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Operant conditioning 4 principle
Basic principles of operant conditioning
Basic principles of operant conditioning
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Shaping involves reinforcing a target behavior by using operant conditioning to reward a positive behavior and prevent a negative behavior. This method was created by B.F Skinner, in which he reinforced a target behavior in the experimenting of rats to see if they will be able to push a lever. He used the principle of rewarding by giving the rats a piece of food each time they got closer to the lever. Shaping, also called "successive approximation," allows the subject of the experiment to set goals for itself when it has reached that successful approximation. Rewarding has its benefits because it is a sensitive procedure towards an act that helps shape a behavior. Shaping can also be used on humans, in laying emphasis on a positive behavior.
During my High School years, I lived in a boarding school which helped shape students to act responsibly when we were out on excursions, debates and sports activities with other schools. I was never the early bird, when I got enrolled into the boarding house. A matron was assigned to each dorm to get the students ready by six in the morning, everyday for school. She did blow a whistle every morning exactly by six a.m, which meant "get up". She did give us twenty minutes to take a shower, ten minutes to lay the bed, another ten minutes to get dressed, and then twenty minutes to get breakfast and join the morning assembly of what I dreaded. It was a structure that did help shape me for the future. In Junior high, I grumbled when getting out of bed each day, I also exceeded the time frame given and faced the consequences at the end of the day. It was hard to keep up. One day, I formed a group of students to join me in protesting against the hectic time frame
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but that did not work as the principal opposed our motives, and gave us a speech on structure in return. The Assembly mentioned above was also a procedure for shaping lazy people like myself at that time, because the activities included drills like marching, to assist in stimulating the brain to stay awake and follow guides. I adhered to the marching routine better because of fear of messing up the routine in front of everyone. As the months progressed, my matron implemented rewards to curb the negative behavior of laziness whenever, we did something right. She made me understand that I had to accomplish the task in order to receive the reward.Which was a principle. Few months after the new process of reward had begun, I found myself adapting to the rules quite easily because it had become part of me through shaping my behavior. I did receive extra passes on any meals of my choice from the local food store. Getting two passes a week had increased to three passes and then four. It also helped put me on the best students list. Which gave me the motivation and enthusiasm to set goals and achieve them. It became progressively more demanding to do well whenever I achieved my goal. In senior high, I was made a prefect, whose job was to assist juniors in forming a plan that molds students into organizing their schedules. I joined the marching band, because I took a liking to its structure of routines and instructions.
Now am in college, and I can certainly agree that shaping had to do with my matrons routine, because it helps me identify my current performance in order to do better.Reward or not it shaped me in staying active, and prepared me for daily task no matter how early it may be.
“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.
Animals can learn interesting and complex behaviors through the means of conditioning and other training methods. The two types of conditioning are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Conditioning incorporates both reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement will increase the likelihood or a behavior, where punishment, and extinction will decrease it. Lee and Belfiore stated that “reinforcement is one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in the analysis of behavior” (1997). Along with these types of conditioning are other factors that help one train an organism. Habituation, magazine training, shaping, and different schedules of reinforcement help one reach the desired behavior. All these factors are part of training an organism to reach a desired behavior.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
The Effects of Nature and Nurture on Shaping of Behavior The nature/nurture investigation has been studied for many years by psychologists and it is a subject that is still in debate today. It brings up the question, how is our behaviour shaped, and the two sides of the answer are nature and nurture. Behaviour in the context of a human being can be described as; the way humans act and think in situations. What is meant by nature and nurture?
B. F. Skinner, the most well-known American Psychologist who was the top exponent of the school of psychology that was known as behaviorism, preserved the impression that learning is an end result of change in evident behavior. The changes in behavior are determined by the way individuals reply to stimuli (events) in the environment. B.F. Skinner defined this phenomenon as operant conditioning. Operant conditioning means changing of behavior by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response (McLeod, 2007). This
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.
For about 90- 95% of the population in my school of around 1400 people, only .00003 % of them have to wake up at 7 o’clock every school day. This is exactly 4 people in the entire school, and is the amount of people I go to seminary with every morning at 6:30. Because of this my first day of high school was a little bit different from everyone else’s first day. While the rest of the kids in the town where still fast asleep in their beds I was showering and getting ready to go to a church class held at a house a few blocks away from my high school. At first I can’t say I was especially excited to have to wake up at 6 in the morning everyday just to go to seminary each morning before school, to me school was enough, but after my first year of seminary I could see the true impact it had on me.
Shaping is the procedure by which reinforcers guide behavior to the desired behavior through successive approximations. In other words, behavior is rewarded every time the behavior gets closer and closer to the desired behavior. For example, to teach a cat to close an open door, it would have to be rewarded when it turns to the door, takes a step towards the door, comes within a couple inches of the door, puts its paw on the door, and pushes the door shut. After moving a step up in this process, the previous behaviors, which were once rewarded, should not be rewarded any more to ensure concentration on the ultimate goal.
In contrast to classical conditioning, operant conditioning, discovered by B.F Skinner, is a learning process that involves either an increase or decrease in some behavior as a result of consequences (Amabile, 1985). Operant conditioning attempts to elicit new behavior through use of reinforcers and punishments.