Shaping In Human Behavior

Shaping, also known as “The method of Success Approximation”, is the process of reinforcing successively closer and closer approximations of a desired terminal behavior. A terminal behavior, in this instance, is the final desired behavior in the trainee or learner. “Shaping” normally begins at a young age. For example, when children begin to grab things in order to stand up, then eventually they learn to stand by themselves without the help of holding onto something, then standing slowly transitions into learning how to walk. They learn these things through positive reinforcements. This is what “shapes” a child’s behavior.

B.F Skinner was a famous and well-known behaviorist who conducted important research on shaping. He first began studying the process of behavior shaping with a pigeon. Skinner practiced trying to get the bird to learn how to bowl. The pigeon would have to swipe a wooden ball with its beak so the ball would go down a mini alley and hit a set of toy pins. This process involved a program, which in this case is a series of discriminative stimuli and reinforcements for small changes in response. The only way shaping can be successful is if you clearly know the behavioral subject and the target behavior. You should also know when to reinforce versus when not to.

Shaping has been and will continue to be used in every living

In my opinion, this solely revolves around the fact that it can change an undesirable behavior at an early stage. Our youth play a huge role in our society and being that they are the next generation leaders, their actions and behaviors dictate how our society will be shaped. So if they’re corrected at a young age and kept corrected, the better off our kid’s futures will be. A lot of times if bad behaviors aren’t fixed in childhood/adolescence it will carry into adulthood which is more prone to criminal behavior. This is why the shaping process is so