Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning tells about the relations between the environmental stimuli and our own behavior; it is also called instrumental learning. The term “operant” refers to the fact that an organism learns through responding through operating on the environment (Martin, Carlson &Buskist, 2010). When a particular action has good consequences, the action will tend to be repeated. In contrast, when a particular action has bad consequences, the action will tend not to be occurred.
Operant conditioning was first discovered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a 24-year-old man who would later become one of the twentieth century’s most influential educational psychologists, Edward L. Thorndike. Thorndike placed a hungry cat inside a “puzzle box”. The animal could escape and eat some food only after it operates a latch that opened the door. At first, the cat engaged in random behavior. Eventually, the cat would accidentally activate the latch and open the door. On successive trials, the animal’s behavior would become more and more efficient until it was operating the latch without hesitation. Thorndike called this process “learning by trial and accidental success”. Thorndike explained that the cat learned to make the correct response because only the correct response was followed by a favorable outcome, which is escape from the box and the opportunity to eat some food. The occurrence of the favorable outcome strengthens the response that produced it. Thorndike called this relation between a response and its consequences the law of effect (O'Donohue, & Noll, 1995).
Although Thorndike discovered the law of effects, Harvard psychologists Burrhus Frederic Skinner championed the application of behavior analysis and its methods for solving human ...

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...or that occurs because it was previously instrumental in producing certain consequences. The reinforcement in this program is surfing internet an hour more when there is consumption of fruits and vegetables. Therefore, the behavior occurs again and again to ensure that I get the reinforcement but not the punishment. Punishment is considered a negative outcome, which will decrease it response rate (Domjan, Grau, & Krause, 2010). Considerable evidence has been offered to support the view that instrumental behaviors are originally acquired as goal-directed acts under the control of their consequences. For example, it has been routinely demonstrated that changing the value of an outcome previously earned by the instrumental response has a dramatic and selective effect on the subsequent performance of that response in an extinction test (Colwill, R. M., & Triola, 2002).