Skinner, where the consequences of a response determine the probability of it being repeated. Through operant conditioning behavior which is reinforced rewarded will likely be repeated, and behavior which is punished will occur less frequently.
By the s, John B. Watson had left academic psychology, and other behaviorists were becoming influential, proposing new forms of learning other than classical conditioning. Perhaps the most important of these was Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Although, for obvious reasons, he is more commonly known as B. Skinner's views were slightly less extreme than those of Watson Skinner believed that we do have such a thing as a mind, but that it is simply more productive to study observable behavior rather than internal mental events.
The work of Skinner was rooted in a view that classical conditioning was far too simplistic to be a complete explanation of complex human behavior.
He believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. He called this approach operant conditioning. According to this principle, behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is less likely to be repeated.
Skinner introduced a new term into the Law of Effect - Reinforcement. A Skinner box, also known as an operant conditioning chamber, is a device used to objectively record an animal's behavior in a compressed time frame. An animal can be rewarded or punished for engaging in certain behaviors, such as lever pressing for rats or key pecking for pigeons.
Reinforcers can be either positive or negative. Punishment weakens behavior. We can all think of examples of how our own behavior has been affected by reinforcers and punishers.
As a child you probably tried out a number of behaviors and learned from their consequences. For example, if when you were younger you tried smoking at school, and the chief consequence was that you got in with the crowd you always wanted to hang out with, you would have been positively reinforced i. If, however, the main consequence was that you were caught, caned, suspended from school and your parents became involved you would most certainly have been punished, and you would consequently be much less likely to smoke now.
Positive reinforcement is a term described by B. Skinner in his theory of operant conditioning. In positive reinforcement, a response or behavior is strengthened by rewards, leading to the repetition of desired behavior.
The reward is a reinforcing stimulus. Skinner showed how positive reinforcement worked by placing a hungry rat in his Skinner box. The box contained a lever on the side, and as the rat moved about the box, it would accidentally knock the lever. Immediately it did so a food pellet would drop into a container next to the lever. The rats quickly learned to go straight to the lever after a few times of being put in the box. The consequence of receiving food if they pressed the lever ensured that they would repeat the action again and again.
Positive reinforcement strengthens a behavior by providing a consequence an individual finds rewarding. Negative reinforcement is the termination of an unpleasant state following a response.
Negative reinforcement strengthens behavior because it stops or removes an unpleasant experience. Skinner showed how negative reinforcement worked by placing a rat in his Skinner box and then subjecting it to an unpleasant electric current which caused it some discomfort.
As the rat moved about the box it would accidentally knock the lever. We can find examples of operant conditioning at work all around us. Consider the case of children completing homework to earn a reward from a parent or teacher, or employees finishing projects to receive praise or promotions. More examples of operant conditioning in action include:. In some of these examples, the promise or possibility of rewards causes an increase in behavior.
Operant conditioning can also be used to decrease a behavior via the removal of a desirable outcome or the application of a negative outcome. For example, a child may be told they will lose recess privileges if they talk out of turn in class. This potential for punishment may lead to a decrease in disruptive behaviors.
While behaviorism may have lost much of the dominance it held during the early part of the 20th century, operant conditioning remains an important and often used tool in the learning and behavior modification process. Sometimes natural consequences lead to changes in our behavior. In other instances, rewards and punishments may be consciously doled out in order to create a change.
Operant conditioning is something you may immediately recognize in your own life, whether it is in your approach to teaching your children good behavior or in training the family dog.
Remember that any type of learning takes time. Consider the type of reinforcement or punishment that may work best for your unique situation and assess which type of reinforcement schedule might lead to the best results.
Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Operant conditioning. Annu Rev Psychol. Rilling M. How the challenge of explaining learning influenced the origins and development of John B. Watson's behaviorism. Am J Psychol. Evidence for a neural law of effect. Progressive ratio schedules of reinforcement. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. The scientific study of operant conditioning is thus an inquiry into perhaps the most fundamental form of decision-making.
There is also phylogenetic selection — selection during the evolution of the species. It emerges full-blown as the animal matures and may be relatively insensitive to immediate consequences. Even humans who should know better! The selecting consequences that guide operant conditioning are of two kinds: behavior-enhancing reinforcers and behavior-suppressing punishers , the carrot and the stick, tools of parents, teachers — and rulers — since humanity began.
When the dog learns a trick for which he gets a treat, he is said to be positively reinforced. If a rat learns to avoid an electric shock by pressing a lever, he is negatively reinforced. There is often ambiguity about negative reinforcement, which is sometimes confused with punishment — which is what happens when the dog learns not to get on the couch if he is smacked for it. In general, a consequence is called a reinforcer if it strengthens the behavior that led to it, and it is a punisher if it weakens that behavior.
The scientific study of operant conditioning dates from the beginning of the twentieth century with the work of Edward L. Thorndike in the U. Lloyd Morgan in the U. Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal…will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation…; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort…will have their connections with the situation weakened…The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond.
Thorndike, , p. Thorndike soon gave up work with animals and became an influential educator at Columbia Teachers College. But the Law of Effect, which is a compact statement of the principle of operant reinforcement, was taken up by what became the dominant movement in American psychology in the first half of the twentieth century: Behaviorism.
The founder of behaviorism was John B. Watson at Johns Hopkins university. They sought mathematical laws for learned behavior. Soon, B. Skinner, at Harvard, reacted against Hullian experimental methods group designs and statistical analysis and theoretical emphasis, proposing instead his radical a-theoretical behaviorism.
The best account of Skinner's method, approach and early findings can be found in a readable article -- "A case history in scientific method" -- that he contributed to an otherwise almost forgotten multi-volume project "Psychology: A Study of a Science" organized on positivist principles by editor Sigmund Koch.
A third major behaviorist figure, Edward Chace Tolman, on the West coast, was close to what would now be called a cognitive psychologist and stood rather above the fray. Skinner opposed Hullian theory and devised experimental methods that allowed learning animals to be treated much like physiological preparations.
It was nevertheless valuable because it introduced an important distinction between reflexive behavior, which Skinner termed elicited by a stimulus, and operant behavior, which he called emitted because when it first occurs i.
Skinner and several others noted this connection which has become the dominant view of operant conditioning. Reinforcement is the selective agent, acting via temporal contiguity the sooner the reinforcer follows the response, the greater its effect , frequency the more often these pairings occur the better and contingency how well does the target response predict the reinforcer.
It is also true that some reinforcers are innately more effective with some responses - flight is more easily conditioned as an escape response in pigeons than pecking, for example. Contingency is easiest to describe by example.
Suppose we reinforce with a food pellet every 5th occurrence of some arbitrary response such as lever pressing by a hungry lab rat. The rat presses at a certain rate, say 10 presses per minute, on average getting a food pellet twice a minute. Will he press more, or less? The answer is less. Lever pressing is less predictive of food than it was before, because food sometimes occurs at other times. Exactly how all this works is still not understood in full theoretical detail, but the empirical space — the effects on response strength rate, probability, vigor of reinforcement delay, rate and contingency — is well mapped.
What happens during operant conditioning? The experimenter intervened no further, allowing the animal to do what it would until, by chance, it made the correct response. The result was that, according to what has sometimes been called the principle of postremity, the tendency to perform the act closest in time to the reinforcement — opening of the door — is increased.
Notice that this account emphasizes the selective aspect of operant conditioning, the way the effective activity, which occurs at first at 'by chance,' is strengthened or selected until, within a few trials, it becomes dominant. The nature of how learning is shaped and influenced by consequences has also remained at the focus of current research. Omitted is any discussion of where the successful response comes from in the first place.
It is something of a historical curiosity that almost all operant-conditioning research has been focused on the strengthening effect of reinforcement and almost none on the question of origins, where the behavior comes from in the first place, the problem of behavioral variation , to pursue the Darwinian analogy.
Some light is shed on the problem of origins by Pavlovian conditioning, a procedure that has been studied experimentally even more extensively than operant conditioning. Variable-Interval VI schedule. What is the other name of operant conditioning is? Instrumental conditioning is another term for operant conditioning, a learning process first described by B.
In instrumental conditioning, reinforcement or punishment are used to either increase or decrease the probability that a behavior will occur again in the future. What is an example of classical conditioning? Classical Conditioning in Humans The influence of classical conditioning can be seen in responses such as phobias, disgust, nausea, anger, and sexual arousal.
A familiar example is conditioned nausea, in which the sight or smell of a particular food causes nausea because it caused stomach upset in the past. What is punishment in operant conditioning? Punishment is a term used in operant conditioning to refer to any change that occurs after a behavior that reduces the likelihood that that behavior will occur again in the future. Punishment is often mistakenly confused with negative reinforcement. Who discovered operant conditioning?
BF Skinner. What are the key elements of operant conditioning?
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