One of the classics is B. F. Skinner's narrative on his discovery of partial reinforcement effects. I don't have the citation handy right now, but the story is that he put his animals on an "intermittent" schedule of pellet delivery because he didn't have enough pellets to last through a weekend but wanted to travel to another town to attend a dance and did not want to spend a Saturday morning baking up a new batch of pellets. He expected his animals' responses to be partially extinguished when he returned and was amazed that they were working as hard as ever . . . and were resistant to extinction. Claudia Stanny
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Fri 10/28/2005 5:46 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
Cc:
Subject: Accidental discoveries
I like telling students about accidental discoveries -- where
researchers are looking for one thing but stumble upon another more
important phenomenon. It usually involves a creative reconstruction of
the results of one's work.
this link is a list of those sorts of things in material science:
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2004/04/19/51.asp
Does anyone have examples in psychology? One that I can think of is
"learned helplessness". The Minnesota researchers were wondering why
their dogs were failing to learn in an avoidance paradigm. I'd love to
know other examples.
Bill Scott
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