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Susan McCarthy is co-author with Marjorie Ingall of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. Ingall & McCarthy write Sorrywatch.com, a website which analyzes apologies. McCarthy also writes about wildlife and animal behavior. She’s co-author of the international bestseller When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, and author of Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. Not literally raised by wolves, McCarthy lives in San Francisco.

Category: Operant conditioning

  • Three hacks

    The experimenters were trying to enliven the lives of zoo animals while simultaneously gathering data. As often happens, not all the data they gathered was in the categories expected. As Hal Markowitz recounts in Behavioral Enrichment in the Zoo, date (1981), he was trying to set up a game for mandrills (Papio sphinx) in a…

  • Cool hammer. Too bad I’m not a nail.

    A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference. While reading about animal communication for…