The selfie taking draws a parallel between rats in a Skinner box and humans in social media. The point is to make people wonder whether social media companies v

The selfie taking draws a parallel between rats in a Skinner box and humans in social media. The point is to make people wonder whether social media companies view their users the same way Skinner viewed his rats in a box: dumb, and able to be manipulated with meager and cheap rewards. It is not a functional piece of the "experiment", but I don't think it was ever meant to be functional or a real experiment. The artist says the rats don't recognize themselves, so I would assume they predicted the selfies would do nothing. The selfie taking is the only interesting part of the piece, imo. Without that, it's just replicating an 80 year old experiment that has already been replicated to death.