[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[Thomas Dalton]

>  (I'm looking for a reference to an experiment I read of: birds being
>  fed or not at random when they pressed a lever. The chance of being
>  fed was determined only by chance, but the birds constructed all
>  manner of increasingly elaborate rituals before pressing the lever,
>  timing, etc. in an attempt to make the food come more reliably. Does
>  anyone know the one I mean?)

I read about it in a book by Derren Brown - I've just found the page
and he says it was done by B. F. Skinner in 1948.