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Skinner's operant conditioning theory summary
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The first podcast that I listened too was Episode 191 from the audioboom.com website. This was titled “What Was B.F. Skinner Really Like?”. I liked this podcast a lot because it gave a lot of quotes from Skinner himself. In the podcast, the host started off by talking about how Skinner was “a real human”. He wanted to point out that Skinner did in fact have feelings and he was not a stereotypical psychologist. One of the first Skinner clips that he played was one where Skinner talked about good behavior in children. Skinner asked the question, “How is good behavior reinforced.” He talked about how there is no real positive reason for treating people well because you don’t get rewarded from it. Skinner also thinks that mistreatment of others should result in punishment. …show more content…
I agree with this because kids don’t really get rewarded for being nice to others, and if they realize this than they might start mistreating others.
The way to stop this is to punish mistreatment of others, just as Skinner has said. This podcast also talks about how it is a good idea to get rewarded when learning to do something like learning to play piano. If you are rewarded through the process of learning to play piano, you will be more likely to continue on with it. It is the same way in today’s society with video games because you get internally rewarded in the game for your successes. In class, we learned about Skinners’ operant conditioning theory. We watched the Big Bang Theory example where Sheldon tries to positively reinforce the woman by giving her chocolates for good behavior. This was a great example of one of Skinners theories and it was nice to see it on display in the real world, even though it is a TV
show. The second podcast I listened too was episode 47 from the audioboom.com website. It was titled “The Little Albert Study: What You Know is…Mostly Wrong”. This podcast was interesting because it was basically just the host critiquing John Watson’s Little Albert study. In this study, the experimenter Watson set a 9-month old baby named Albert on the floor. He then would place a white rat right in front of little Albert, but at the same time he would clang a steel bar behind his head. This experiment was made to study behaviorism because Albert was scared every time he saw the white rat because he associated the white rat with the unpleasant noise. We watched this video in class and it was very interesting. The podcast then described how people think that Albert continued to be afraid of the white rat and anything that was white and furry, which wasn’t the case at all. The host said that 10 days after the first experiment was done, the rat was placed before Albert again and he crawled away from it but started to coo, which shows that he wasn’t as afraid of the rat as before. Then days after, Albert wasn’t afraid of the rat at all and would even touch it. The host was also surprised that this study is even popular because of this result and because it didn’t use the proper guidelines of the scientific method because there was only one test subject. This relates to the behaviorism aspect that we talked about in class when we talked about John Watson. I really enjoyed the video of this experiment that was shown in class because it made the experiment so clear.
In Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box, the second chapter “Obscura” discusses Stanley Milgram, one of the most influential social psychologists. Milgram created an experiment which would show just how far one would go when obeying instructions from an authoritative figure, even if it meant harming another person while doing so. The purpose of this experiment was to find justifications for what the Nazi’s did during the Holocaust. However, the experiment showed much more than the sociological reasoning behind the acts of genocide. It showed just how much we humans are capable of.
F. Skinner focuses on behaviorism which primarily deals with what can be observed and measured. B.F. Skinner believes through operant conditioning you can create desired (or undesired) behaviors in anyone. 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. She couldn’t pay attention and often disrupted the class by talking with the people around her. Laurie’s third grade teacher got fed up with her behavior, so she placed Laurie’s desk next to her own in front of the class and then slapped Laurie’s desk with the ruler every time she caught her not paying attention. After a couple months, Laurie no longer required a slap on the desk to pay attention. According to Skinner, this behavior modification is punishment, not reinforcement, as the teacher was trying to decrease Laurie’s preference for daydreaming. However, as a result of not daydreaming, Laurie’s grades improved. Her parent’s began to reward her with $3 for every A she earned, using positive reinforcement to get Laurie to continue performing well. Due to operant conditioning, Laurie passed third grade and remained a top student the rest of her life, graduating from college with honors. If you ask Laurie to
According to Skinner’s theories, “Reinforcement does not strengthen the response instance that produces the reinforcer.” Rather, reinforcement can increase the likelihood that a comparable response may occur within the future. For one bottom-line, “behavior is not caused by something that has not yet happened.” Similar to operant conditioning, “the emission of a response reflects past conditioning, so the response occurs because similar responses were reinforced earlier, not because it will be reinforced later.” Skinner agreed that the “initial high response rate seen in extinction sessions exemplified this important aspect of operant conditioning” (Iversen, 1992, pp. 1325-1327). Theoretically, Skinner identified two aspects of reinforcement, one is the “pleasing effect of reinforcing stimuli, the other is their strengthening action.” Furthermore, Skinner emphasized that “feeling pleased by an event does not necessarily make a person want to repeat the respons...
In Opening Skinner 's Box, the author uses an assortment of imaginative scenarios in order to foster a more interesting narrative in the readers mind. In my opinion, this technique is a hit and miss, as it can alternately grasp your imagination and make the author seem very incredible. This chapter is an intriguing look at famous psychological experiments, but is overall weakened by the authors rampant imagination. When Slater describes an imaginary scene, like saying the odor in the air is of something rotting, she is plainly trying to foreshadow in her history made fictitious story. Her credibility is besmirched in her attempt to make the history more interesting, as she is preemptively trying to bias the reader. However,
Throughout the process of growing up, punishments and rewards clearly mark what we should and should not do. Whether it is being sent to time out for pushing a classmate or earning an allowance for cleaning the dishes, we are programmed to know the difference between good and bad. When
F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura, focuses on changing the behavior of clients. This type of therapy “aims to decrease the frequency of maladaptive behaviors, and increase the frequency of adaptive or helpful behaviors” (Corsini & Wedding, 2014, p 194). Behavior therapy does this by using trait theories of personality and assuming that “each individual has unique, enduring patterns of behavior that can be observed across a wide range of situations and that these patterns can be understood in terms of specific personality characteristics – traits – that vary in intensity from low to high” (Corsini & Weddin, 2014, p 199). Behavior therapy also uses concepts such as classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning “is a form of learning in which one stimulus, a conditioned stimulus, comes to signal the occurrence of a second stimulus, an unconditioned stimulus…[an unconditioned stimulus] is typically a stimulus that naturally causes a characteristic response, known as an unconditioned response” and operant conditioning “is a form of learning in which the frequency, form, or strength of a behavior is influenced by its consequences” (Corsini & Wedding, 2014, p 200-201). Concepts like these, including reinforcement and punishment, can be wide spread and used in various types of situations which is why this therapy is a good one to use with other
I think that B.F. Skinner shares my philosophy in the behavioral aspects of education. There are many points that have expanded my philosophy. One was the operant conditioning theory, which is when the behavior is changed through positive and negative consequences depending on one’s behavior. Positive Reinforcements can be anything from food and candy to a toy or sticker. Negative reinforcement could be a timeout, scolding, or maybe a spanking. It all depends on their behavior. One thing that surprised me was when Skinner said, “punishment is generally ineffective in controlling undesirable behavior.” I thought that was always the best route to go. Skinner also states that it is better to just ignore the bad behavior until it stops. That to me doesn’t sound like the best idea considering that the child wont know that is not how they are supposed to act and if you don’t let them know then they wont stop. I guess that people didn’t believe that it could work so he put it to the test. He tried it on his daughter and though it took some time he finally found that there are better ways ...
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).
Skinner designed an experiment to test operant conditioning, known as a ‘Skinner box’ (Gross 2005). In the box, animals, such as rats, would be conditioned into certain behaviour. For example, by pressing a lever to receive food (Gross 2005).
According to numerous references in the field of Psychology, a cognitive psychologist is an individual that studies topics such as thinking, problem-solving, learning, attention, memory, forgetting, and language acquisition, among several others. Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes, and its core focus is on how people acquire, process, and store information. While great research has been done within the field of psychology, there are individuals such as B.F. Skinner who criticize its strides, purposes, and research methods.
Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner, an American behavioral psychologist, is best known for his experiments on changing behavior. With behavioral psychologists Pavlov and Watson as his inspiration, Skinner formulated his theory of operational conditioning. His idea of “shaping” behavior is prevalent in the parenting and teaching techniques of children and students.
Psychologist B F Skinner was interested in learning and behavior. Like teachers who have depended on behaviors to tell them what’s going on inside a person , Skinner believed that observing people’s behavior was the best way to figure them out.in skinners branch of psychology, learning is about changing behavior and begins to listen, he has learned to listen. Likewise, if you are explaining to students how to add numbers and the students consistently answers with the wrong answers but then begins to answer with the right ones, his behavior shows you that he has learned how to add. Skinner believed that people learn two different ways: they learn to avoid negative things and strive for positive things. So according to B F Skinner , if you give a child a piece of candy each time he gets an answer right, he will learn to figure out the right answer in order to get the candy because he is striving for positive things. On the other hand, if you give a child detention every time he gets the answer wrong, he will also learn to figure out how to get the right answer, this time in order to avoid negative things
...sciousness but he also thought that emotions and processes of the mind are just the consequence of the never ending sequence of stimulus and reaction which carry out no meaning (DISCovering Authors). Skinner also promoted the utilization of behavioral technology to improve society. He believed that the same method that effectively trained the animals he used in his laboratory study could be used to manage human's negative actions. He believe that in doing this, social troubles such as law-breaking, poverty, and warfare could be abolished (DISCovering Authors). Many of Skinners critics thought that his beliefs were a totalitarian hazard.
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.