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History and Systems of Psychology
Operant Conditioning By B.F. Skinner
Skinner's influence on psychology
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Recommended: History and Systems of Psychology
Throughout psychology there has been a numerous amount of influences about how it should be defined. There are many people who had helped create its definition today. Just to name a few;Wilhelm Wundt, John B. Watson, Rosalie Rayner, B.F. Skinner, and Sigmund Freud. Before our most recent definition, psychology was known as, “the science of mental life.”(Myers,2014) That was until, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner changed it to, “the study of observable behavior.”
B.F Skinner was a leading behaviorist. Although he started off with the thought that psychology is an observable behavior, he continued to dig deeper. Introspection was not a factor in Skinner’s science, he went on to study how consequences helped shape the behavior of certain beings. Skinner came up with, not only negative consequences that affected behavior, but positive consequences too.
With Skinner introducing the effects of consequences on behavior, he went onto researching operant responses, which then lead to operant conditioning. Thus introducing positive and negative reinforcements/punishments.
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Partially is only when you reinforce some times not all the time. Partial reinforcement also comes with; fixed-ratios, fixed-intervals, variable-ratio, and variable-interval schedule. Fixed-ratio is when reinforcement occurs after a fixed number of responses. Fixed-intervals are when the reinforcer occurs following the first response after a fixed interval of time. Variable- ratio is when the reinforcer is delivered after an average amount of correct responses. Variable-interval is when the reinforcer occurs following the first correct response after an average amount of time has passed. Without the studies of B.F. Skinner, none of these things would have been discovered and used in today’s
Reynolds, G. S. (1961). Relativity of response rate and reinforcement frequency in the multiple schedule. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 4, 179-184.
Operant conditioning is changing behavior through the use of reinforcement after the desired action is given; a behavior that is rewarded positively is more likely to continue and a behavior that is rewarded negatively would likely stop occurring (Santrock,2014). In addition to reinforcement, Skinner also talks about punishment. Reinforcement increases the probability an action or behavior will be repeated, while punishment is intended to decrease a behavior (McLeod, 2015). When Laurie was younger, she thought she was being sent to school every day to socialize with her friends and that learning was a secondary, unintentional happenstance. In third grade, compared to the other students in her class, she was falling short in reading and math.
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 ...
down the Susquehanna River when he was only 13 years old. He was a natural
Alternately, a reinforcement schedule is a pattern of provided reinforcement to an organism following a specified amount of time between receiving reinforcement. For example, a mouse with a fixed ratio schedule will receive a piece of cheese for every time the mouse performs a trick. Similarly, the roommate will be rewarded with a single choice of an unhealthy meal once a week for every successful week he only eats healthy food. The reward for the roommate is the reinforcement; the once a week opportunity to receive the reward is the pattern, as well as the specified amount of time between receiving reinforcement; and lastly the target behavior is the response. However, when comparing and contrasting the roommate and mouse, it is important to understand the roommate’s pattern of reinforcement is considered a fixed interval schedule, and the mouse’s is a fixed ratio schedule. This is because there 's a finite amount of time between when the roommate can receive the reward, whereas the mouse can perform as many responses in order to receive an equal amount of
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).
B. F. Skinner concluded that people could mentally have control over all of their responses. He believed that a reinforcement and/or consequence given after a behavior would influence future behavior (Roblyer,2003, p.57). In other words, reinforcements and/or punishments can shape human behavior. For example, if a child eats all of his vegetables at dinner and his parent’s reward him with positive words and a cookie, then the child will probably eat his vegetables at the next dinner.
Primary reinforcement fulfills the need of the behavior, “A stimulus change that functions as reinforcement
B.F. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, a small town where he spent his childhood. He was the first-born son of a lawyer father and homemaker mother who raised him and his younger brother. As a young boy, Skinner enjoyed building and used his imaginative mind to invent many different devices. He spent his college years at Hamilton College in New York to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in writing. Following his graduation in 1926, Skinner explored writings of Pavlov, Russell, and Watson, three influential men in the field of behavioral psychology. After two years as a failed writer, Skinner applied to Harvard University to earn his Ph.D. in psychology.
Skinner’s theory operant conditioning is a theory that I feel most can say they agree with or they like the way he thinks. Speaking for myself I think his theory of operant conditioning is right on point. Although as I said in my discussion last week a lot of his theories and experiments were done on animals and not a lot done on humans and I think that plays a big part in his theory of why I agree and disagree with it. I only disagree because of the simple fact that humans are completely different from animals, obviously. What I do agree with in his theory are the positive and negative reinforcements, and the positive and negative punishments because although those were tested on animals as well a lot of that can relate to humans and how we act as far as our behavior. In my own opinion of his theory I feel like his operant conditioning would work rather well on children. I know for instance as positive reinforcement for my son I will give him a snack that he loves if he doesn’t act like a wild monkey in the store. Therefore, I see it working better on children rather than adults. In the video I watched from week 5 of operant conditioning in the first video he talks about how the bird received a reward every time the bird pecked or turned but he also says that this worked very well with the bird because every time he pecked and turn he didn’t get a reward each time only
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.
In the case of differential reinforcement, a response not only increases, “it also makes that response more probable upon the recurrence of
The word Psychology comes from two Greek words: Psyche and Logos. The term ?psychology? used early on described the study of the spirit. It was in the 18th century when psychology gained its literal meaning: The study of behaviour. In studies today psychology is defined as the scientific and systematic study of human and animal behaviour. The term psychology has a long history but the psychology as an independent discipline is fairly new.
while Skinner was developing his ideas, the emotional reaction of society over the founding’s of Skinner was substantial even getting him a spot in Life Magazine for his development of operant conditioning and the Skinner Box (Smith 130). Because of the amount of controversy surrounding Skinner’s work, his specific inventions including the Skinner Box was never widely used, but his theories and research have been
“Punishment is one of the most used, but least understood and badly administered, aspects of learning” (Luthans, 1977, pp.300). As mentioned earlier, punishment is anything which weakens behaviour and tends to decrease it in subsequent frequency. Positive punishment is the method of administering negative consequences upon the occurrence of an action whereas Negative punishment involves the termination of positive consequences. In order to work, either case must weaken and decrease the behaviour which preceded the application or withdrawal of the stimuli. Skinner (1953) stipulated that we must defy the urge to label a form of stimuli as “desired” or “undesired” as a whole but rather to identify them by their effect on the observed subject.