Essay On Operant Conditioning

What is Operant Conditioning? Operant conditioning is a type of associative learning, and explains why people voluntarily make changes in their behavior. (King, 2016) When people discover that certain actions cause certain consequences, they will voluntarily make changes to their behavior. In operant conditioning, there are several different ways that it occurs. Positive, negative, reinforcement, and punishment are all terms used in operant conditioning. Positive means to add a stimulus, while negative means to remove a stimulus. Reinforcement is when a connection between a stimulus an in action is strengthened by repeated sequence

(King, 2016) For example, I have two dogs, and when they were puppies they loved to pee in guest’s shoes. In order to end this behavior whenever they did that I would squirt them with cold water. Because they hated getting wet, especially when the water was cold, this bad behavior ended within a few months. Negative punishment occurs when a wanted stimulus is removed due to bad behavior. I used to work at a preschool, and one of the children there absolutely loved her pink pencil. She also enjoyed pulling on the other children’s hair, so in an effort to end that behavior whenever she pulled someone’s hair we would take away her pencil. She was devastated when she lost her favorite pencil, and once she realized pulling people’s hair meant losing it, she quickly stopped pulling hair. (pg.

Ivan Pavlov was an influential physiologist, who accidently discovered what’s known as classical conditioning. (King, 2016) When he was conducting an experiment on a dog, in an effort to learn about the digestive system, he noticed that the dog would salivate when meat powder was placed in his mouth. Eventually he noticed that the dog would start to salivate, even when the meat powder was absent. He discovered that all of the stimuli that caused the dog to salivate had a connection to the meat powder. Curious as to why this occurred, he observed the dog’s behavior, and noticed that the dog’s behavior was both learned and unlearned. Unlearned behavior means a reaction to a stimulus that is automatic, such as a reflex. An unlearned response is an automatic action that is caused by the stimulus. In the case of Pavlov’s experiments, that was the dog’s reaction to the food. Whereas learned behavior comes from obtaining knowledge about a stimulus, for example, a child learning not to touch the stove after burning their hands on it. Interested in his discovery, Pavlov began to conduct experiments. In one experiment, Pavlov wanted to cause a dog to salivate by ringing a bell. He wanted to create a learned behavior in the dog. In the beginning, ringing the bell had no effect, so it was a neutral stimulus. In order to cause the desired reaction, Pavlov began ringing