I am reading a biography of Steven Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak helped create the most valuable company in the history of the world, Apple. There is much to learn by reading about geniuses. One thing I have learned from the start of the book is that with the disadvantage of immaturity, a person can be both a genius on the rise and a fool. While a college student, Wozniak used something I taught about today, shaping, to have fun at the expense of others. He build a device that allowed him to create static on any nearby TV (he was a genius!). Then he would go into the common TV room of a college residential hall and secretly create static. As someone tried to fix the TV, he would sometimes end the static. The a few minutes later he would start the static again and keep it going until the person did something entertaining, such as holding on to the antenna. Then he would end the static, only to start it again soon, this time ending the static only when the person did something more entertaining such as holding the antenna while holding one foot in the air. I can picture him trying hard to keep from laughing his guts out.

Woz may not have known the term shaping, but he grasped the concept. More commonly humans use shaping to teach complicated behaviors like riding a bicycle or speaking a foreign language. We try to obtain gradual improvement by slowly raising the standard for reinforcement (the reward) from some realistic starting point up to where the student learns the behavior at the level desired. Shaping is a large part of how you and I learned to walk and to talk. Consider: A child receives reinforcement for babbling. Then parents raise the standard for praise to saying a work-like sound, such as ma-ma-ma. Then the child has to say a real word to mean something, such as toy for a toy. Eventually the child has to speak clearly enough to communicate desires to get reinforced.

Have you been shaping a complex behavior in someone? Teaching someone a new dance? A new sport?

John Malouff, PhD, JD
Assoc Prof of Psychology