimuli altogether. But a requirement to engage in choral responding, while imperfect, is a way to ensure that most students are attending to relevant teaching stimuli.
An observing response, it seems, could be used for evil.
In 2009, an application for a patent was filed. It was one of about half a million granted that year, inauspiciously titled System for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games. It was filed by an employee of Sony, a maker of both televisions and video game consoles. The patent was published in 2012.
As near as we can tell, this was first reported by a user on the NeoGAF video game forums. Technically, the user posted it concurrently on his blog, but NeoGAF was where it was picked up by other outlets.
Some popular press stories popped up by 2013. The technology described in the patent was overwhelmingly hated.
The hatred was spawned by this picture, one of a dozen filed in the patent:
“Say ‘McDonald’s’ to end commercial” cast a long shadow. In 2023, a tweet that included the above image and a single sentence describing the patent went viral, which then was picked up by lazy news outlets.
A patent – seemingly never implemented in the specific way pictured – went viral twice. That’s because even non-behaviorists recognize the mechanism. From the aforementioned NeoGAF forums:
Forums user GoofsterStud: he gets it.
While John Watson famously went into advertising after a career as a behaviorist, and may (or may not) have changed ads using behavioral psychology, Zig Engelmann actually has the better story.
In the early 1960s, Zig was working in advertising when a client asked him how they could get kids to remember their brand. How much repetition is needed? To Zig’s surprise, that research didn’t seem to exist.
He experimented with kids, including his own twin toddlers. Quickly, he found that he was more interested in teaching than in advertising. He abandoned his advertising career, and had a legendary impact on education.
Zig Engelmann had considerable success and support throughout his life. But it can’t really measure up to the material support that could be provided by McDonald’s. Sony’s R&D budget for 2009 was 432 billion yen – approximately $4.5 billion.
Zig was, at times, disillusioned with American public education. Perhaps this is an understatement. It’s undoubtedly true that it’s easier to build the next Playstation than to convince schools to adopt effective instruction.
And yet.
Forums user GoofsterStud, in 2013, recognized that an observing response will be effective for learning. He also was skeptical of using it in ads. Is GoofsterStud an optimistic ending to this story?
From Science & Human Behavior:
Skinner believed that control is more acceptable to people when it is obscured.
Consider what might be the most famous ad campaign of all time: Got Milk?
Yes, yes, it’s right there in the tagline: milk is the product. But the advertisements generally were designed to showcase a humorous shortage of milk – a man takes a bite of peanut butter, and suddenly has to answer a trivia question! If only he had milk.
The brilliance of the ads might be in how little they direct the viewer. They don’t ask you to buy milk. But…do you have it?
Advertising has become so indirect that “brand twitter” has become shorthand for elliptical non-ads that barely involve a sales pitch at all. Merely generating attention of any kind was the goal.
There has been a certain backlash to all of these forms of advertising. Countercontrol, Skinner theorized, was easier to marshall when the methods of control were elucidated. The magic is ruined when you see the strings.
“Say ‘McDonald’s’ to end commercial” is uniquely bad. But even random forums users can see that.
I forwarded this post to my son who makes TV/Social Media commercials.