A Tale of Two Rats: The Backstory of a Clever Cartoon

Abstract

A well-known cartoon among psychologists and behavior analysts depicts two rats in a Skinner box, leaning over a response lever as one says to the other, “Boy, do we have this guy conditioned, every time I press the bar down he drops a pellet in.” Anyone who has ever conducted an experiment, worked with a client, or taught someone can relate to the cartoon’s message of reciprocal control between subject and experimenter, client and therapist, and teacher and student. This is the tale of that cartoon and its impact. It begins mid-20^th-century at Columbia University, then a hotbed of behavioral psychology, which bears an intimate connection to the cartoon’s appearance. The tale expands from Columbia to follow the lives of its creators from their undergraduate days there to their deaths decades later. The infusion of the cartoon into American psychology begins with B. F. Skinner, but, over the years, it also has appeared in introductory psychology textbooks and in iterative form in mass media outlets such as the World Wide Web and magazines like The New Yorker. The heart of the tale, however, was stated in the second sentence of this abstract. The tale ends with a review of how reciprocal relations like those depicted by the cartoon’s creators have influenced research and practice in behavioral psychology.

Cartoons have an important place in teaching, whether the students are 20-year-olds taking a conventional college-level course, trainees for important caregiving positions, employees in major industries, or parents striving to help their children with learning and adjustment. Cartoons can distill complex ideas to a few strokes of the pen and an equally few well-chosen words. As such, they allow teachers to connect with their students with the subject matter in unique ways that are easily relatable to everyday life. Cartoons also inject humor into what for some is deadly dull stuff, perhaps increasing interest and awareness.

This is the backstory of a well-known, even famous, cartoon in the teaching of behavioral psychology.1 The cartoon, shown in Fig. 1, depicts two rats in front of a response lever inside a Skinner box, as one says to the other, with what could be interpreted as a smirk on its visage, “Boy, do we have this guy conditioned. Every time I press the bar down, he drops a pellet in.” Its unusual subject matter, accurate depiction of a Skinner box of the time, and insightful commentary on both the rat and human condition invite further questions about its origins, its creators, and its impact. These are the subjects of this tale.

Fig. 1.

The original version of the Jester Cartoon (1950)

The Context

The cartoon appeared in the Columbia University humor magazine, Jester of Columbia (hereafter, Jester), in its November 1950 issue. Although the cartoon often has been cited in psychology textbooks and online websites (and probably used in presentations far more often than that), the citations vary widely, with its date of origin, for example, varying from 1928 to 1961. The correct citation for the original appears in the reference list (Mazzeo & Gardner, 1950). The Jester began publication on April Fools’ Day, 1910 and continued to appear in more recent times in electronic format until it was officially “derecognized from Columbia recognition in the spring of 2022 after a few semesters of inactivity” (Jocelyn K. Wilk, personal communication, February 6, 2023). In mid-20^th-century America, campus humor magazines were popular with students, offering social commentary on the contemporary college scene. The Jester was highly regarded, including among its staff alumni Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk and one of the intellectual leaders of the beat generation, poet Allen Ginsberg. The first clue of some direct connection to psychology comes simply from the cartoon’s appearance in the Jester, which prided itself on delivering sharp observations, on a continuum from positive to scathing, of events transpiring on the Columbia campus and beyond. What might this cartoon reflect about academic life at Columbia at midcentury?

To answer this question, consider behaviorism in American psychology at the time of the creation of the cartoon, which was dominated by the work of Clark L. Hull at Yale University and B. F. Skinner at Harvard University. It also was the best of times for behaviorism at Columbia University, where its strong representative was Skinner’s former graduate school classmate and lifelong friend, Fred S. Keller. Keller and fellow Columbia faculty member William N. Schoenfeld together created a program that, along with Harvard, produced many of the early leaders of what would become known first as the experimental analysis of behavior and later, behavior analysis. Table 1 provides a list of some of the many graduate and undergraduate alumni of the Columbia program who went on to distinguished careers primarily, but not exclusively, in behavior analysis during the last half of the 20^th century. Notable even among this august list, for very different reasons, are Murray Sidman, whose 1960 book, Tactics of Scientific Research, became the most important resource for what today are called single-case experimental designs (e.g., Barlow et al., 2009; Hersen & Barlow, 1976; Kazdin, 1982, 2011) and Joyce Brothers, who became the veritable public face of American psychology in the 1950s and 1960s through her frequent television appearances and eventually her own television show. Brothers’s dissertation was on the topic of shock avoidance and anxiety, but after completing her degree she approached psychology more eclectically.

Table 1.

A sampling of notable alumni of the Columbia University behavioral psychology program

J. J. Antonitis

John Boren

Joyce Brothers

A. C. Catania (undergraduate)

Donald Cook

William C. Cummings

James A. Dinsmoor

Charles B. Ferster

Ralph Hefferline

Richard (Dick) Malott

Francis Mechner

Allen Neuringer (undergraduate)

John A. (Tony) Nevin

Murray Sidman

Arthur Snapper

Gerald Zuriff (undergraduate)

Not only did Columbia offer graduate education in the behaviorism of the time, but Keller also had the opportunity to reshape the undergraduate curriculum in psychology. As he noted in his autobiography, “[i]n 1945–46, strongly supported by the College Administration and more cautiously approved by Henry Garrett [the department chair] and the Psychology Department, we were able to lay the groundwork for transforming our introductory course” (Keller, 2009, p. 196). And transform it they did. In the fall of 1946, their iteration of General Psychology, Psychology 1–2, a two-semester course, comprised of 2 hr of lecture and 4 hr of laboratory per week, was offered for the first time to 180 Columbia men (Columbia College was an all-male institution at that time) out of 360 who applied for the course (from a total enrollment of 1,500–1,800 undergraduates in the college). The course was controversial even before its implementation. In the quotation above, Keller (2009) noted the hesitancy of the Psychology Department chair over turning the introductory level psychology course into one focused on promulgating behavioral psychology. Wendt’s (1949) negative response to Keller and Schoenfeld’s (1949) article describing the course included an analysis of how the dynamic relation between establishing such a focused course/curriculum and subsequent allocation and reallocation of limited resources can change the character of academic psychology departments.

Perhaps the most unique feature of the new course was its rat lab (by now the astute reader may sense where this is going with respect to the cartoon), in which each student conducted a series of demonstration experiments with their own individual rat. Both the course content and the topics studied in the rat lab became the model for many, if not most, subsequent iterations of psychology of learning and behavior principles courses up to the present (see, e.g., Lattal et al., 1990). Of the laboratory portion of the course, The New York Times observed in its obituaries of both Fred S. Keller (Saxon, 1996a) and William Schoenfeld (Saxon, 1996b) that its inclusion “made Columbia the first university in the world where undergraduates [“conducted experiments with” is the wording in Keller’s obituary; changed to “experimented with” in Schoenfeld’s] living animals from the start to finish of the course.”

In 1950, Keller and Schoenfeld published what remains a model for behavior principles textbooks. Somewhat grandly, they drew their title from two other books that revolutionized the psychological thinking of their times, Spencer’s (1855) Principles of Psychology and James’s (1890) two-volume tome of the same title. Keller and Schoenfeld seemed to envision a second behavioristic revolution in psychology.

[Principles of Psychology] received the ultimate accolade when Skinner wrote to Keller that his own Science and Human Behavior (S & HB), itself a classic, “could be written only because [Principles of Psychology] came first” (p. 228). Indeed, S & HB was dedicated “To F. S. Keller.” Clark Hull wrote to Keller of [Principles of Psychology], “You . . . have made a teachable elementary psychology out of technical material in a way which I would not have believed possible if I had not seen the book.” (Lattal, 2009, p. 215)

Table 2 shows the goals of the course, the table of contents of Principles of Psychology, and the laboratory exercises the students completed across the 2-semester course. Even though behavioral research since the book was published has changed, the examples and amount of detail available about behavioral processes have a remarkably contemporary feel to them. Almost all of the general topics of the lectures and laboratory exercises they developed remain part of contemporary courses in learning and behavior analysis, suggesting the universality of those principles. Keller and Schoenfeld (1949) provided a detailed description of the course, and they along with Frick, the person in charge of the laboratory, described in detail the apparatus used in the rat lab (Frick et al., 1948), offering a blueprint for others to recreate the Columbia student rat laboratory in their own universities.

Table 2.

Descriptions of Psychology 1–2 at Columbia College

A. Goals of Psychology 1-2 (from Keller & Schoenfeld, 1949)

- Give pupils some facts about behavior of organisms

- Present “coordinated picture” of psychology

- Instill feeling for scientific method and research in psychology

- Help student apply behavior principles to his life and that of others

- Attract ablest students to advanced study

B. Keller and Schoenfeld (1950) Table of Contents

Psychology and the Reflex

Respondent Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Extinction and Reconditioning

Generalization and Discrimination

Response Variability and Differentiation

Chaining

Secondary Reinforcement

Motivation

Emotion

Social Behavior

C. Contents of the Laboratory Component of Psychology 1-2 (from Keller & Schoenfeld, 1949)

- Operant conditioning with regular reinforcement (crf)

- Retention and extinction of a conditioned operant

- Periodic reconditioning (at fixed interval)

- Formation of a discrimination

- Reversal of a discrimination

- Effect of punishment

- Reduction of operant latency

- Chaining

- Secondary reinforcement

- Effect of drive on response rate

- Light aversion

- Conditioning of an avoidance response

- Conflict of motives

- Experimental prototype of “fetishism”

- Experimental prototype of “masochism

The apparatus depicted in the cartoon suggests a connection to the Columbia College Psychology 1–2 laboratory. One clue is in the caption, which refers to “a pellet.” “Food pellet” is a common technical way of describing “a piece of food” or “food.” It is a description that might be expected of someone who has worked around Skinner boxes, as is describing the lever action as a “press” rather than a “push.” These wordings thus offer suggestive, but certainly not conclusive, evidence of the sought-after connection between the course and the cartoon. More conclusive evidence comes from the drawing of the response lever that the rat is pressing. It is a single tube bent into a “U” shape so that it could be inserted into the chamber through an “H” shaped opening. The levers shown in the photographs published by Frick et al. (1948) are of a similar “U” shape. The real smoking gun connecting the cartoon with the Psychology 1–2 laboratory, however, comes from a description of the Columbia operant chambers by James Dinsmoor. In an article describing his remembrances of being a graduate student at Columbia during the time period under discussion, he wrote: “[e]ach rat currently serving as a subject . . . was housed in its own, numbered cage. . . . When the time came to start an experimental session, we moved the cage into position and inserted a lever through the H-shaped slot cut in one end” (Dinsmoor, 1990, p. 138; emphasis added). Another person who was a teaching assistant in the laboratory (J. V. Keller, personal communication, October 28, 2018) independently corroborated this feature, which is a prominent one in the cartoon. With the provenance of the cartoon’s chamber thus established, the next question is how the cartoon came to be created. The cartoon again supplies a clue because it contains, in the lower left, the names of its creators: Mazzeo and Gardner.

The Creators

Henry J. Mazzeo, Jr

Of the candidates provided by several web searches, one Henry J. Mazzeo, Jr., emerged as the most likely candidate. The January/February 2010a issue of Columbia College Today, the Columbia College alumni magazine, noted under “Class of 1952” the passing of “Henry J. Mazzeo Jr., advertising writer, Yonkers, N.Y., on May 10, 2009. Mazzeo earned an M.A. in English and comparative literature in 1956 from GSAS” (Columbia College Today, 2010b; emphasis in original). Further research on Ancestry.com revealed Mazzeo to be a native New Yorker who lived all of his life in Yonkers, NY, just outside New York City. He was an only child and never married, dying intestate (following surgery for an unspecified disorder; Noël Vreeland Carter, personal communication, June 15, 2017). Being the right age in relation to the cartoon’s first appearance invited further research into Mazzeo’s earlier life. As it turned out, he also was recognized early for his artistic talent. An article in the July 17, 1946, Yonkers Herald Statesman described Mazzeo as “an admirer of Walt Disney” who drew a poster for the library:

Done in pastel pencil and advertising “Summer Reading,” the poster shows a Snow-White-ish young woman sitting backed up to a tree, demure eyes downcast as she reads—“The Snake Pit” (current best seller on an experience in a mental institution).

Around the tree trunk a bit, his unidentified book open but disregarded for the moment is a young man vaguely resembling Boris Karloff [a famous horror-film star of the era] in his lighter moments and eyeing the young lady in the Karloff merry way. (Herald Statesman, 1946)

The evidence to this point that Mazzeo was indeed a co-creator of the cartoon is as follows: artist of at least some note, good sense of irony, and a 1952 graduate of Columbia College. Turning to the Columbia University archives provided the final nails in the coffin (a metaphor that Mazzeo, with his macabre, wry humor, would appreciate). In an article published in the campus newspaper dated April 4, 1951, it was noted that Henry Mazzeo was named the art editor of the Jester (Columbia Daily Spectator, 1951). Inspection of copies of Jesters from his period of undergraduate study indicated that this appointment was the culmination of several earlier positions he held with the Jester, and he remained its art editor during his senior year at Columbia (1951–1952). Recall that the cartoon was published in the November 1950 issue. At the time of its publication, Mazzeo was listed as a member of the magazine’s “art staff.” By now, the evidence was clear that Henry Mazzeo, Jr., was indeed the artist who signed the cartoon.

But why would he and his co-creator select this topic for a cartoon? One or the other, or both, would seem to have had to have taken the Keller and Schoenfeld course, but could it be proven? Inquiries to the Columbia University Registrar’s Office went nowhere. The Office told me that it could release enrollment information only to next of kin or with the latter’s permission. After several further emails back and forth with that office, and after doing the research on Ancestry.com to prove that there was no next of kin, the following email arrived: “Dear Andy: In reference to your inquiry I found a Henry Joseph Mazzeo, Jr. who was enrolled in Psychology 1 for the fall semester of 1949 and Psychology 2 for the spring semester of 1950 through Columbia College (undergraduate school)” (Bill Santin, personal communication, January 20, 2016).

Richard A. Gardner

The history of the second-listed creator, Gardner, began with the discovery of his photograph and a brief sketch in the 1952 Columbia College yearbook, The Columbian. The only “Gardner” to graduate from Columbia in the 4 years after the cartoon appeared, Richard A. Gardner also was listed as the “Local Circulation” manager of the Jester in the Fall 1950 issue. In volume 50, no. 4 (the issue in which the cartoon appeared), he was listed as “Art Candidate,” but was not listed in any issue of the Jester thereafter. Gardner was a premed major and in his senior yearbook he listed his service with the Jester among his activities. A subsequent inquiry to the Registrar’s office resulted in a more prompt (than was the case with the inquiry some time earlier about Mazzeo’s course enrollment status) confirmation that Gardner was enrolled in Psychology 1 in the fall of 1950, a year after Mazzeo started the course.

During the period 1948–1952, Gardner’s name appears only on one cartoon: the one that is the subject of this tale. In that same period, Mazzeo created, both individually and in collaboration with others, more than 40 cartoons for the Jester. None of these other cartoons have anything resembling the academic focus of the one derived from his and Gardner’s Psychology 1–2 rat lab experience. A sampling of Mazzeo’s cartoons appears in Fig. 2. The two at the top appeared in a special issue of the Jester for which Mazzeo served as co-editor. In a review of that special issue in the March 12, 1951 issue of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the reviewer singled these two cartoons out for special praise, noting, “Henry Mazzeo’s junior Batman is surpassed only by his Cinderella” (Outcalt, 1951). Mazzeo’s early sense of irony and interest in the macabre suggested in the 1946 Yonkers Herald Statesman is revealed in many of his cartoons, illustrated here particularly in the cartoons on the lower left and right. His lifelong interest in Walt Disney characters (see below) is reflected in the top right cartoon with his depiction of a Cinderella theme. Mazzeo’s interest in child-literature characters also is clear from the Alice cartoon in the middle of the figure.

Fig. 2.

Sample of other Jester cartoons created by Henry Mazzeo, Jr

Figure 3 shows Mazzeo’s and Gardner’s yearbook photographs (top), Mazzeo with other members of the art staff during his senior year at Columbia (middle), and (bottom) a self-caricature of Mazzeo that was published in the Jester issue announcing his appointment as its Art Editor.

Fig. 3.

Photographs of Henry J. Mazzeo, Jr. and Richard Gardner from the Columbia University Yearbook (top, left and right, respectively), The Colombian; Jester staff photograph from 1950 Yearbook showing Mazzeo as the second from the left (middle); The lower photograph is a self-portrait of Henry J. Mazzeo, Jr. from the Jester issue announcing his appointment as its art editor (the writing on Henry’s right collar reads “EGO?”). (Top and middle photographs reproduced with permission of The Columbian)

Speculations about the Origin of the Cartoon

Precisely what circumstances transpired to create the cartoon can never be known, but some observations about the creators and their times are suggestive. These are, of course, only speculations and can be considered only in that context. The style of the cartoon—its lines, expressions, and gestures—all are similar to other cartoons by Mazzeo, suggesting that its rendering likely was his work. As for the idea of the cartoon, both creators had experiences in the Psychology 1 laboratory by the time it was created, suggesting at least two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, possibilities.

One possible set of circumstances leading to the cartoon is suggested by the backgrounds and proclivities of its two creators. Mazzeo was a clever cartoonist, an artist, and an English major at Columbia. This background suggests he might have been a careful observer, someone attuned to subtleties of human interactions. This same attunement seems likely in Gardner, given his future profession and contributions thereto (see next section). Nothing is known by the author about Gardner’s sense of irony, but Mazzeo’s is evident in much of his creative work, from his first poster (described above) to his interactions with his friends later in his life (see below). The combination of attunement to nuances of behavior and irony are the central features of the cartoon. Thus, its creation simply could be a function of two bright young men reacting cleverly and insightfully to a shared experience in one of their courses.

A second possible set of circumstances leading to the cartoon, perhaps in combination with the above, perhaps not, is suggested by the observations and comments of others familiar with the course. Gerald Zuriff was an undergraduate at Columbia during the Keller–Schoenfeld period at Columbia, moving on to obtain his Ph.D. degree from Harvard, where he conducted research in the Pigeon Lab (Lattal, 2002). Among his subsequent conceptual writings about behaviorism, he authored a definitive textbook on the philosophy of behaviorism (Zuriff, 1985, 1986). In a reminiscence about his undergraduate experiences at Columbia College, he observed the following:

[Keller and Schoenfeld] led a department of true believers in [the philosophy of behaviorism]. . . . Columbia University in those days was synonymous with Skinnerian behaviorism, and introductory psychology consisted of reading Keller and Schoenfeld's (1950) Principles of Psychology accompanied by a rat lab in operant conditioning, much to the consternation of many Columbia undergraduates. (Zuriff, 2002, p. 368; emphasis added)

One such consternated undergraduate was author and Columbia College alumnus Michael Gruber, who, in his novel, The Forgery of Venus (2008, pp. 103–104), described his main character’s quite negative reaction to taking what sounds suspiciously like the Keller–Schoenfeld designed course. Although the character (and, by extrapolation, the author) “seemingly did not care for operant conditioning, the course content left a sufficient impression on [Gruber] that he singled it out for mention by his character” (Lattal, 2009, p. 3). In light of these observations and commentary, not beyond imagination is a scene in which the two Jester staff members are sitting around doing what undergraduates do—“chewing the fat” was the expression of the times; the contemporary version probably is cruder—and the discussion turns to their common experience in Psychology 1, in which Gardner currently is enrolled and Mazzeo had by now completed. In light of Zuriff’s observations, it seems at least possible that in this imaginary interaction both express some consternation or maybe even stronger displeasure with the course. The cartoon’s conception could be interpreted as an expression of a negative reaction to a course that appears to have been received similarly by many students.2 Thus interpreted, the cartoon becomes a sort of literary/artistic flip-off to both the course itself and to a system that created such a course. The latter is consistent with a theme of at least some of the Jester’s other content of that time. Of course, the second interpretation may require the first interpretation to come off as it did. Should the second interpretation be closer to the truth, there is an ultimate irony here that both authors might have relished: their pointed cartoon, which may have been a rebellious response to a course they may have neither appreciated nor enjoyed, was destined to take on a future life in behavioral psychology as an insightful and enduring example of and commentary on reciprocity between controlling agents and their controlees.

The Post-Columbia Lives of the Cartoonists

Mazzeo

After completing his master’s degree in English at Columbia, according to the biographical sketch on the back inside cover of his 1968 edited anthology (see below), Mazzeo was offered a fellowship for further graduate study in English at Ohio State University and a scholarship to study art at Cooper Union. He accepted neither. He lived at home with his mother until her death and thereafter alone in the home in which he lived from boyhood forward until his own death in 2009. He worked in advertising in Manhattan for most of his adult life, commuting daily from Yonkers (Noël Vreeland Carter, personal communication, June 17, 2017). Except for the pursuit of some literary work (see below) and involvement in an unsuccessful attempt to save the old Yonkers Public Library building library from destruction (MacAuley, 1982), at this point my search for information on Mazzeo’s life seemed to have reached a dead end.

Then, some months later after this seeming dead end, while perusing deep into the web late one night in search of further information about Mazzeo’s adult life, I ran across the following, posted next to a large Mickey Mouse mask that was part of a beautiful web site presenting a virtual toy museum: “My friend Henry Mazzeo Jr., who commuted, every day, told me [the mask] was [in the store], so I went to see it and brought along my camera with me. It was worth the journey.” This had to be our Mazzeo. There was no email address, only a post office in upstate New York, so I wrote to the PO address, outlining my interest in Mazzeo. As time passed since posting the letter, I gave up hope on learning more about him. One day a few months later, however, I received the following email from the website’s creator:

Dear Andy: I am so pleased to inform you that thanks to your diligence, astute powers of observation, and the unexpected workings of Fate, you have hit the jackpot. . . . Henry was a keen observer of humanity, and he continued to draw wry and witty cartoons, that spoke volumes in a few well penned lines, throughout his life. . . . I met Henry due to the fact that he, like me, was an enthusiastic fan and collector of Walt Disney. His fascination with Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” bordered on obsession. (Mel Birnkrant, personal communication, February 14, 2016)

The author of the note and Mazzeo remained friends until the 1960s, when they began to drift apart, but the author continues to appreciate Mazzeo’s unique talents and personality to the present. The author also put me in contact with a woman who remained close to Mazzeo for the rest of his life. She, in fact, buried him in her family’s plot because at his death he had no family to undertake even that final farewell (Noël Vreeland Carter, personal communication, June 15, 2017). From Ms. Carter, I learned that he was active in literary circles in New York City throughout his adult life. In 1968, he published an edited book, Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural (Mazzeo, 1968), which was illustrated by the well-known and equally macabre artist Edward Gorey. The book contains 18 stories by well-known writers on the subject, including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. It still was receiving positive reviews in 2013, 45 years after its initial appearance (Draa, 2013). It also continues to appear on the website Goodreads with positive reader comments. In this same period, Mazzeo translated a Russian novel into English and also completed a novel of his own creation. After a publisher rejected it, however, he never wrote anything else in the area of fiction (Noël Vreeland Carter, personal communication, June 15, 2017). In addition to his copywriting for the advertising agency that employed him, he also did some writing for Newsweek magazine. As Mr. Birnkrant noted in the email cited previously, Mazzeo continued to draw cartoons, and his friend Ms. Carter shared many originals with me. Most continued macabre themes involving vampires, skeletons, and spirits of one sort and another. Many have a distinctly Edward Gorey stylistic feel to them and they remained similar in style and substance to several of those that Mazzeo created for the Jester.

Gardner

After finishing medical school at Columbia University, Richard Gardner remained in New York City, becoming a well-known psychiatrist who authored 40 books and 250 professional journal articles. Among the most popular was The Boys and Girls Book about Divorce (Gardner, 1970). He also created an early therapeutic board game, The Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game (Gardner, 1973). In 1985, he introduced the “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS), which Newsweek magazine defined as describing “a set of behaviors exhibited by kids whose parents deliberately turn them against the other parent, through a variety of techniques that are at once coercive, manipulative, vindictive and sociopathic” (Weller, 2014). Gardner alienated many women’s advocacy groups with his observations (one obituary in England described him as “an authentic American monster” [Gumbel, 2003]) and simultaneously developed strong supporters among divorced-fathers’ support groups. His comments in 1992 concerning the Mia Farrow/Woody Allen divorce dispute brought broader attention, much of it negative, to his ideas about PAS (Weller, 2014). The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (American Psychiatric Association, 2022) does not identify PAS as such; however, it does include language describing mental health problems surrounding parental alienation. Gardner died by his own hand in 2003. He received a full-article obituary in the New York Times (Lavietes, 2003). The author’s attempts to contact his surviving family members were not successful. Such was the fate of the two creators, but what of the cartoon itself in those many years since 1950?

The Life of the Cartoon after Its Creation

In 1956, in an American Psychologist article, which was subsequently a chapter invited by Sigmund Koch for his multivolume Psychology: A Study of a Science, Skinner described his own case history as a scientist (Skinner, 1956). He wrote, “[t]he organism whose behavior is most extensively modified and most completely controlled in research of the sort I have described is the experimenter himself” (p. 232). To illustrate this point, he included a version of the Jester cartoon, shown in Fig. 4, in what likely is its first post-Jester publication appearance. The cartoons shown in Figs. 1 and 4 are not identical. In fact, they are not even close in appearance. The one from Skinner (1956) lacks the precision and finesse of line apparent in the original. The rats’ facial expressions on the reproduced version appear blander, lacking the smirks (admittedly subjectively) apparent on the original version, expressions that lend support to the possible “in your face” provenance of the cartoon noted above. The “H” slot for the lever was omitted and the background is plainer and thus starker in the reproduced version. Perhaps the most egregious difference between them is the omission in the reproduced version of the pellet tray, without which those pellets the rats are discussing cannot be delivered. In addition, Skinner does not precisely reproduce the caption, which appears in the text rather than beneath the cartoon itself.

Fig. 4.

The version of the cartoon that appeared in Skinner (1956). The caption Skinner used, “Boy have I got this guy conditioned! Every time I press the bar down he drops in a piece of food” was not included below the cartoon, but rather appeared in the body of the article). (From Skinner, 1956, p. 232)

These differences raise questions about exactly what was being reproduced in Skinner’s (1956) version, who reproduced it, and who supplied it to Skinner. Concerning the first question, two observations suggest that Skinner did not have the original version. First, if he had, there would be no reason to not use it instead of the less aesthetically pleasing version he used. Second, if he had the original, there also would have been no reason to alter the caption, although placing it in the text instead of beneath the drawing may have been a stylistic decision. The reproduced version Skinner used, then, was copied by some unknown sketcher from either the original, a reproduction of the original, or a verbal description of the original.

The answer to the second question, of who might have done the copying, seems unlikely to be discovered. One possibility to consider, however, is Skinner himself. Reflecting on the 1956 article, Skinner (1982a) noted, “the pictures of apparatus and rough copies of experimental results were drawn from memory, and in a rather primitive style” (p. 97). His daughter Deborah was skeptical that it was reproduced by his own hand, suggesting that her father did not sketch (Deborah Buzan, personal communication, June 25, 2018). His other daughter, Julie, also was skeptical, noting that the drawings of the rats were not like those he drew in some of the other figures in the article. She added, however, that, “[m]y father was actually quite a good artist, so could easily have copied a style different from his own” (Julie Skinner Vargas, personal communication, December 3, 2019). As already noted, however, the styles of the two cartoons are quite dissimilar.

Answers to the third question, of how Skinner learned of the cartoon, also are elusive. Because it seems highly unlikely Skinner would have been perusing the Columbia humor magazine, a reasonable assumption is that someone at Columbia supplied the information about the cartoon, either in graphic or verbal form. Whether Skinner knew about the cartoon soon after its creation or later, Keller would be a likely suspect, but he can remain only that, and there are many others affiliated with Columbia’s behavioral psychology program who also either could have done so or at least have been involved in the chain connecting Skinner and the cartoon. One such person was Charles Ferster, a young alumnus of the Columbia program who worked closely with Skinner between about 1950 and 1955, conducting the research for and co-authoring Schedules of Reinforcement (Ferster & Skinner, 1957).

Whoever reproduced the cartoon was not alone. Most, but not all, of the direct reproductions of the cartoon in psychology textbooks are based on the version appearing in Skinner (1956) and not on the original 1950 Jester version. Variations of the cartoon have appeared in psychology textbooks, popular magazines, and, of course, on websites. A small sampling of these variations comprise Figure 5. Most are, like the one in Skinner (1956), simple line drawings not approaching the artistic quality of the original. Note, too, that, unlike the original, neither the reproduction in Skinner (1956) nor the ones on the left side of this figure contain a food cup for receiving delivered pellets. The Japanese-language version in the middle right position seems to be a facsimile of the Skinner (1956) version, but the reproducer added both a light and a food cup. Many versions reproduce the caption or its sentiment in more or less Mazzeo and Gardner’s original intent, but not in their exact words. Others, however, have taken greater literary license with the caption, sometimes to the point that the humor of the original is lost, or at least misplaced, as in this one: “This is brilliant. Every time I press the button I get a reward.” Or the one in the lower left position in Fig. 5 that suggests the rats are controlling the experimenter, but there is nothing to suggest reciprocity. (It is, of course, an overreach to assume that every cartoon containing two rats in a Skinner box bears some relation other than the obvious to the subject of this review, but, in fact, many do.) The cartoon in the upper left of Fig. 5 appeared in a chapter written by Schoenfeld et al. (1973). It was attributed to one of the chapter’s co-authors, Bob Mankoff, who at the time was a graduate student under Schoenfeld at Queens College of the City University of New York (Zwicky, 2017). Mankoff was for 20 years the cartoon editor of The New Yorker and thereafter the cartoon and humor editor for Esquire magazine (http://www.bobmankoff.com/press-release). Mankoff, however, indicated that not only did he not draw the cartoon, but that “whoever did redraw it did a terrible job. The original was a simple line drawing which was perfect for this classic line” (Robert Mankoff, personal communication, February 12, 2023).

Fig. 5.

Sample of different renditions of the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon. Note that the caption under the top left cartoon indicates that use of that version was granted by “JESTER. Columbia College,” but the image is not the one created by Mazzeo and Gardner (1950) that appeared in that magazine nor is it the one depicted in Skinner (1956)

There has appeared, in addition to the original Skinner-box theme, a 2003 version based on a classical conditioning experimental arrangement (Fig. 5, bottom right), though the operant contingency arguably remains in effect. With respect to the latter version, Skinner (1983/1984b) noted that the Boston Globe in 1962 published an article in which a different version of the cartoon was described as follows: “Bit of conversation between two guinea pigs in a laboratory. Said one: I've got the professor well trained. Every time I ring the bell he brings me the grub." Of this description Skinner noted “[t]he guinea pig of laboratory science had replaced the rat, and Pavlov's bell the lever” (p. 267). Both the operant and Pavlovian versions shown in Fig. 5 have been reproduced with the captions in several different languages. The middle two cartoons in Fig. 5, for example, show versions in Spanish and Japanese.

The first reproduction of the cartoon in a textbook that I have found was in Millenson’s Principles of Behavioral Analysis (1967, p. 82). Millenson was graduate of the Keller–Schoenfeld Columbia PhD program and the textbook was among the early psychology of learning courses developed in the spirit of the Keller and Schoenfeld course content described above (cf. Keller & Schoenfeld, 1949). The version in Millenson’s textbook is described as an adaptation of the Mazzeo-Garner cartoon. It is not a simple reproduction of the one in Skinner (1956) in that the facial expressions and lines of the Millenson version are more nuanced.

Versions of the cartoon appeared in textbooks many times thereafter, mostly in ones used in introductory psychology. A search was undertaken in the spring of 2019 of all of the introductory psychology textbooks held by the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio. The date of publication of the books ranged from the 1960s to the present. Of the estimated 250–300 such textbooks in the collection, the use of cartoons to illustrate psychological points about the psychology of learning was found only in 23 of them. Of that number, the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon appeared in six, or about 26%. A second, smaller, and also nonrandom survey was made of 15 textbooks published between 1999 and 2014 held by a colleague who is responsible for the introductory psychology course in the author’s department. Of the seven that contained cartoons, two included the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon (29%), one published in 2010 and the other in 2014, more than 60 years since its creation. These samples are not random, of course, but they were what were accessible in single locations.

Various iterations of the cartoon are easily accessed on the World Wide Web. The original cartoon is almost never acknowledged, perhaps simply out of ignorance of Mazzeo and Gardner’s 1950 creation. A different drawing and caption, but clearly reflecting the idea of the original cartoon, even has appeared in The New Yorker magazine.

Broader Implications of the Cartoon

A number of other cartoons also illustrate learning principles. One of the more popular ones appearing in chapters on learning and motivation in introductory psychology textbooks (5 of the 15 textbooks in the second sample described above) shows a rat in a business suit sitting at an office desk with its feet on the desk with a response lever and a light just to its right. It is saying to a colleague over the telephone, “[o]h, not bad. The light comes on, I press the bar, they write me a check. How about you?” Another popular one depicts a rather sad-looking rat (if I again may be allowed, in this instance, anthropomorphic poetic license) holding a sign that reads, “Will press lever for food.” Both are humorous and illustrate points related to learning principles. However, the irony, insight, and, indeed, elegance, of the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon is absent. From the standpoint of a behaviorist, the uniqueness of the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon is its prescient observation about the reciprocal nature of contingencies of reinforcement. To the time in the history of behaviorism when the cartoon appeared, although perhaps never explicitly stated, it seems to have been implicitly assumed that the experimenter was in control and the subject merely a pawn in the experimenter’s hands. At least, that was how the science had progressed.

In a reciprocal contingency involving two organisms, each receives reinforcement as a result of the other’s actions. In the Mazzeo–Gardner cartoon, the rats gain pellets and the “guy” gains data. As long as both continue to benefit, presumably the behavior of each co-actor responsible for the other’s gains (reinforcers) will continue. In reciprocity, the contingency involving the co-actors can either develop “naturally” from their interaction or it can be imposed by the two co-actors on one another or by a third party on each co-actor. Themes of reciprocity appear in several places in Skinner’s early writing, as in an incident described in his autobiography (Skinner, 1979/1984a). While a graduate student at Harvard, he “wrote a short scenario of a demonstration film poking fun” (p. 31) at Köhler’s (1925) “insight” experiments with chimpanzees:

A “scientist” in white coat is seen (films were still silent) pointing to the essentials of the experiment—a basket hanging from a high branch of a tree on along rope, some boxes to be piled by the ape to reach the basket, and a banana. . . . The scientist picks up the banana, climbs a ladder against the tree, and reaches for the basket. He slips, grasps the basket, and finds himself swinging from the rope. He begs the ape to pile some boxes under him so that he can get down, but the ape refuses until the scientist throws him the banana. (p. 31)3

In Chapter 8 of Walden Two (Skinner, 1948a), he discussed in a most general way the give-and-take between the Walden Two experimental community as a whole and its members. The reciprocity he described is implicit and not explicitly discussed as such. In that case, the reciprocal contingency was part of the design of the Walden Two culture. Skinner’s (1953) analysis of social behavior also included a reciprocal contingency: “[w]hen a reinforcing person becomes harder and harder to please, the reinforcement is made contingent upon more extensive or highly differentiated behavior” (p. 300). This observation is characteristic of the tone of the entire discussion of social behavior in this chapter of his textbook: the “reinforcing person” (co-actor A) is in control, withholding reinforcement from co-actor B until B meets the standard imposed by A. Thus, there is an inequity between the two: A is in control, withholding and doling out reinforcers as a function of what B does. If B meets A’s requirements, both A and B receive reinforcement; if not, then neither receives it. In a subsequent discussion of a social episode in this same chapter, Skinner described how, in predator–prey relations, “a reduction in the distance [between the predator and prey] is positively reinforcing to the predator and negatively reinforcing to the prey” (p. 304). Later in this same discussion, in talking about leaders and followers, he observed that “[t]he leader is primarily under the control of external variables, while the follower is under the control of the leader” (p. 305). In this example, the behavior of the two co-actors is reciprocally controlled because the leader’s responses are reinforced only if the follower follows appropriately, with such behavior being reinforced by the leader.

In a chapter on “The Problem of Control,” Skinner (1953) wrote, “we all control and we are all controlled” (p. 438), but this observation does not specify who is controlling the “we,” thus the notion of reciprocal control seems absent, or at least not clear, from the statement. Reciprocity is a point that Mazzeo and Gardner not only nailed, but they did so some time before Skinner wrote directly about reciprocal relations between subject and experimenter.

In the 1956 article in which the cartoon appeared, Skinner discussed the control of the experimenter’s behavior, observing, “[t]the organism whose behavior is most extensively controlled in research of the sort I have described is the experimenter himself” (Skinner, 1956, p. 232). After this quoted material, he described the Jester cartoon to illustrate the point. Even though he does not complete the reciprocity circle by saying explicitly that the experimenter controls the subject’s behavior, it is obvious enough, given the accompanying cartoon. Is it possible that the cartoon played a role in Skinner’s insight about the reciprocal relation between nominal subject and experimenter? It is, as with the cartoon’s origins, sheer speculation to wonder whether, or how, the cartoon might have contributed to, or possibly even catalyzed, Skinner’s articulation of the reciprocal contingency in scientific research.

After the 1956 case history, Skinner discussed reciprocity in several other places. For instance, Ferster and Skinner (1957) restated Skinner’s (1956) observation in a somewhat more general way by commenting that “[w]hen an organism acts upon the environment in which it lives, it changes that environment in ways which often affect the organism itself” (p. 1), but the environment is not specifically expanded to include the behavior of another organism. Skinner (1976), in a filmed discussion with Ferster about their earlier work on schedules of reinforcement observed that “. . . our behavior was shaped by the pigeon much more than vice versa” (4 min 4 s into the film). Also, by 1957, and perhaps earlier (Skinner, 1948b), Skinner (1957) noted the reciprocal relation between the verbal behavior of a speaker and listener:

In explaining the behavior of the speaker we assume a listener who will reinforce his behavior in certain ways. In accounting for the behavior of the listener we assume a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to environmental conditions. The interchanges between them must explain all the conditions thus assumed. The account of the whole episode is then complete. (p. 34)

The concept of dynamic contingencies in which reciprocity exists between the conditions of reinforcement and the subject’s behavior has been considered experimentally as well. There are several experiments in which some property of the reinforcer, for example, its duration or intensity, changes as a function of the subjects’ behavior, which in turn changes that behavior itself (e.g., Gentry & Eskew, 1984). Blough (1966) measured the times between successive responses (interresponse times, or IRTs) over some period and then reinforced the least frequently occurring of these times, resulting in a shift of the response distribution favoring these least-frequent IRTs. As the distribution shifts in the latter direction, the distribution changes, creating a reciprocal relation between the organism’s present behavior and the prevailing conditions that must be met for an IRT to be reinforced (see also Platt, 1973, and also Galbicka, 1994, for a useful summary of some of this work).

If reciprocity is a social exchange of reinforcers, behavior-analytic research on cooperation and sharing (e.g., Hake & Vukelich, 1973; Hake & Schmid, 1981; see also Marwell & Schmitt, 1975) offers experimental examples of the Mazzeo–Gardner depiction of reciprocity. In those experiments, many related to the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, one person’s actions affected the likelihood the other person’s responding would be reinforced, and vice versa. There are scattered examples of the experimental study of reciprocity, acknowledging its importance (see Hoyert, 1992; Marr, 1992, 1996; Patterson & Reid, 1970, for discussions of behavioral dynamics) through experimental analysis. The insights exemplified by Mazzeo and Gardner’s cartoon, however, are not yet a mainstream topic, to the detriment of the understanding of reciprocal actions and their consequences.

 The End of the Tale

Years after shifting from laboratory research to address more general issues of human behavior, Skinner (1982b) observed that “[t]eachers have always modified the behavior of their students and students the behavior of their teachers . . . employers have always modified the behavior of employees and employees the behavior of their employers . . . [and] [t]herapists modify the behavior of those they help and those who are helped the behavior of their therapists” (p. 3). These latter observations focus clearly on what Mazzeo and Gardner articulated with their quick pen strokes and few well-chosen words. They not only made the point, but did so years before the topic became widely discussed among behavior analysts. Their clever cartoon remains a witty, visible, and popular reminder of the dynamic, reciprocal nature of behavioral interactions, certainly to include those between subject and experimenter.

Data Availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during this project.

Declarations

Conflicts of Interest

The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.