Comparing Punishment And Rewards Affect How People Behave

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Psychologist B.F. Skinner studied the ways in which rewards and punishments affect how people behave. He believed that he could make anyone do anything with the right reward or punishment. Just as his experiment with the mouse shows, he could get the mouse to push the button by rewarding him with food every time he pushed the button. For my example, I will be showing how reward and punishment affect the way a child behaves in class or at home. A child who misbehaves in class will continue to misbehave in class or at home unless an authority figure, such as a teacher, intervenes and punishes the child for the behavior. For example, if a child pushes another child at recess, the child will continue to think that pushing children is okay, unless …show more content…

This is because children enjoy being rewarded for the things that they do. In this case, rewarding the child for good and respectful behavior will condition them to continue acting in such a manner. Another example would be in the case of my brother. When he doesn’t do his homework, he doesn’t get to play his Xbox, but when he does complete his homework, and complete it well, my mom will let him play his Xbox. This is an example of positive punishment. Just like the experiment done by B.F. Skinner where the tiger got rewarded with his food when he pushed the button, my brother gets rewarded with his Xbox when he completes his homework. An example of a negative punishment would be in the case of my friend’s toddler. Her daughter would not help pick up her toys around the house. So as a negative punishment, my friend would take away a toy every time she refused to help pick up. This is negative punishment because the toddler is having something taken away from her every time she chooses to behave in that manner. It conditions the child to help pick up because she doesn’t want a toy taken away from

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