Operant Conditioning is a way of learning that uses rewards and punishments for certain behaviors. It was first coined by BF Skinner. It is also known as Skinner Conditioning. It creates an association between a consequence and a behavior. Sometimes it is also referred to as response-stimulus conditioning. Operant conditioning is related to classical condition but focuses more on why the behavior is happening & what the drive is behind it to accomplish the task at hand.
Skinner conducted an experiment to test his new theory. In his experiment, he put animals into a box. Initially, he had a rat pull down on a lever that would give it food. This would eventually condition the rat to learn that whenever it pulled on the lever, it would get food. With this, Skinner came up with three types of responses that follows behavior. They are neutral operants, reinforcers and punishers. A neutral operant is a response from the surrounding area that does not favor or disfavor the probability of a certain behavior being repeated.
A reinforcer is a response from a surrounding area that will increase the chance of a certain behavior being preformed again. Reinforcers can be either positive or negative, depending on the situation at hand. A punishment is a response from the surrounding area that decreases the chance a certain behavior is being preformed again. The experiment showed Skinner that his theory had truth to it and began to expand it into human behavior.
Skinner created the theory because he was a behaviorist, he was interested in human behavior and wanted to learn more about it. He wanted to figure out why human beings do certain things the ways they do. This led him to do his experiment with the rat. The rat experiment can be applied...
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...ane approach but the attention given to her during the instances of acting out did not change the behavior during her nine years at the hospital and very well might have been reinforcing that behavior. Her growth when the incentive system went under way supports this and supports the effectiveness of the initial negative punishment. Positively reinforcing her appropriate actions later on would not have been possible since receiving attention would not have been separate from her inappropriate behavior. That is to say the reinforcement could have been blocked because showing concern and care would have been associated with her acting out in extreme ways as opposed to her behaving appropriately. The effectiveness of this treatment is a compelling reason to believe that operant conditioning is a viable option as well as stressing the importance of negative punishment.
Behavior modification is based on the principles of operant conditioning, which were developed by American behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In his research, he put a rat in a cage later known as the Skinner Box, in which the rat could receive a food pellet by pressing on a bar. The food reward acted as a reinforcement by strengthening the rat's bar-pressing behavior. Skinner studied how the rat's behavior changed in response to differing patterns of reinforcement. By studying the way the rats operated on their environment, Skinner formulated the concept of operant conditioning, through which behavior could be shaped by reinforcement or lack of it. Skinner considered his discovery applicable to a wide range of both human and animal behaviors(“Behavior,” 2001).
John B. Skinner, known as B.F. Skinner, was born in Pennsylvania in March 20, 1904. His father was a lawyer and his mother stayed home. As a boy, he enjoyed building gadgets. He attended Hamilton College to pursue his passion in writing; however, he had no success. He later attended Harvard University to pursue another passion, human psychology. He studied operant conditioning using a box, also known as Skinner box. He studied the behavior of rats and pigeons and how they respond to their environment. He was the chair of psychology in Indiana College, but he later became a Harvard professor. He later published the book The Behavior of Organisms based
According to Gewirtz and Peláez-Nogueras (1992), “B. F. Skinner contributed a great deal to advancing an understanding of basic psychological processes and to the applications of science-based interventions to problems of individual and social importance.” He contributed to “human and nonhuman behavior, including human behavioral development, and to various segments of the life span, including human infancy” (p. 1411). One of Skinner's greatest scientific discoveries was “single reinforcement” which became sufficient for “operant conditioning, the role of extinction in the discovery of intermittent schedules, the development of the method of shaping by successive approximation, and Skinner's break with and rejection of stimulus-response psychology” (Iversen, 1992, p. 1318).
At Harvard, B.F. Skinner looked for a more objective and restrained way to study behavior. Most of his theories were based on self-observation, which influenced him to become a enthusiast for behaviorism. Much of his “self-observed” theories stemmed from Thorndike’s Puzzle Box, a direct antecedent to Skinner’s Box. He developed an “operant conditioning apparatus” to do this, which is also known as the Skinner box. The Skinner box also had a device that recorded each response provided by the animal as well as the unique schedule of reinforcement that the animal was assigned. The design of Skinner boxes can vary ...
“Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence for that behavior” (Cherry). Positive reinforcement which is praising a person for doing something good verses negative reinforcement which is an unpleasant remark a punishment. B.F. Skinner did an experiment on a rat, the rat was taught to push two buttons, one to receive food and the other was a light electric shock. The rat tried both buttons and realized which button was good and which one was bad. This experiment goes to show that upon the rewards and punishment system one can learn their rights from their wrongs through a series of lessons. Kincaid and Hemingway both use operant conditioning to show human behavior under stimulus control.
In the beginning of the article the author stated that the father of operant conditioning was B.F. Skinner. Skinner introduced the concept of reinforcement. Reinforcement was when something was given or taken to increase the likelihood of a certain
...ss to the field of behavioral psychology, he did face some criticism regarding the reliability of his experiments. Psychologists who do not support Skinner’s work claim that his research using rats and pigeons does not translate into human behavior. Many people believe that the human mind is much more complex than that of small animals. It is common among those in the psychology field to believe that reinforcement and rewards are not the only causes of behavior.
Operant conditioning is a type of learning where a person is taught that specific actions are related to specific consequences. The main goal of using this type of conditioning is to encourage the individual to change his or her behavior in some way. Specifically, the individual can be encouraged to perform a desired behavior more often through use of positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, and he or she can also be encouraged to perform an undesired behavior less often through use of positive punishment and negative punishment. Positive reinforcement is basically a type of operant conditioning in which an addition or reward is given to the individual when he or she has displayed the desired behavior, and as a result, the behavior
Over the course of this class I feel like I have become a much better writer. When I go back and look at some of my Journal entries and assignments that I did at the beginning of the semester, I can’t help but tense up at some of the things I wrote. Sometimes the things I was writing didn’t flow well, or I might have even have missed glaring grammar mistakes.
As a second language learner I have never expected myself to be a perfect writer throughout the semester. Even If English was my first language still, I would not be a perfect writer. It is not about first or second language, it is about how well I understand the learning objectives. Then organizing and writing with my own ideas and putting them in my paper. I am going to be honest, I am not good at English subject and English subject is my strongest weakness than the other subjects. In this paper I will discuss and analyze my own writing, reflecting on the ways that my writing has improved throughout the semester.
Reinforcement is a strategy in which award or punishment is implemented in order to foster a desired behavior. This idea stems from the theory of behaviorism, or the theory that the behavior of different organisms are controlled external forces. In the article “Does reinforcement Facilitate Learning”, the author references B.F Skinner’s theory of operate conditioning where “ a thirsty rat presses a bar when a light flashes because this results in the delivery of a few drops of water.” In this example the flash of light is the outside is the external factor that encourages the rat to press the bar. The article also states that “According to Skinner, an event serves as reinforcement if it is contingent on an organism’s response to a stimulus
He called this method operant conditioning. Operant Conditioning deals with operants - intentional actions that have an effect on the surrounding environment (McCleod, 2007). Skinners objective was to ascertain the processes which made certain operant behaviors more or less likely to transpire. In a team setting if action is based on reward it provides motivation for a team to work well and complete tasks more efficiently. If team members are aware that inappropriate behavior garnered consequence Skinners theory suggests that would be the less likely action for fear of consequence.
What is Skinner’s Operant Conditioning? Skinner was the first to discuss operant conditioning. McLead (2007) explained that an operant condition means that using reinforcements given after a desired response could change behavior. There were three types of responses that can follow the behavior. Neutral operants, reinforces, and punishers were the three types of responses. According to McLead (2007), Skinner invented a box with levers and lights to test his theory. He placed a hungry rat inside where the rat learned to press the levels for different responses. One level would give it a piece of food and the rat would not receive food when the light was off. This box demonstrated the shaping of behaviors through operant conditioning.
Skinner designed an experiment to test operant conditioning, known as a ‘Skinner box’ (Gross 2005). In the box, animals, such as rats, would be conditioned into certain behaviour. For example, by pressing a lever to receive food (Gross 2005).
B.F. Skinner is a major contributor to the Behavioral Theory of personality, a theory that states that our learning is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, modeling, and observation. An individual acts in a certain way, a.k.a. gives a response, and then something happens after the response. In order for an action to be repeated in the future, what happens after the response either encourages the response by offering a reward that brings pleasure or allows an escape from a negative situation. The former is known as positive reinforcement, the latter known as negative reinforcement (Sincero, 2012). A teenager who received money for getting an “A” is being positively reinforced, while an individual who skips a class presentation is being negatively reinforced by escaping from the intense fear and anxiety that would have occurred during the presentation.